Elian, then 5, was found floating in the ocean off Florida’s coast on Thanksgiving in 1999 as The Guardian recounts. Soon thereafter the U.S. and Cuba were wrapped up in the international-relations version of a squabbling custody battle. Cuba prevailed when Attorney General Janet Reno ordered the forcible removal of Elian, by then 6, from his relatives’ house in Miami.

This week the communist nation held a state celebration of the 10th anniversary of Elian’s return to his home country, which is where he spoke to reporters. President Raul Castro attended the celebration, according to the Cuban News Agency. The Babble has a short firsthand account of the 2000 protests in Cuba about Elian’s custody battle.

Flash forward 20 years and many of the hopes of those who were present at the breaching of the Wall have not been realized. In much of the former Soviet bloc the intervening decades have been distinguished not only by young democracies, but also by corruption and shady insider dealing. But for Americans what may be more disheartening is that the roles of East and West have been, to some extent, reversed. Ironically, instead of the ex-Eastern Bloc looking to the U.S. as a model, the U.S. seems to be modeling its behavior on post-communist Eastern Europe. And nothing less than America’s public interest is at stake.

The way that government and business now interlock in the U.S., notably in the wake of Wall Street’s meltdown, is beginning to resemble the tangle of self-interested government-business “clans” and other such informal networks that emerged during the East’s transition to a market economy in the 1990s. I have come to this conclusion after spending the better part of three decades studying communist and post-communist societies — observing first how people circumvented the communist system, and when it was coming undone, how players positioned themselves to wield power and influence and thereby helped create the emerging order. This century, as I’ve turned much of my energy homeward, my prior experience has — to my surprise — proved ideal preparation for looking into similar issues in the United States.

In Eastern Europe what happened is clear. When the command structure of a centrally planned state that has owned virtually all the property, companies and wealth breaks down and no authoritarian stand-in is put in its place, a network-based mode of governing and business develops to replace it. Throughout the region, long-standing networks, positioning themselves at the state-private nexus, rose to fill leadership vacuums and, at times, reaped the spoils of previously state-owned wealth. Known variously as “clans” in Russia, “institutional nomadic networks” in Poland, and by still other names elsewhere, always their members were energetic and well-placed, sometimes also ethically challenged.

A “clan-state” arose in Russia in the 1990s. During that period, competing political-financial cliques –- or clans — mobilized to exert control over the economy, energy, internal security and other valuable arenas. They had a strong footing both in segments of the state and in business or finance. Their loyalty was to their group, and to promoting that group’s agenda, rather than to the broader public interest. A prime example of the Russian clan at work would be the “Chubais Clan,” named after the young “reformer” Anatoly Chubais, which had earlier coalesced through a club of young intellectuals, then teamed up with advisors from Harvard University to carry out economic reform and privatization of state assets and became one of the most powerful clans of the era. Its comparative advantage in the Russian context was its access to hundreds of millions of Western aid dollars. To serve the clan’s agendas, members of the clan closely guarded official information, made end runs around the bureaucracy and the democratically elected parliament, and straddled multiple and mutually reinforcing roles across government and foreign aid-supported private organizations.

A similar, but more benign, version of the clan developed in post-communist Poland — the institutional nomad networks. The phrase was coined by Polish sociologists, but also sometimes crops up in the Polish media. These tight-knit networks are so named because their members migrate freely between institutions — governmental and nongovernmental, including national branches of international banks and foundations. Nomadic networks were not nearly as likely as clans to cross the line into criminal activity — there wasn’t as much at stake in Poland as in vast and resource-rich Russia. (Besides, there is little evidence of criminal mafia infiltration in the Polish political establishment, as opposed to the institutional and legal frameworks of the Russian clan-state.) As with clans, however, the members’ primary loyalty is to their network, rather than to the institutions, both governmental and non-, for which they are working at any given time.

