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Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant, a political classic!
Review: A very young Arthur Schlesinger wrote this in 1949 during a very different era, and may have succeeded more than anyone else in making clear where the lines of acceptable political discourse were to be drawn, especially for the liberals of the time. The book was very timely, coming as it did right after the failed 1948 Presidential campaigns of Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace, and Strom Thurmond. Schlesinger's political orientation is pure Truman Democrat, and he made it clear here that plutocratic business interests (probably best represented in 1948 by Dewey, and still holding a set of fiscal views better known today as laissez-faire or libertarian) were not particularly trustworthy in running government, while the third party campaigns of Wallace (who had included Communists prominently in his campaign), and Thurmond (Schlesinger here made the first known use of the term 'neo-Confederate' to describe him), were beyond the bounds of acceptability. A large portion of the book is taken up with the threat of totalitarian ideologies, and the need for responsible liberals to firmly reject any alliance with or sympathy toward Soviet-style Communism, and for responsible conservatives to likewise firmly reject any such stance toward Nazism or Fascism. While these particular forms of totalitarianism are not major concerns today, the point bears re-emphasizing for a number of other reasons. Other ideologies Schlesinger dismisses as irrelevant, and he specifically names anarchism, Chestertonian distributism, and Gandhian non-violence. He also dismisses the world government movement as something not possible to attain under current conditions. Ideologies such as these have no chance of success in the modern world, and serve mainly as outlets for the small number of people adopting them to work out their personal neuroses. For those serious about political activism, the orientation must be squarely within the political center, typified by New Deal Democrats such as FDR and Truman, working in alliance with the responsible non-Communist left, typified by organized labor and Americans for Democratic Action, and responsible conservatives who reject laissez-faire and understand the need for government programs, typified by Theodore Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie. The astute reader will immediately recognize the modern-day equivalents of all these. This book is not only a political classic but was also prophetic, owing to the author's complex grasp of the political realities of his day. On page 238, for example, he predicted the Sino-Soviet split, a decade before it happened. In Chapter 9, he warned that efforts to keep Communist influence out of government must fall within limits which affirm civil liberties, and predicted witch hunts and blacklisting would occur if these limits were not observed; Schlesinger's advice was not followed and these very things did indeed occur just a few years later during the McCarthy era. Probably most remarkably, he foresaw the increasing importance of wilderness conservation, ecology, and overpopulation, over a decade before Silent Spring and two decades before The Population Bomb was published. In light of the divisive and argumentative direction American politics has taken in recent years, this book bears a cursory re-read today, especially by liberals and mainstream conservatives, to ensure that we don't lose our way.
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