What do folks think of this:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/7863873/allan-bloom-prophet-of-doom.thtml
"....
Perhaps I’m being unduly alarmist. As a cheeky young graduate student in the
Harvard Government Department, I used to pour cold water on the theories of the
visiting professors who would warn us of the fragility of liberal democracy or
predict the decline of Western civilisation. ‘Okay,’ I would say. ‘How long
have we got? Ten years? Fifteen? At what point can we conclusively say that
you’re talking b***s?’
This was in 1987 and I can remember the excitement I felt when I first cracked
the spine of The Closing of the American Mind, sitting in my dorm room in a
building designed by Walter Gropius. Bloom himself thought that nothing less
than the future of freedom was at stake — that if the great tradition of
liberal education couldn’t be saved from the levelling scythe of rampant
egalitarianism, America was doomed and with it, in all likelihood, Europe as
well. Had he given a paper to my graduate class, I probably would have asked
him the same question: ‘Ten years? Fifteen?’
But twenty-five years later, I’m no longer so sanguine. Liberal democracy,
having triumphed so gloriously over Soviet communism in 1989, now seems more
enfeebled than ever — and this crisis of faith is coinciding with a period of
economic turmoil that looks less like a cyclical downturn and more like a
permanent shift in global power from West to East. Not quite a perfect storm,
but a storm nevertheless.
At the time, I thought of Bloom as just another Cassandra, albeit one who could
write with extraordinary clarity and power. Now, as the forces of chaos gather
on the darkling plain, I’m beginning to think I was wrong. Today, he looks more
and more like a prophet. "
