With the exception of Noam Chomsky, perhaps no intellectual has been more influential on today’s American neo-communists and radical progressives than Howard Zinn. The far-left academic, who died in 2010, literally wrote the book on the left’s revisionist history of the United States.
With his A People’s History of the United States, a bestseller thanks to generations of academics forcing their students to buy it, Zinn outlined a comprehensive vision of this history—likely drawn from Stalinist propaganda—that portrays the United States as a conspiratorial fraud got up by white racists and rapacious capitalists.
The conspirators, Zinn claims again and again over hundreds of pages, brutally exploit the American people, who are too duped or stupid to realize the truth of their plight. Thankfully, Zinn is there to enlighten them.
It is impossible to overestimate the power this vision exercises over today’s radical left. They have effectively adopted Zinn’s claims wholesale without the slightest question. Zinn’s influence is palpable in the tearing down of statues, demonization of the US as a racist and genocidal entity, and even “mainstream” efforts like the New York Times’ 1619 Project. If the radical left has a vision of what the US is, it is Zinn’s vision.
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