cover image Can America Survive

Can America Survive

Ben Stein, Phil DeMuth, Benjamin Stein. Hay House, $24.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-4019-0333-6

America may be waging war against""certain deranged souls in the Moslem world,"" but the real enemy--lurking alarmingly within--is a Fifth Column of angry,""Anti-American"" leftists fomented by Al Gore and John Kerry, contend conservative humorist Stein and journalist-cum-psychologist DeMuth (co-authors of Yes, You Can Time the Market). The authors maintain that these enraged liberals, whom they say characterize the Bush administration as imperialistic, overreaching and racist, have essentially joined Islamist fanatics' assault on the United States. Worse, the authors argue, the Left's relentless invective--during wartime, no less--threatens to drag the nation into its most divisive crisis since the Civil War (although they concede that this will not lead to an actual war). Instead,""a more likely and potentially equally bloody sequel to today's anger from the Left would be a failure to adequately wage the war on terror,"" they warn. Stein and DeMuth blame the usual suspects--the""liberal news machinery,"" Marxist academics, befuddled environmentalists and Hollywood radicals--with the unoriginal gusto of apparatchiks. When they aren't heaping accusations on their straw adversaries, they're trying to uncover the psychological clues to liberals'""perceptual disorder"" and""irrational"" anger with the Bush administration. The Left's rant is a manifestation of an infantile personality, they say, while environmentalists""have projected their inner sense of guilt on to the world at large, and are seeking their personal redemption by redeeming the planet instead of redeeming themselves."" In other words, this volume will be appreciated primarily by those who already sympathize with the authors' views.