The nomadic networks were key players in the immediate post-communist years especially, but they still hold sway today. One such network that was very visible in the late 1990s, known as Ordynacka (and whose members first came together during their student days under the umbrella of a communist club), counts among its ranks the popular Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who served as president of Poland from 1995 to 2005. Ordynacka can’t be reduced to a political party, NGO, social club, business or lobbying organization, yet its influence can be seen in the politics, the economy and the media.

Operating at the pinnacle, members of both clans and institutional nomadic groups secure the resources and power necessary to further their group’s goals, whatever they might be, often at the expense of the institutions they supposedly serve. It may seem absurd to suggest that American democracy today has anything in common with Russia or Poland in the early 1990s, or far-fetched to compare American businessmen and government officials with Russian clans and Polish nomads. But in the aftermath of the financial crisis in the United States, some things are starting to look familiar.

The post-communist players bear a striking resemblance to the interlocking handful of Wall Street–government policy deciders who “coincide” at the highest echelons of power and have come to be symbolized by “Government Sachs.” From those who ruined Enron to those who wrought more recent Wall Street wreckage, a lack of loyalty to institutions, including the dearth of regard for shareholders and boards of directors, has characterized the modus operandi of the Wall Street players who brought on the financial crisis in America — and the world.

In both the East European and U.S. cases, operators at the top challenge governments’ rules of accountability and businesses’ codes of competition, ultimately answering only to each other. In both cases, it’s hard to get more “efficient,” because inside information and power is confined to very few actors who trust each other. And, because only the players have the information, they can brand it for everyone else’s consumption without anyone being able to challenge them. Their maneuverings are largely beyond the reach of traditional monitors. Gone are the messy disagreements and competing interests of the democratic process. You can hardly get more efficient, for example, than having two former Goldman Sachs executives like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and assistant Neel Kashkari hand $700 billion in taxpayer money to errant financial firms, including a hefty chunk to Goldman Sachs.

Moreover, the intertwined coterie of financial and policy deciders in the United States is creating not only the financial architecture of the future, backed by the power and billions of the state, but, more generally, new relationships between the bureaucracy and the market. A perfect example of these relationships in Russia is Gazprom, the natural gas conglomerate created from the Soviet gas ministry in 1989 and staffed by nomenklatura turned capitalists. While it was nominally privatized in the 1990s, the Russian government holds a controlling stake and Gazprom is run by Putin cronies. Just as the Russian government holds a controlling stake in this major industry, bailouts have made the U.S. government a huge shareholder in two financial firms, AIG and Citi, as well as two carmakers, General Motors and Chrysler. Through their maneuverings, these networks help create new institutional forms of governance in which state and private power are not only interdependent but often blurred. With minimal public input or even notice, this new architecture provides more and more opportunities for the players to reinforce their power and wield influence — largely beyond public scrutiny.

Though practically invisible to the public, the current challenge to democracy actually characterizes much of federal governance in the United States today. This state of affairs grew out of a reconfiguring of the balance between state and private interests, combined with a hollowing out of the regulatory and monitoring functions of the state. A major contributor to it lies in regulatory and policy changes associated with the contracting out of government work to private companies over the past 15 years. One result is that, today, most of the work of the federal government is actually performed by contractors. In fact, three-quarters of the people working for the U.S. government actually receive their paychecks from private companies, according to government scholar Paul Light. The outsourcing of many government functions is now routine. Contractors choose and oversee other contractors, control crucial databases, draft official documents, and run intelligence operations — constituting one-fourth of the country’s intelligence workforce. Government bailouts and stimulus packages are managed and overseen by contractor firms that can hardly be said to be disinterested.

