Customer Reviews

America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am glad I heard this author on the radio and checked out his book. It's clear to me now: America has been pushed into an aggressive posture in foreign policy by imperialist thinkers and actors who want the U.S. to dominate the world,ostensibly for the sake of democracy.In the end they are most interested in power and in advacing their own hidden purposes. Because they build on utopian ideas and are breaking with the older American political tradition, they are doing great damage to American institutions and liberties domestically and creating hatred of the U.S. abroad. America the Virtuous relates the ideas of American neo-Jacobinism to a general decline of American culture, but the author also shows that this political movement is just a symptom of a much larger problem with modern America. I was vaguely aware of some of this before, but now I can see it clearly. Although the book deals mostly with ideas rather than practical politics,it is a pleasure to read. You don't have to be a scholar to find it engaging and enlightening.

At first I didn't like the way this book sounded at all. It went against to many of my assumptions and made me uncomfortable. But something made me stick with the book and the more I read the more I could see that I needed to rethink some of my beliefs about conservatism and America. The perspective is unusual, I don't understand it completely, and I still have to get used to it, but I don't think that I can every go back to what I used to think about Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and some others. Believe me, I didn't want to go in this direction. But the author has arguments and facts that I can't ignore. A lot becomes a lot clearer in my mind. I have to give him credit.

Everyone puzzled at GWB's radical shift from his promise of a "humble" foreign policy and modest domestic programs in 2000 must read this book!!
Bush the Younger, evidently a decent man, has been led to change his views, to act on them, and to demean the principles of history and the U.S. Constitution by "neo-conservatives," many of whom began infiltrating the first Reagan Administration after allegedly being "Scoop Jackson Democrats."
Unfortunately, neo-cons have almost nothing to do with conservatism. Instead, they are crusaders bent on toppling the USA's rich and unique historic experiences, and its superb 1789 Constitution in favor of ahistorical "shared principles" emanating from their own superior brains.
Ryn identifies their beliefs as historically similar to the Jacobins of the vile revolution in France and more properly names neo-cons as neo-Jacobins.
Ryn makes a good case for his assertion that wild-spending, interventionist, and anti-civil liberties activities at home -- all in the context of a mega-government -- and crusaderism overseas in the name of forced democracy emanate from neo-Jacobin thinking.
It's such a pity that neo-Jacobins claim to be conservatives, or to defend the values of truth, justice and the American way, since it comfuses all and gives the more traditional, constitutionalist position a bad name.
Finally, Ryn notes the immense media influence of neo-Jacobin talking heads. Even many Democrats spout a variant of the neo-Jacobin line, including John Kerry. The U.S., they say, exists to remake the world -- not by humility and example, but by might and endless virtue. Here at home, the only solution is a surveillance state, combined with intrusive, profligately expensive government.
Thinking people will find much in Ryn's work; even opponents or real Jacobins may find it interesting. Neo-Jacobins will want the book to be ignored or, in the spirit of their democratism, to squash Ryn like a bug.

I saw somewhere that this book is a "blockbuster," and got a copy. It is a brainier book than I expected. It really explains the current quest for empire and how it grows out of a deteriorating american society. I learnt a lot! The book is engrossing. Read this if you want to know what dangers we face and how we might save ourselves!

I found this book to be very informative concerning the modern transformation of political thought in America and about the significant shift in American foreign policy that has taken place in the last two years. Anyone involved in foreign policy and/or the study of political ideology can not afford to miss reading this book.

This book really makes you think about the general direction of American society, especially U.S. foreign policy. It goes a lot deeper than current discussions of empire. It puts the present U.S. policies in a historical context and explains them. Reads very well.

it's hard to gain a sense of scope, in a short book, of the depth of the malicious current which now afflicts american politics in the fascist redux of neoconservatism. ryn does admirably, tracing the mindset of radical/revolutionary polarized idealism such as we see today in neoconservatism to the rousseauian jacobins.

ryn concentrates revealingly on the revolution within the form that has taken place in america, including the onset of political euphemism and the perversion of abstract words like "freedom", "capitalism" and "democracy" such that they mean now nearly the opposite of what they once meant. using the same words with wildly different meaning is the mechanism by which the united states pretends to adhere to the old lockean/puritan values of its founders while betraying them on every front. it is a central point in understanding the political development of america in the 20th and 21st centuries as it moves to totalitarianism.

it's extremely difficult for any short book to cover western militant idealism as it has evolved from plato through the renaissance and counter-enlightenment to modern decadence and fascism, and ryn to her credit tries to concentrate her field of view in a very complex topic. that necessarily means oversights, of course, and many aspects of idealism's intellectual development are left untreated -- most notably, the heavy influence of trotsky, himself something of a new jacobin and the advocate of perpetual revolution.

but the book remains a compelling foundation for her thesis and potentially represents brutally enlightening reading for many americans who think fascism "ended" in 1945 and could never happen here. the unfortunate truth appears to be that is has been happening here for decades, and is moving to an endgame.

This book is written for scholars of political science, not for casual readers or the anti-establishment. Claes Ryn describes a movement throughout Western politics that he calls the neo-Jacobins. The neo-Jacobins bear a resemblance to Rousseau in the sense that (1) they advocate the eradication of tradition and political and individual restraint, (2) their morality is such that they are always right, and anyone who opposes them is wrong. Neo-Jacobin thinking permeates through intellectual elites who stand to gain power from the two points above. The one criticism I have is that his description of the Jacobins may not be taken seriously because it comes across as a "conspiracy." In fact, it is not a conspiracy, and many of the Jacobins are not aware that they are or have not thought carefully about where they stand. Still, such a manner of presentation may discourage serious readers from accepting his views.

My only complaint is that this book is mostly about ideas and does not go very far into how the "new Jacobins" push through their own agenda. Did Mr. Robert Hynes skip parts of the book? Ryn repeatedly says that many people who have new Jacobin opinions do not really understand them or that they promote a certain goal. These people remind me a bit of the "useful idiots" the communists use to rely on. The pure Jacobins know better what they are up to.

I kept seeing favorable mentions of this book and wondered if it could be as god as all that. It is. Before reading it I couldn't really explain the social and political phenomena that have me worried about my countrys future. America the Virtuos gets to the bottom of many of thse problems and shows what's wrong. And so well-written: clear as crystal.