LM#77--The Fight for the Soul of America is HERE

Liberty Minute Opening

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Those are the drums of Liberty. Two years ago, we asked what happened to our country. Certainly didn't know the answer would come looking for us so soon. Let's talk about it on this Liberty Minute.

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Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.

The Question Becomes An Answer

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Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another Liberty Minute and to this Theory to Action podcast almost two years ago. Almost two years ago, now we ran a three-part series that asked the question so many of us, frankly, so many of you have been asking me. Asking me at your kids' hockey tournaments, over beers with the guys, at the kitchen table with your spouse. What in the world happened to our country? Now we're not asking that question anymore. We know the answer. Staring us straight in the face. And today I want to take you back through that series, tie three books together we featured there, show you exactly where that road has led us. Because, friends, we're here now. This is the fight for the soul of America.

Slack And The Quiet Revolution

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So going back, book one, we talked about, we featured the war on the American Republic. That was Kevin Slack's book, professor of politics at Hillsdale College, in his book Before Mentioned the War on the American Republic. But uh we'll put the link in the show notes so you can go back and listen to that part one. Uh we did deep dives on all three parts. We're not going to take as deep a dive there because we wanna make the case of where all this was leading and how we are here now. Facing an existential crisis. At least our country is. But going back to Slack, he was our leadoff hitter hitter in uh in uh book one. He swung for the fences, his thesis was simple and devastating. America is undergoing a cultural revolution. And it didn't start yesterday, it started decades ago at the 1972 Democratic Convention. When the party fully embraced the radical wing over the working man, he walked us through Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, and his theory of the long march through the institutions. Not a violent revolution, a quiet one. Capture education, capture the bureaucracy, capture the regulatory agencies, change the culture, and the politics will follow. The radicals rewrote the hidden curriculum in our schools. The radicals took over the very agencies Congress created to enforce civil rights law and twisted them into quota machines. Radicals redefined the public interest as nothing more than a collection of competing grievance groups. That's agonizing. But Slack showed us it was no accident.

Levin And The Authoritarian Playbook

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Then we moved on to book two, The Democratic Party Hates America by our cleanup hitter, Mark Levin. That book was absolutely fascinating. He went line by line, paragraph by paragraph, frankly, chapter by chapter. He picked up, Levin picked up exactly where Slack left off. You see, if Slack gave us the mechanism, the long march through the institutions, Mark Levin gave us the receipts. He traced the Democratic Party's radicalism all the way back to slavery, to Jim Crow, to the Klan, and showed how that same appetite for control simply changed its clothes for the modern era. Did you catch the line that struck with me most? If someone told you they wanted to fundamentally transform their own spouse, would you believe they love them? Of course not. But that's exactly the language that Barack Obama used in 2008, and Joe Biden echoed it deeply in 2020. Levin's most chilling move in our second episode was pulling out that Freedom House report on modern authoritarianism. It was written by Communist China and Putin's Russia. But boy, you went side by side, held it up to the Democratic Party's own playbook, eliminate the filibuster, pack the courts, weaponize the DOJ and the IRS against your political opponents, cripple the opposition without technically destroying it. You'd be like, whoa. Sound familiar? It should. We named it plainly then, and we're gonna name it, name it plainly now. That's the stuff of police state autocracies, not a political party in a free republic. And then we move to our finale.

Rufo Links Ideas To Institutions

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Chris Rufo's incredible work, America's Cultural Revolution. Again, we're gonna put the links in the show notes so you can go back. If it's been a while, if you missed those episodes, be sure to go back. We took deep, deep dives. I think every one of those shows were over 20, 30 minutes. But Rufo did something neither of the first two authors fully did. He connected the dots between the ideas and the institutions. You see, he introduced us to what one podcaster called the four horsemen of the Democratic Apocalypse. Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Derek Bell, and Paolo Faree. Free is the most one, is the one that most conservatives miss. His book, The Pegadi of the Oppressed, that's the third most cited work in the social sciences. It became the foundation of nearly every graduate school of education in America, and Free wrote it while idolizing Lenin and Mao and Che Guevara, men whose revolutions left a trail of famine and gulags and firing squads. But here's the gut punch. Rufo showed us that everywhere these theories were actually tried Guinea, Angola, Nicaragua, they failed. Not partially, completely. Illiteracy, poverty, civil war, drug cartels running the ports. And yet the very theories that wrecked all these nations throw in their Venezuela, wrecked all these nations, became the lingua franca of the educated class here at home. Ruvo called it Rufo called it exactly right. He said it was a moral void masquerading as moral progress.

