Praise for The Battle

"What makes The Battle so important is its unique combination of intellectual clarity and the best succinct analysis of the values of the American people I have ever read....Arthur C. Brooks has written a book that will take its place with Charles Murray's Losing Ground as one of the pivotal books around which American history turned."

--Newt Gingrich (from the foreword)

"Arthur Brooks is one of America's most astute, bold, and iconoclastic thinkers. The Battle provides yet more evidence of that fact. Loaded with fresh data and common sense, The Battle uncovers liberalism’s true grand agenda--to change America's culture and the American way--and explains how these same Americans can fight back and ultimately win."

--William J. Bennett

"Economic issues are not just about money. They're about how we live. The Battle shows how Washington power-grabbers use financial fears to tell the rest of us how we must live. Crucially, The Battle teaches us how to fight back."

Summary

America faces a new culture war. It is not a war about guns, abortions, or gays--rather it is a war against the creeping changes which threaten our culture of free enterprise.

Free enterprise embodies the values that define us as a nation: individual liberty, equal opportunity, entrepreneurship and self-reliance. It is the source of our past success, and the promise of a better future. But the recent economic crisis has distorted our values, and given the small minority who oppose free enterprise a pretext for sweeping European-style social democratic change.

Many Americans have forgotten the evils of twentieth-century socialism and the predations of the America’s own Great Society welfare state programs. But as American Enterprise Institute’s President Arthur C. Brooks reveals in The Battle, the forces for socialism are back with a vengeance. They have the full arsenal of government, money and power, and they are using our economic insecurity to introduce breathtaking increases in the reach of the state. They are playing for keeps, and if they win, America will be changed forever--not just economically, but culturally.

The Battle offers a plan of action for the defense of free enterprise. It is at once a call to arms and a crucial redefinition of the political and moral gulf that divides Left and Right in America today. The battle is on, and nothing less than the soul of America is at stake.

Arthur C. Brooks is president of AEI.