Buchanan Convinced Today's Political Left Rooted in Past's Counterculture
by Ed Thomas
June 6, 2005
(AgapePress) - An author and political commentator says the cultural philosophy of the political left comes from anti-Christian philosophies that were embraced by the counterculture in the U.S. some 40 or 50 years ago.In his book Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neo-Conservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (Thomas Dunne Books, 2004), author Pat Buchanan makes the case that the culture war in America is between social conservatives and liberal social elites.
"In Hollywood and New York, you take the academic elites, all of them have been converted to what we used to call the 'counterculture' in the 1960s," Buchanan observes.
On Fox News' O'Reilly Factor, Buchanan explained the counterculture was a group that embraced more humanistic principles of living often opposed to the Judeo-Christian ethic -- principles he says have always been in existence somewhere -- and surfaced in earnest in the U.S. after the political fight with Communism was over.
"[The ideas go] back, frankly, to the French Revolution ... and even before. And it is fundamentally, deeply anti-Christian, anti-Catholic," he says, "because it rejects the values and beliefs and what those cultures basically created in the West."
And according to Buchanan, worldviews opposed to the U.S. and to Western civilization's Judeo-Christian heritage have even snuck into the politics of social conservatives. That, he says, is what is driving the social liberals. "You know, you go back to Robespierre, you go back beyond him to Rousseau, [in] all of these ideas -- you find, in my judgment, a basic war against the ideas and the philosophy that are rooted in Christianity," Buchanan suggests.
Buchanan says he is convinced that "soft Marxism" -- a change of values and ways of thinking that had led to moral decline -- has replaced Christianity in the U.S. culture.
Ed Thomas, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
