John T. Flynn, The Road Ahead, 1949. John T. Flynn, described further in Kazin s The Populist Persuasion, was a leftist political commentator in the 1930s who moved to the right during and after World War II. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Flynn was one of the most widely read exponents of the new right-wing populism. Fervently anticommunist, he was equally antimilitarist, and called Cold War defense spending a job-making boondoggle. War is socialism, and vice-versa, he said, because each increases the power of the state over the people. These are excerpts from his 1949 best-seller, The Road Ahead: America s Creeping Revolution. Our Real Enemy My purpose in writing this book is to attempt to describe the road along which this country is travelling to its destruction. In England, we have a perfect case history of the infection and progress of the Socialist disease for despite the glowing terms in which its apostles promote it, socialism is a disease which fastens itself upon the body of a weakened society. We are following, not in the footsteps of Russia, but in the footsteps of England. We are being drawn into socialism on the British gradualist model. We are well on the road much further along than our people suspect. And if we do not clearly recognize that fact and abandon that fatal route, we will inevitably, perhaps in less than a decade, arrive at that state of socialization now before us in England. I do not mean to underestimate the danger from the Communists. They are interested at the moment in serving the purposes of the great enemy of the whole western world Russia. They are a traitorous bloc in our midst and they have frightening potentialities for harm in our foreign relations. But they are not as dangerous to us in the struggle now under way to change our internal institutions as another wholly indigenous movement. The leaders of this movement now actually seek to outdo us in berating the Communists with whom they were marching together but two or three years ago. They are more dangerous because they are more numerous and more respectable and they are not tainted with the odium of treachery. They are more dangerous because, as a matter of fact, they are now occupying positions of great power, have in their hands immense sections of our political machinery and are actually hailed as our brothers in the battle against the Reds. Every day that passes reduces the power of the Communists to mislead us or to promote their program among us. But every day that passes enlarges the opportunities of our real internal enemies to confuse us, to arouse us, and to entice us to travel the dark road that has led every country in Europe to its doom. Where We Stand Today The Communist would like to ruin the American system by clubbing it over the head. The Socialist Planner would like to do it by slow poison. Both types of assassin are at work on it now. For the moment we have limited a little the
energies of the assassin with the club. But we must not make the mistake of taking to our bosom the assassin with the poison bottle. The Socialist Planners have moved into the Democratic Party, have made it their helpless tool and are driving out of it the orthodox Democrats. It is merely a question of time when the Democratic Party will go out of business or become absolutely the party of the Planners. What To Do We must put an end to crisis government in America. Since 1940, this nation has been living on war. It has been the excuse for spending fabulous billions and filling every man s pocket with a share in the black profits of war. From 1940 to 1945 we borrowed and spent billions in a shooting war. Since 1945 nearly five years we have been spending billions in what we are told is a cold war. Unless we make an end of this it will bankrupt us. Even more appalling, it will lead us into another war at the end of which our liberties and our economic system will be ready for the scrap heap. The reason for all this is that the interests of America have been completely blotted out in this insane adventure in world salvation. We have saved nothing. We are contributing to the destruction of everything our civilization values. We are being led along by noisy minorities who use the world crisis to destroy our way of life or whose interests are in other lands, and by bungling politicians dependent upon crisis as an institution to remain in power. The time is here for all those who believe in America and who want above all to save her to stand up and make their voices heard above the clamor of the minorities who are destroying us. The task before us is clear. For our principles of action we must go back to our Constitution, to our Declaration of Independence, to our history and to the example set by our national fathers. We must begin now to dismantle the tyrant State in America and to build up once again the energies of a free people.