A review of Daniel J. Flynn’s A Conservative History of the American Left (New York: Crown Forum, 2008), 464 pages, $27.50.

I must confess that I opened this book with trepidation. Daniel J. Flynn’s previous books were Why the Left Hates America (2002) and Intellectual Morons (2004), titles beside which Rush Limbaugh looks like George Santayana. I’m in for it, I thought: four hundred pages of USA! chest-thumping and ridiculous depictions of nonentities such as Michael Dukakis and John Kerry as the spawn of Satan.

But I was pleasantly surprised. Flynn has produced a well-written, pugnaciously argued, and consistently interesting account of the American Left. I disagree with significant portions of it, but hey, unlike in the vast majority of “political” books today, at least there is something to disagree with.

The Left is most attractive to Flynn—and to me—when it is most “firmly rooted in American tradition.” He’s willing to sing a song for the dreamers, and in doing so he offers an entertaining survey of antebellum utopian settlements. Some commanded celibacy and others free love, while Charles Fourier, aiming at that perfect mean, suggested a “Court of Love,” which has a nice doo-wop ring to it. Of the Court, Flynn indelicately says, “A guaranteed minimum of sexual experiences leveled the erotic playing field for the ugly, shy, and awkward.” If you’re gonna have a redistributive state, one supposes, better Charlize Theron for the lonely than food stamps for Doritos-eaters.

The most pernicious aspect of these communities was their denigration of core family functions. Conjugal variations aside, many prescribed group kitchens, communal responsibility for the raising of children, and a denial of privacy that even an exhibitionist would find intrusive. Home, and homely tasks and talents, were derogated. Children were often separated from parents and delivered into the chill hands of experts. (Upper-class Americans later turned this into a ritual with their boarding schools.)

Robert Owen, founder of the New Harmony settlement in Indiana, declared that “every child born within any state is the child of that state,” a proto-Hillary “it takes a village” conception of the young as the joint property of parents, busybodies, and a meddlesome bureaucracy that is always making plans for Nigel.

Flynn has taken an elephant gun on this safari through Yankee kingdom and he does enjoy bagging his prey, who are usually ragged Johnny Appleseeds of eccentric Protestantism aiming at the perfectibility of man. He has a talent for the savage tag, as when he piquantly pegs John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Perfectionists, as a “wife-swapping communist” who “nominated Jesus Christ for president.” (Christ, a prolife extremist who would not support the troops, was a longshot in 1840 and a sure loser today.)

The Oneidans turned their small fry over to a “Children’s House,” where they were raised by well-meaning strangers, and while this strikes us as monstrous I am not sure how it really differs from the system of daycare that politicians and policymakers of all stripes laud and subsidize today.