America's Thirty Years War

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

America's founding principles of liberty and the rule of law have eroded steadily over the last three decades, and the U.S. risks sliding into socialism, asserts Vazsonyi in this alarmist, sometimes strident polemic. This Hungarian-born historian and contributor to National Review and the Washington Times, offers the simplistic thesis that "Anglo-American" values of liberty, capitalism, democracy have waged an unremitting struggle against "Franco-Germanic" collectivist, utopian, statist tendencies. Vazsonyi, who fled his native country for the U.S. in 1959, does draw on firsthand experience to pinpoint similarities between Soviet communism and German nazism. But much of this tiresome conservative manifesto has a familiar ring: special-interest groups (feminists, blacks, homosexuals) dilute the concept of constitutionally derived individual freedoms; entitlement programs and government regulations threaten guarantees of private property; multiculturalism and Afrocentric curricula inventing a mythical past represent an assault on our common American identity. Vazsonyi exaggerates the influence of political correctness on campus ("Academic freedom has been all but driven out of the American university"), and his scattershot broadside sometimes borders on paranoia, as when he charges that various departments (including NEA, EPA, DOE) are commissariats serving a political agenda, or when he brands the environmentalist movement as a cover for "the de facto repeal of property rights, and the curtailment of freedom." (Sept.)

Jose L. Panero

Master pianist Baling Vazsonyi writes about politics as if he were playing a concerto. . . .his book. . .traces Western plitical thought from King Arthur's Round Table through the Americans with Disabilities Act, with a few interludes from Lenin and the French Revolution. -- National Review