Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance

Respected historian and political scientist Barry Rubin exposes the radicalism that masquerades as liberalism today in Silent Revolution, his thorough history that charts the movement's unchecked rise to cultural and political power.

Over the past fifty years, an ideological revolution has created a brand of radical leftism that now dominates the liberal movement in the United States. The values espoused by the left today are a far cry from the traditional progressive and Enlightenment values that have historically defined the movement.

Barry Rubin argues that, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the survivors of the '60s New Left drew on the ideas of radicals like Saul Alinsky, cultural Marxists like Antonio Gramsci, and Third World revolutionary thinkers like Frantz Fanon to create a Third Left: a radical movement that championed a new class of experts and managers to seize control from within. Silent Revolution explores the formation and ideology of The Third Left and documents how this movement culminated in 2008, when Americans elected the most radical left-wing government in their history.

Concise and hard-hitting, Silent Revolution is a must for all conservatives looking to understand and overcome American liberalism.

Over the past fifty years, a silent revolution has allowed the radical left to seize power to an extent unthinkable only a decade ago. Stranger still, no one has noticed.

Throughout the twentieth century, leftists worked tirelessly toward their goal of a proletarian revolution. But they continually fell short. American workers rejected socialism in the 1920s and declined to join the international communist movement in the 1930s. The New Left flowered briefly in the 1960s but petered out with the end of the Vietnam War. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, radical Marxism seemed to have been defeated and discredited for good.

Not so fast, says the political scientist Barry Rubin in this sharply pointed history of the modern American left. Far from disappearing, the radical left has undergone an ideological revolution and has rebranded itself as liberalism. Rubin traces the roots of this new ideology to the ideas of domestic radicals like Saul Alinsky, cultural Marxists like Antonio Gramsci, and Third World revolutionary thinkers like Frantz Fanon. This new brand of leftism constitutes a Third Left that now dominates the liberal movement in the United States.

The Third Left's main ideological innovation is the abandonment of the working class as a revolutionary vehicle. Instead it targets the education system, and it has now trained several generations of Americans to think in leftist terms of fairness and social justice. Imbued with this new "common sense," these young people have fanned out through the professions, the government, and the media, where they unhesitatingly advance the ideas and goals of the left: anticapitalism, a state-controlled medical system, the seminationalization of key industries, the redistribution of wealth, and a rejection of America's leading role in the world. As a result, without any real debate or understanding, the citizens of the United States have elected the most radical left-wing government in the country's history.

Silent Revolution offers a brief, readable, and utterly devastating critique of the radicalism that masquerades as liberalism today.

“How did an intolerant and illiberal left come to dominate our culture under the guise of tolerance and liberalism? In brilliant fashion, the late Barry Rubin charts the increasingly intolerant trajectory of the modern progressive movement and its Machiavellian attempt to pass of its radical agenda as mainstream reform. A persuasive and frightening primer on political dissimulation from an astute critic of the left who understood, both concretely and abstractly, its pernicious influence as few others do today.” - Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University

“How did we get here? How did we move from an America based on individual liberty and economic freedom toward a European-style socialist state, complete with raging anticapitalism, class warfare, radical wealth distribution, socialized medicine, and forced division by race, class, gender, and age? Barry Rubin explains this destructive turn by brilliantly exposing the rise of revolutionary leftism that has masqueraded for decades as liberalism. Before we can reclaim and restore America, we must know what we’re up against. Silent Revolution fearlessly unmasks the enemy within—and shows how we can defeat it.” - Monica Crowley, PhD, Fox News Channel, Nationally Syndicated Radio Host of the Monica Crowley Show, New York Times bestselling author