BunkoSquad

1. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels.
Engels was the original limousine leftist: A wealthy textile heir, he financed Marx for much of his life.

Whereas, as we know, the only acceptable thing for a wealthy heir to do with his loot is hoard it jealously. Like Jesus would have done.

The Manifesto envisions history as a class struggle between oppressed workers and oppressive owners, calling for a workers’ revolution so property, family and nation-states can be abolished and a proletarian Utopia established.

How these guys were able to foretell the NHL strike, I'll never know.

2. Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler.
[Hitler] envisioned...a war against France to precede a war against Russia to carve out "lebensraum" ("living room") for Germans in Eastern Europe. The book was originally ignored. But not after Hitler rose to power.

If I didn't want to meet some FBI agents, I'd point out that one man's "lebensraum" is another man's "spreading peace around the globe". But I don't really think that. This may be the one book that deserves to be on the list.

3. Quotations From Chairman Mao.
In 1966, [Mao] published...The Little Red Book, as a tool in the "Cultural Revolution" he launched to push the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese society back in his ideological direction. Aided by compulsory distribution in China, billions were printed.

You know, if [Certain World Leaders] were able to put together a coherent sentence, I could see crowds marching down the street waving copies of [C.W.L.]'s quotations. But as a slogan to live by, I think "We must make a distinction between the enemy and ourselves, and we must not adopt an antagonistic stand towards comrades and treat them as we would the enemy." beats "You're either with us or against us", hands down, any day of the week.

4. The Kinsey Report.
The reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy.

Because the normalization of Victorian-era prudery and shame worked oh so well. And how dare anyone take a controversial idea and slap a "scientific gloss" over it to make a point? Not in the 6,000 years of the history of Earth has anyone been that audacious.

5. Democracy and Education, John Dewey.
In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose,

Um.

he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking "skills" instead.

For myself, I know I'd have never gotten anywhere if I hadn't memorized the periodic table.

His views had great influence on the direction of American education--particularly in public schools--and helped nurture the Clinton generation.

Clinton and GWB were born the same year. Presumably, the compilers of the list feel that Bush learned hard knowledge and Clinton learned thinking "skills". Which man got more out of his education? It's a subject that reasonable people will debate Republicans about for generations to come.

6. Das Kapital, Karl Marx.
Forces the round peg of capitalism into the square hole of Marx’s materialistic theory of history, portraying capitalism as an ugly phase in the development of human society in which capitalists inevitably and amorally exploit labor by paying the cheapest possible wages to earn the greatest possible profits.

Yeah, what a nutball.

Marx theorized that the inevitable eventual outcome would be global proletarian revolution. He could not have predicted 21st Century America: a free, affluent society based on capitalism and representative government that people the world over envy and seek to emulate.

Kook. It's like he pictured 21st Century America as a fractured place teetering on the brink of third-world economic disparity, with an out-of-control government that people the world over treat with the respect and fear you'd give an armed junkie. Again...nutball.

7. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan.
Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in "a comfortable concentration camp",

So long as it's comfortable, what are those dames so worked up about?

...a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life.

Some women got true fulfillment from being traditional stay-at-home moms. A lot more got true fulfillment from balancing a family and a career. And in extremely rare cases, even today, a few women don't even get to choose -- because their no-good husbands don't earn enough money to support a stay-at-home lifestyle! I've even heard of a woman in New Jersey who doesn't even have a husband! But when it comes to defining a woman's role in society...you can believe the founding president of the N.O.W. But I trust the findings of my local conservative think tank, thank you very much. Particularly since their blue-ribbon panel consisted of fourteen men and Phyllis Schlafly.

8. The Course of Positive Philosophy, Auguste Comte.
Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and cultural heritage...

Too bad. It looked like such a winning propisition, what with spawning the French Revolution and all. He developed the idea of

"positivism," in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.

NEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRDDDDD! What has scientific observation ever done for anyone, anyhow?

9. Beyond Good And Evil, Freidrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche argued that men are driven by an amoral "Will to Power," and that superior men will sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules, which he deemed as artificial as any other moral rules, to craft whatever rules would help them dominate the world around them.

Change "superior men" to "power-hungry hobgobllins" and change "sweep aside religiously inspired moral rules" to "selectively interpret and cite religiously inspired moral rules". Then read that passage again.

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes.
Keynes was a member of the British elite--educated at Eton and Cambridge...

NEEEEERRRRRRDDDDDD!

FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.

It's important here to remember that FDR was President until last Tuesday.

Among those just missing out on the Top Ten were Charles Darwin, Ralph Nader, Margaret Mead, Frantz Fanon and Rachel Carson. Would you want to have lived in a world where any of their ideas were taken seriously? Me neither.

Other takes on this list from Pandagon and Boston Dreams. And Brad DeLong and Down With Absolutes and Mark in Mexico and A Beautiful Soul and Schrodinger's Cat.