I rely on Amazon Reader Reviews to inform me about books I am contemplating. But this time, I opened the Reviews just to revel in others’ comments about a book I felt, and feel today, is among the very best histories I have ever read, Thomas Fleming’s A Disease in the Public Mind. But I was amazed at the high percentage of one-star and two-star reviews, and so I opened those. And what I found was stunning. What I found in those one-star and two-star reviews were clouds of mad, slurring, scoffing, sarcastic impugning of Fleming and his motives and his book.
Ten years ago, I stood at a Heritage Foundation affair, congratulated the speaker, Mathew Spaulding, on the thunderous endorsement of his talk by the packed hotel ballroom, and asked him if he had ever addressed a similar ballroom packed with the Left. I added that I had been, for many years, trying to discuss, to reason, with the Left, and had finally concluded that it cannot be done. I am answered by a torrent of abuse; smug, scoffing, sneering, jeering, mocking, guffawing, hooting, japing abuse. I said that two times before on this continent, the two sides had reached a point where the discussion was impossible, and so we fought. Obviously, 1775 and 1860. I concluded, “I think we are there again. We are about at 1845. Civil war is coming.”
Mr. Fleming’s book is superb. He tracks the two-hundred-year run-up to the Civil War. Moral superiority in the North, particularly in New England, defensive truculence in the South. Each disease intensifying, mutating, growing.
A Disease in the Publi…
Meticulously does Fleming trace these parallel “disease(s) in the public mind(s)”. Quoting hundreds of letters, speeches, newspaper articles, and editorials;…