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However anarchical their rhetoric, triumphant socialists unfailingly turn totalitarian. This is the message of The Coercive Utopians: Social Deception by America's Power Players, by Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac (Chicago: Regnery Gateway, c. 1983). They argue that "utopianism, by its inherent logic, leads to coercion" (p. 8). The book comes commended by one of America's preeminent philosophers, Sidney Hook, who said: "I have rarely read a book which has contained such challenging information, and which raises so many troubling questions about the good will and bona fides of many organizations soliciting public support. The Isaacs' book should be read by all intelligent laymen who are active in public affairs."

Illustrating one of the facts that elicited Hook's alarm was a 1980 decision of the General Conference of the Methodist Church to financially support communist regimes in Cuba and Vietnam as well as the PLO. Aligned with the National Council of Churches, which encouraged its functionaries to disguise how the organization's funds were spent, the Methodists were simply one of the mainline denominations supporting Marxist movements that promised to inaugurate perfect societies. To one Methodist spokesman, the church's mission was to establish "'solidarity with the poor and the powerless'" (p. 20). Church delegations visited Cuba and inevitably found what they hoped for--a wonderful, egalitarian society. Other representatives visited Vietnam and wrote glowing reports of the communist transformation taking place following the war. They found grounds for praising Pol Pot's movement in Cambodia and gave financial support to Robert Mugabe as he began his brutal rule in Zimbabwe.

Linking arms with radical religionists, environmental utopians sought to restore the planet to a pristine "Mother Earth" condition. With Earth Day in 1970 the environmental movement began to shape the nation's consciousness, prodding Congress to pass laws designed to "produce the perfect environment" (p. 49). To get clean air and water, to protect endangered species, to banish toxics of all sorts, became morally obligatory and justified a massive expenditure of public funds. Yet "no reasonable standards satisfy the perfection-seeking environmental organizations" (p. 56) and laws passed decades ago are now used to restrict personal liberties in unimagined ways. "The distinguished sociologist and historian of ideas Robert Nisbet sees environmentalism as a revolutionary social movement. Indeed Nisbet sees it as potentially the third great social movement of Western civilization after Christianity and socialism, and one, ironically, that strikes at the roots of that civilization. If environmentalists as such do not `hate the system' they hate what is vital to the system--the development of energy sources, with the most environmentally benign source, nuclear energy, assuming a literally demonic character. Nisbet sees the reason for the movement's fascination with the sun as `a form of spiritual purification, for there is a renascent primitivism in the envioronmentalist's characteristic approach to life'" (p. 60).

Though a concern for the environment had shaped an earlier "conservationism," the movement that emerged in the `70s was largely guided by the New Left. Its sacred texts included Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful. Its causes included the banning of DDT and nuclear power, despite the utter lack of hard evidence that they threatened anything. The environmentalist agenda, promoted by powerful groups such as the Sierra Club, successfully promoted a "utopian campaign against modern technology" (p. 70) that prevailed politically, despite counterfactual realities.

The environmentalists' disdain for Western civilization was amplified by anti-American advocates in utopian think tanks such as the Institute for Policy Studies, which endeavored to destroy "public belief in the virtues of key American institutions, particularly those crucial to maintaining American power and influence in the world. An image of the United States is constructed as a rapacious imperial villain, the greatest single threat to the world's peace and prosperity" (p. 108). To make their case, they camouflaged their presentations under the guise of seeking "to preserve traditional American values and institutions" (p. 109). Thus Derek Shearer, an IPS representative, confessed that because it was imprudent to "'use the "S" word [socialism] too effectively in American politics, we have found that in the greatest tradition of American advertising the word "economic democracy" sells'" (p. 131). Such folks also claimed to identify with the "workers" whose welfare they championed. In fact, however, they harbored "'a tremendous elitist contempt for ordinary Americans, hatred of blue collar Americans because they weren't revolutionaries, contempt for them because they didn't want to smash and destroy, contempt for their pastimes, contempt for their marriages, contempt because they were Americans. Yet these elitists wanted to take that away from them, smash it, set up a system based on China or Cuba or Vietnam or Tanzania'" (p. 135). Equally counterfeit was the pacifism espoused by many of the radicals. Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth elicited fanatical fever within "peace" movements such as Clergy and Laity Concerned. Such pacifism, however, was largely a guise of anti-American tirades and generally followed dictates from Moscow, mediated through compliant popular front organizations.

Environmental organizations, along with other utopian groups, skillfully learned to "subvert the constitutional arrangements of the country" by infiltrating and manipulating governmental bureaucracies such as the EPA (p. 221). Here they saw themselves (though never elected by anyone) as "executors of the will of `the people' as they intuitively understand it. Utopian bureaucrats thus feel free to reshape, circumvent and disregard the laws they are assigned to administer" (p. 222). This took place quickly under President Jimmy Carter, who allowed the Natural Resources Defense Council to effectively set the coal leasing agenda for the Department of the Interior. Federal monies flowed into various "alternative energy" schemes, many of which proved wastefully utopian. Even more gratuitously, the Legal Services Corporation has "consistently defied its Congressional mandate" (p. 234) and taken upon itself the task of reforming American society (as well as providing a comfortable income for thousands of lawyers). Taking money from the government, these lawyer-bureaucrats sought (always in the name of "social justice") to undermine it through class action suits designed to destroy industries they disliked! As one of the presidents of the National Lawyers Guild declared, as reformers within the system they espoused "anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism" (p. 238).

Much of this activity goes unnoticed because the media, enamored with environmentalism and hostile to big business, acts "as a filter, screening out most of the information that could damage the utopians in the public view" (p. 251). Consequently, the nuclear power industry has been consistently misrepresented by journalists determined to destroy it. When government officials pled for stronger defense policies, TV personalities such as Walter Cronkite dismissed them as alarmists. Few Americans heard of the genocide in Cambodia, as horrific as Hitler's holocaust, because it would have questioned the rectitude of those who had opposed the Vietnam War. While millions died in Cambodia, the New York Times and Washington Post saw fit to mention it a total of 13 times in 1976! The next year, when the slaughter reached its zenith, America's TV networks noted Pol Pot's slaughter three times--and NBC said nothing at all. The networks were able, however, to devote 159 reports to human rights violations in South Africa. Shameful though it was, such media bias elicited no shame in journalistic circles. (Indeed, as the 2008 election showed, the media now sees itself as cheerleaders for the causes they support.)