Will Liberals Hate “America”?

•Conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary America is in New York theatres starting this week and though it may have a few bits that I, as a libertarian, disagree with, I’ll have to see it for, among other things, featuring Ronald Radosh criticizing overrated left-wing revisionist historian Howard Zinn.

Radosh isn’t just some indiscriminate lefty-basher, either. He was the one who urged me to read and correspond with the late, ideologically quirky historian Martin Sklar, whose description of our current paradoxical political system as “corporate liberalism” dating back to the Progressive Era strikes me as apt.

•In fact, given Ralph Nader’s recent very cordial panel discussion at the Cato Institute -- with Brink Lindsey, Dan McCarthy, and Tim Carney -- I hope even the most hardcore of latter-day Progressives may be starting to worry about the half-plutocratic, half-socialist regulatory superstate they have wrought.

•Tim’s brother John Carney recently pointed to one reason to worry that new ideas will find an easier time taking root on the right than on the left, though: A study suggests liberals think they’re already diverse in their views but in fact are in lock-step ideologically, while people on the right tend to assume other conservatives agree with them but are actually quite diverse in their views.

•All this adds to my mounting (and embarrassing) fear that history will say it was the anti-banking and anti-authoritarian conspiracy theorists who were basically right about how the world works -- right down to using immigration as a subversive tool and using fascistic goons to maintain secrecy at relocation camps. Or maybe it‘s just a little hiccup in processing that’ll soon be resolved by an even more populous and diverse America. We shall see.