Book Review: Still The Best Hope By Dennis Prager
Book Review by Dick Morris of of Still The Best Hope: Why The World Needs American Values To Triumph by Dennis Prager
The world is neither round nor flat according to talk show host Dennis Prager — it is triangular. Prager suggests that we now face a tri-polar society in which Islam, the Left, and American values are competing for ascendency. Like geodetic plates shifting beneath the surface of the Earth, these three systems vie for supremacy, each certain in the knowledge that it cannot survive if the world is inhabited by the other two. Democracy and free markets can no more co-exist with a militant Islam bent on its destruction than it can with a leftist agenda that constantly tries to take its wealth and redistribute it to all. Nor can the left make it when there is a free market, free will alternative to its strictures and rules waiting over the horizon. And, of course, Islam, by definition, believes that its mission is global conquest.
We know what Islam is all about and most of us understand American values, but Prager’s real contribution is a revised definition of leftism. He argues, echoing Norm Podhoretz’ thinking, that the Left is a secular religion. Dedicated to egalitarianism, globalism, and socialism, he argues that global media is the medium through which the left spreads its message and that the world’s universities are its incubators. Prager writes that Western Europe – with the sometime exception of Britain – is under leftist control and, indeed, that much of America is as well. Presumably that includes our current president.
China? Prager says its current hybrid of Confucianism, Communism, and Capitalism is but a transitory state, the creature of an autocracy in search of an ideology.
But the real battle is that against Islam and the struggle against the Left. Each force must conquer America which with its Judeo-Christian morality and its free market and libertarian ideals stands in the way of each. He chronicles the struggles and predicts their course. But his main contribution is that he accurately labels the players and identifies them by their right names.
He also points out that the left will back Islam against Americanism as a tactical maneuver.
Of course, Prager would agree that two forces stand inexorably in the way of these dogmas. For the left it is the economic impossibility of its agenda for which Greece is the poster child. For the Islamists, it is the fact that people who come under their sway hate them and want out of which Iran is the best example.
In Greece, the left faces its ultimate reality, once articulated by Margaret Thatcher, that “soon it runs out of other people’s money.” A dogma that focuses on the distribution of wealth but has nothing much to say about its creation, it will eventually die of the same causes the killed the Soviet Union and put Greece on life support.
For Islamists, the fact is that once they take power, the people they govern come to hate them. The popular revulsion against the Taliban then and the Iranian Ayatollah now attest to the instability of a system based on Shariah Law.
Ultimately people will come to American values because, in Churchill’s words, “it is the worst system of government except for all the others.”
Prager’s book is a very important work. Its construct of a tri-polar division is an essential tool for analyzing the play of our politics and of our foreign policy. More than anything else, it provides a framework in which to see the world. No book can do more.
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