America's 30 Years War: Who Is Winning?

"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