One Diagnosis From Three Books

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So let's tie all these three together because each book answers a different piece of that same question. Slack showed us the mechanism, like we said before, the long march through the institutions. Levin showed us the party carrying it out, just how far back its contempt for the country actually runs. Rufo shows us the ideas themselves and the man who worshipped the tyrants while lecturing us about justice in our universities. So three books, three authors, one diagnosis. We are in the middle. We're in the middle of a cultural revolution. And it didn't happen by accident. Now that was almost two years ago. And I wish, deeply wish, I could tell you the hurricane has passed. But it hasn't. So let's connect a few more dots because Slack, Levin, and Rufo give us pieces of the puzzle, but I want to lay out the full arc myself plainly so you can see the whole roadmap in one sitting.

How The Party Shift Accelerates

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Because the big picture is this the Democratic Party did not just flip a switch and go radical overnight. It moved over the last 50 years from a Cold War anti-communist center-left coalition into an activist, progressive, increasingly socialist-friendly one. And the move was driven by party reforms, by cultural change, generational replacement, and frankly, the slow collapse of the old working class center. No single event did this, but it was a long march, just like Slack told us. Now, our hinge point, we actually covered this in our pivotal elections podcast and series, but the hinge point is the actual turning point. You

1972 As The Hinge Point

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can put your finger on it. 1972, George McGovern's campaign, proved that the anti-war left and the new left could capture the Democratic nomination outright. Now he lost to Nixon in a landslide. 60, some 60% uh I think 37 or 38. But here's the thing losing big didn't kill the strategy. It actually became the blueprint for the radicals. You see, before govern, there was a different Democratic Party. Men like JFK, Scoop Jackson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, they were all anti-communist. But they were patriotic. Yeah, we get in fights over tax rate policy and housing policy, and they were pro-labor. But they were willing to defend American power on the world stage without apology. That wing of the party was real. Remember, we've covered JFK in the in the Reagan Revolution. JFK went for tax cuts 1962. He had supply, strong supply side policies, just like Reagan. Reagan actually adopted, went back and read Kennedy's economic policies, and then went back and read Coolidge, his policies in the late 1920s or the middle 1920s to get the roaring 20s up and running. So there was a there was a very good coalition of people that were patriotic that wanted to get the c the economy roaring and not have these radical socialist tendencies. But all that faded and has been fading. Here's some reasons why that party where we had a center left and Republicans could work with a center right. As a center right party, we could we could work across the aisle. Its usefulness as a unifying cause eroded. The party's base shifted away from blue-collar ethnic voters towards educated urban voters. Primary voters, activist groups, and donors increasingly rewarded the ideological purity over moderation. Moderate Democrats were primaried, they were retired, andor simply some were just forced to adapt or get out. And then we jump to 2006.

Obama To Sanders To DSA

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The party's left flank gained the real strength through the anti-Iraq war politics and the brand new tool of internet organizing. This is when Nancy Pelosi gained speakership. That period laid a groundwork for everything else that came next. Because what comes next is 2008. Barack Obama is going to completely transform the world, transform the country. And he was able to give a great speech, but boy, his presidency was very radical. And then after eight years of that, what do we have? Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders did something no one else had managed. He made democratic socialism politically respectable for the new left in America. He tied that to kitchen table concerns, healthcare, tuition inequality. And he did so by turning that fringe ideology into real living moments that he could talk about on the campaign trail, get all the young ones fired up, completely transforming one of our two major parties. And that movement, obviously, that movement needed a home, and it got one. So now we have the Democratic Socialist of America. Became the organizational backbone of this new radical left. The membership has grown. The local candidates started winning real elections. Mayors, school boards. The radical left is no longer just a mood or a protest chant. It's now there. With money, with infrastructure, with staying power. The young kids believe it. Most of the Democratic Socialists of America are white and in their late twenties to early thirties. Imagine that. These are all the kids that grew up reading Howard Zinn. That's the moral framework that made this whole shift feel righteous. Now we've named Howard Zinn before. Certainly named we talked about Howard Zinn on this podcast so many times. But we're gonna name him again. His version of American history taught a generation of activists to see this country as fundamentally a story of oppression, of protest, of struggle. And did that one book cause the entire shift? No. But boy, it supplied the intellectual and emotional fuel that made the rest of it just feel justified. So here's our nugget of wisdom and how all this fits together.

