Crouching Patriot, Hidden Bircher

Most people have heard about the book, The 5,000 Year Leap.  It's billed as a book which explains about how  representative democracy, which began in the US, propelled humanity forward the same distance in 200 years as it had taken 5,000 to previously transverse.  In terms of freeing up markets and granting people civil rights, America became a place where it was better to have a great idea than to be born into an aristocratic family.  This allowed America to progress at a greater rate than nations who still answered to a monarch or where social status was the sole determinant.  

Having only heard about the book in passing but agreeing with the thesis in general, I decided to purchase a copy for my new Kindle. The sample section talked about federalism, the Articles of Confederation, The Constitution, Jamestown, socialism, and capitalism.  After purchasing the book, however, I learned that the real message had to do with the supposed 28 principles for good government and that is when I started to notice a trend.    

Principles 1-5 are directly related to God or morality, Principle 9 refers to divine law.  The remaining principles are all derived from a narrow view of religion and seem to only have a thin veneer of political thought.  As a religious book, it's passable if not quite inspiring. As a political book, it's garbage.    


After suffering through fifty pages, I decided to look up the author.  From the introduction, he described himself only as a constitutional historian but I guessed there was more to that story.  The author, Cleon Skousen, turned out to be a Mormon evangelizer and an associate of the John Birch society.  His other works covered topics such as New World Order conspiracies, end of the world prophecies, and parenting (I have not read the parenting books by him, but I can't quite recommend them either!).  

For those not familiar with the John Birch Society, it takes what should be a good foundation of anti-communism and succeeds into making it a bizarre belief system.  Birchers, as they are often called, believe President Eisenhower was a communist.  They also believe that adding fluoride to the drinking water (which occurred way back in 1945) was  a communist plot.  As Ayn Rand said of them, "What is wrong with them is that they don't seem to have any specific, clearly defined political philosophy.  I consider the Birch Society futile, because they are not for capitalism, but merely against communism. I gather they believe that the disastrous state of today's world is caused by a communist conspiracy. This is childishly naive and superficial. No country can be destroyed by a mere conspiracy, it can be destroyed only by ideas. The Birchers seem to be either nonintellectual or anti-intellectual. They do not attach importance to ideas. They do not realize that the great battle in the world today is a philosophical, ideological conflict."

After reading up on Skousen, I contacted Amazon and told them I had bought the book in error.  It was removed from my Kindle and I was issued a full refund.  I suppose many people would have let their experience with the book pass without comment or simply would have stopped reading the book without undertaking the level of research I did.  My reason for needing to warn others about the author is as much motivated by personal reasons as political ones.  Over the years I have read thousands of books.  While other kids played, I read.  In 26 years, I have only ever not finished three books after starting them.  The first was an uninteresting and over-technical book by Piers Anthony in the Mode series which was a fantasy series based around the geometric pattern of the Mandelbrot set.  The second was Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.  Zinn was at best a deluded moron or at worst a pathological liar, there is enough there to start another post so I'll simply direct anyone interested in Zinn to Reason.com's latest post on him.  The third will be the 5,000 Year Leap.