You will probably be surprised to learn of the massive and virtually unchecked power that the Left holds in the United States. After all, you'll say, aren't the key American institutions - the Presidency, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the corporations - run by determined right-wingers or weak-kneed centrists? And didn't American thinkers recently proclaim the dawn of a capitalist millennium, a 'New Economy' in which privatisation, deregulation and lower taxes were taken to be their own justification, while American CEOs mounted the heights of Davos and instructed the world in the timeless principles of the free market, as handed down by Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and the prophets of Silicon Valley?

LRB 21 March 2002 | PDF Download