Why The Outcome Isn’t Inevitable

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McGovern opened the door, Zinn supplied the emotional story, Sanders gave the movement political legitimacy, talking all over the country, and the DSA gave it its organization, its staying power. And the old moderates, the Scoop Jacksons, the Daniel Patrick Moynihans, they simply faded away. Culture passed them by, the party passed them by, the incentives and the Democratic Party base all changed underneath. So let that sink in. It slowly, deliberately made changes. It replaced the old Cold War liberal center with the newer radical activist left. Moderation still technically exists in that party today, but who who's there? John Fetterman? Love the guy, but boy. He's fighting an uphill battle. The energy, the money, the power increasingly belong to the left flank. The radical left flank. And that's the honest, unflinching answer to how we got here from JFK to where the party stands now. A socialist in New York City, socialist in Colorado, socialist running all over the place. None of them know their history. Frankly, some of them don't even know what socialism is. Some think it's actually socializing. Completely different word. Folks, come on. What are they what are we doing? But that's our young generation. And here's here's the nugget that all of them, meaning Slack, Levin, and Rufo, they all share. Whether they say it in the exact words or not. This outcome is not inevitable. It's not permanent. Yes, the country is going on a bender. A deep, deep, bad bender. But Slack reminds us that a rising generation of young people is also finding much worthy to conserve. Classical education is coming back through homeschooling, nonetheless. Rufo reminds us that the ideas that fail everywhere, they've been tried, cannot survive contact with the truth forever. We've got to keep explaining the truth over and over. Reagan said we're one generation away from losing our country. We're in the middle of that fight. We've got to keep fighting. We gotta keep explaining. We gotta keep teaching history. And certainly our greatest champion of that liberty is Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln. He wrote in the darkest hour of the Civil War. He reminded us that we cannot escape history, that we will be remembered, he said, in spite of ourselves. So here we are, folks. This is not a warm-up, this is the fight for the soul of America. It's being waged in our culture, in our schools, our institutions, in our own living rooms, in our own workplaces, in our own baseball diamonds, hockey tournaments, kitchen tables. So we gotta keep reading, we gotta keep asking the hard questions, we've got to keep raising kids to know the real truth about our own country, not the myths that the radical revolution wants them to believe.

Tools To Learn And Teach

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And here's the thing: you don't have to do any of this alone. You don't have to start from scratch. We are building and have built out a whole library of book briefs, just one pager's five-minute read over at the Mojo Book Academy on Substack, mojoacademy.substack.com. We'll put the link in the show notes. So you can go deeper on all these books, Slack Levan, Rufo, every other offer we're going to cover here. We have covered in the past. We're building out that library as a resource. Also over on YouTube, we're publishing videos tackling some of these same subjects. So go there, subscribe, arm yourself, arm your family. This library is for you. And one more thing, because you need this in your inbox every week. Every single week we publish a newsletter called Crazy versus Common Sense. The crazy versus common sense newsletter. It's exactly what it sounds like. We put the radical, the absurd, the downright crazy headline of the week right next to the common sense conservative response. We do it with books side by side to help educate you. So you can see the contrast for yourself. It's sharp, it's quick, it'll arm you for every single argument you have at the dinner table, around the water cooler, at your kids' games. And friends, it's completely free. So go sign up today. Again, the crazy versus common sense newsletter. We'll put that link in the show notes as well. So let's keep fighting the good fight. Let's stay optimistic out there. God bless America. God bless the United States. And until next time, let's keep getting our mojo on.

Closing Blessing And Sign Off

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Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademy.com, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.