Certainly it can no longer be denied: the progressive infiltration of our Fourth Estate and our intellectual academies are effectively complete. Although both were once highly regarded institutions, they have been thoroughly compromised as willing organs dedicated towards ushering in the Gospel of the Benevolent State. However, in order to make straight the steps leading to the Beautiful Lands, it became necessary to throw one's professional integrity under the freight train and to sell one's temporal soul for thirty pieces of silver and the respectability that one rightfully accrues upon assuming the title of House Courtesan. As it turned out, applicants lined up from around the block.

In promulgating the Big Lie as Liberalism's Good News, it was incumbent upon the elitist nomenclatura to carry water that evangelized a countercultural mythology touting America as de facto "Jailer of the Emergent Progressive Soul" and that "bloody boot" forever impressed upon the neck of its ubiquitous poor. Having long since bought into postmodernity's deconstruction of truth, the demolition of history for the politicized perspective of utilitarian ends became the broken eggs of necessity. And if a crime of intellectual commission or omission obscured an inconvenient truth or required painting a Happy Face on the gates of a Destructive Labor Camp, then so be it -- given the political revelation that an irresistible utopian transformation of mankind hung tenuously in the balance.

In turning a people away from their traditions, values, and beliefs, it is best to initiate the task at hand with the education of children, for he who molds the minds of the young holds the keys to a formidable power in the fullness of time. Additionally, if one can control the narrative of history and through selective and anecdotal fiat prove that the American experiment was in fact a vainglorious and self-interested project aimed towards the immoral acquisition and denial of political and economic power, then it is infinitely simpler to cleave a generation from its roots. It is only necessary to infer that what began in injustice proceeds in injustice. And while Charles Beard in his 1913 seminal work An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States laid the foundation for deconstructing American liberty, it would be Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present, that provided the polemical acid necessary to dissolve the worldview of millions of young ill-educated minds.

In utilizing Zinn's textbook in High Schools and Colleges, the Left presented America with its image distorted as through a fun house mirror. A People's History provided the perfect narrative from which a straw man caricature of the United States could be cobbled together with a primary emphasis placed on our national warts. Presenting the reader with a Manichean duality of robber barons and aristocrats vs. the teeming millions kept penniless and powerless, Zinn's ersatz Marxian historical analysis interpreted through a jaundiced prism struck with a cynical pessimism. Indeed, events from the Revolutionary, Civil, and both World Wars are drawn by the author in the most jaded perspective possible. Icons such as Washington and Lincoln are portrayed in the most unflattering terms and even the Second World War is ascribed to Japanese racism and our flexing of illegitimate economic and military power. Verily, this entire panorama of American history can be distilled down to the detritus of exploitation, suffering, and relentless human misery for the downtrodden. But for some unexplainable reason, immigrants surprisingly did not flee America for their lives, but in fact stayed and carved out a life for themselves despite Zinn's tale of horror and woe.

Armed with Howard Zinn's warped looking glass and the books and monographs of a hundred others with the same contorted outlook, young people maleducated in a government school curriculum of self-loathing saw no reason to take pride in such a benighted heritage and internalized that same intellectual bitterness: albeit at a more emotional gut level. Posing the fairy world dilemma in their narrative between cowering to the might of America's Fascistic forces of reaction and in boldly speaking truth to power as the noble student vanguard who singlehandedly ended a Southeast Asian genocide, the Left put their spin on the American zeitgeist and have been running with this tired meme ever since.

In fact, having in their salad years murmured and seethed about an America that was laughingly perceived as Totalistic and Fascist, the progressives are self-deluded to the damning insight that free speech and inquiry during the "ancien regime" were then still very much alive and well, thank you. The Left is living evidence of that tolerant freedom: since clearly they posed a genuine Fifth Column danger to the Founder's paradigm of America --an archetype of negative freedom, par excellence. That they proceeded unmolested from their countercultural incubators despite their shrill bleating of violent revolution and "social justice denied" is revelatory of just how contrived a narrative their suffering had been.

But as the Progressives have ascended to the thrones of prestige and power, we now know that those hollow 60's slogans trumpeting "Free Speech" and "A Plurality of Voices" were just so much poseur window dressing pandering glittering slogans to a herd consciousness. Indeed, any exotic collectivist flimflam was celebrated by the Left as they "worked the culture" -- provided that it stuck hard and fast in the Founders' ideological craw. Unveiled now as hypocrites of the highest order, progressives have become so bloated and impervious to the consideration of heterodox thoughts that they have lost their capacity to enjoy the grand irony of it all -- having becoming themselves the supreme tools of statist conformity in both word and deed. By commandeering the mediums of entertainment and opinion, the Left now blankets its oppressive egalitarian shroud over our nation and conspires to smother any party that dares reveal their political and philosophical nakedness.

A Velvet Stalinism, Managerial liberalism's reliable stock in trade, is in reality the fruition of what those peace-loving radicals had in mind a generation ago. More fully, they firmly believe they have shown the world that in their capacity as artful disseminators of ideologically orthodox thinking, they are indeed the shining vanguard inaugurating a Brave New Science of Man. In holding that America has intellectually evolved beyond the constraints of Constitutionalism and its "effeminate" fears concerning the concentration of power in human hands, the Progressives' are fully confident they have accomplished their sacred burden of proving to America that the Founding Fathers were mere rubes that fell off the bed of a turnip truck.

In spending their careers decrying the mote in their Fathers' eyes, the splintered beam obstructing their own collective gaze abides unheeded. Meanwhile, all but that faithful remnant left to bear witness to America's descent into subordinancy are oblivious to the knowledge that the cage door of servility is slamming shut -- a testament to the lemming-like docility of a people as it waxes helplessly towards critical mass.

Glenn Fairman writes from Southern California and blogs as The Eloquent Professor at http://www.palookavillepost.com/. He can be contacted at arete5000@dslextreme.com.