Thus, I think Leopold's call for a new "progressive populism," while still fledging, is not without merit. The left's increasingly deracinated belief in newly invented social causes pour epater les bourgeoisie has driven off normal Americans, most certainly including the white working class, the heart of traditional American society. As long as the media and academe -- including Oberlin! -- are firmly in leftist hands, however, it's unlikely. As my regular readers knows, there is no limiting impulse to far-leftism; they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. Novelty, not tradition, is what's important to them. Destruction is the result.

Congenital dissatisfaction fuels their rage and drives them to ever more extreme positions; as Leopold's book demonstrates, they've managed to demonize their own base and driven the Workers of the World to the "far right." It's insane and utterly self-defeating, for which we are eternally grateful, otherwise we would have no chance against their relentless activism.

Perhaps, later, in the rubble, we can find common ground and begin anew. Not with the New Soviet Man but the rebirth of Western Man, a believer in freedom, a capitalist with a conscience, and a man whose philosophy is not beggar-thy-neighbor, who doesn't see the world as a zero-sum game, and who only asks to live and let live. But it begins with free speech, or it never begins at all.