The New York Sun Reviews "A Conservative History of the American Left"

The New York Sun Reviews A Conservative History of the American Left by Daniel Flynn.

The book contains a very interesting chapter on Margaret Sanger and points out that Sanger once spoke at a Ku mKlux Klan rally.

Here is an excerpt from the NY Sun Review:

By CHRISTOPHER WILLCOX May 5, 2008

Whatever its shortcomings — including a sharply polemical tone throughout and an occasional failure to differentiate between the democratic left and its totalitarian variant — "A Conservative History of the American Left" by Daniel J. Flynn (Crown Forum, 464 pages, $27.50) is a remarkable compendium of American utopian and collectivist follies. Its greatest strengths lie at 30,000 feet, where generalizations about the left's ideals and delusions concerning the creation of heaven on earth are spot-on, and, moreover, observable across the whole of the nation's history. When it fails, it is in the details, especially with regard to the significant role played by some liberal Democrats in exposing and opposing Soviet Communism.

A bonus for conservatives: Mr. Flynn's frequent, even relentless, forays into the dirty laundry of some of liberalism's dearest icons. We learn that Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger, once spoke at a Ku Klux Klan rally and was a lifelong advocate for not only planned, but "selective" breeding, and that utopian planner Robert Owen pointedly excluded blacks from his failed experiment in New Harmony, Ind. Even though some of them finally woke up and snapped out of it, periodicals the Nation and the New Republic, philosopher John Dewey, and social worker Jane Addams served as megaphones for Lenin's early brutalities. And the beat goes on. Later, the New York Times couldn't find a famine in the Ukraine under Stalin.