America's Thirty Years War: Who Is Winning? - Hardcover

"Every day," Balint Vazsonyi cautions, "serious persons tell us that 'communism has lost,' 'socialism has collapsed,' 'conservatism is taking over America.' Each of these is an inaccurate assumption, or the product of wishful thinking." Despite the collapse of the Soviet bloc, he argues, democracy's victory is unclear, because since the 1960s Americans have increasingly abandoned the basic principles--"the rule of law, individual rights, guaranteed property, and a common American identity"--on which the United States was founded.

In America's 30 Years War, Vazsonyi--a concert pianist and political commentator who arrived in the United States in 1959, fleeing his native Hungary after the failed revolt against Soviet occupation--elaborates upon his distinction between the "Anglo-American" principles of liberty he finds in the Founding Fathers' intentions and the "Franco-Germanic" social theories that he claims, in their "search for social justice," lead inevitably to communism. The thesis is somewhat idiosyncratic, and could have used a sharper editor; readers may be frustrated to learn that five entire pages of the "Conclusions" section are drawn verbatim from one of the early chapters. --Ron Hogan

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."
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