The New Leviathan

March 26, 2012
Forget right-wing businessmen: America’s real plutocrats are left-liberal foundations and labor unions, argues this suspicious exposé. Deploying material from their site DiscoverTheNetworks.org, conservative pundits Horowitz and Laksin (coauthors of One Party Classroom) investigate a rogues’ gallery of “progressive” foundations—everything from the Ford Foundation to, astonishingly, the ChevronTexaco Foundation—along with the public sector Service Employees International Union and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. This powerful agglomeration, masterminded by billionaire arch-liberal George Soros, vastly outspends conservative foundations, the authors contend, and dominates American politics: funding radicals at ACORN and the ACLU; promoting leftist policies on health care, immigration, and global warming; boosting minions—Barack Obama, most prominently—into high office to enact “socialism by stealth.” The authors’ turgid, acronym-strewn text takes on conspiracy overtones as they doggedly trace “networks” of liberal patronage, but their one-sided account of political influence—they focus on nonprofit organizations while ignoring corporate political activity and conservative talk radio—is neither original nor alarming. The machinations they uncover—voter registration drives, position papers, liberals funding liberals—feel run-of-the-mill rather than sinister. The result is a panicky but unconvincing rehash of familiar conservative-populist dudgeon. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt Inc.