While the public is familiar with the excesses of the now infamous Blackwater (renamed Xe), it is generally unaware that companies stand in daily for government. Many public priorities and decisions are driven by private companies instead of government officials and agencies that must answer to citizens, with officials only signing on the dotted line. In report after report, government investigators (such as the Government Accountability Office and inspectors general) have raised questions about who really sets policy — government or contractors? — and whether government has the information, expertise, institutional memory and personnel to manage contractors — or is it the other way around? Other contributors to the new forms of blurred governing include the rising number and influence of quasi-government advisory boards, according to the Congressional Research Service, the upsurge in personal envoys forging public policy, and the drift of governmental legitimacy and expertise to private partners.

The upshot of all this is that new institutional forms of governing that join the state and the private permeate virtually all arenas of government, most visibly intelligence, military and “homeland security” enterprises, where so much action has taken place since 9/11. It is questionable whether the world’s model democracy can be counted on to act in the national and public interest. And it is hard to see how all this can be unraveled. The challenge the current state of affairs presents to democracy and the free market may well prove more daunting than the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. 

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Janine R. Wedel, a professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of “Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market” (Basic Books, Dec. 1).

Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history at Princeton University and the Woodrow Wilson School, has written (with a contribution from Jan Gross, also a professor of history at Princeton) an account of just that, a version that briskly dispenses with several currently popular theories. “Uncivil Society” reprises arguments in Kotkin’s acclaimed 2001 book about the dissolution of the USSR, “Armageddon Averted,” but with even more concision. (“Armageddon Averted” was only 300 pages long; the narrative portion of this book clocks in at half that.) The history of the Cold War — especially on the Soviet side — often seems a soporific chronicle of dull, gray men in dull, gray suits hammering out dull, gray and largely incomprehensible treaties while dictating production quotas. Kotkin proves that this story, the epochal global event of our time, can be made fascinating when described with vigor, clarity and a cobweb-slicing scorn for cant and obfuscation.

“Uncivil Society” examines the end of Soviet-style socialism in three exemplary bloc states: East Germany, Romania and Poland. Kotkin complains that on this subject most analysts “continue to focus disproportionately, even exclusively, on the ‘opposition,’ which they fantasize as a ‘civil society.’” With the exception of Poland, where the Solidarity movement constituted a real counterpart to the Communist regime, this notion of a valiant resistance who modeled a better order and spearheaded the mass uprisings of 1989 falls, in Kotkin’s view, “into the realm of fiction.” And, while he credits the West for its “steadfast” containment of the Soviet Union (“whatever the mistakes and excesses”), Kotkin doesn’t seem to regard direct Western action as a significant cause of the collapse of the USSR, either. Instead, he views the whole thing as an “implosion”; the Soviet-style establishments (“uncivil societies”) simply gave up the ghost — in some cases even helping the dissolution along.

Why would any group in possession of so much power, enjoying privileges denied to the hoi polloi, willingly surrender? As Kotkin sees it, they were terminally demoralized. The Soviet bloc elites had promised (and, he insists, mostly believed) that Communism would provide a better alternative — a living, breathing reproach to the ruthlessness of capitalism. Forced to scrape by alongside booming postwar Western economies, the Communist states (particularly East Germany) had their noses rubbed in their failure on a daily basis. Media, from Western propaganda efforts like Voice of America to TV and radio intended for Western European audiences but picked up by audiences behind the Iron Curtain, made the superior consumer goods and political freedoms of the West common knowledge and the subject of much envy and yearning.

To placate their populations and build up their production capacity, the Soviet satellite states wound up borrowing heavily from Western governments, gambling on the success of future exports. But they never managed to make goods that the rest of the world wanted, and had to borrow more cash; Kotkin persuasively argues that the regimes in most of the bloc nations realized they were living on borrowed time by the late 1980s. Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform program, a reprise of the “socialism with a human face” promised (then squashed) in the Prague Spring of 1968, turned out to be ideologically and practically impossible. To admit that Soviet-style socialism could be reformed was to allow that it wasn’t already the best possible system, confessing to decades of lying and laying the whole apparatus open to revision and revolution while the tempting example of Western-style market economies waited right next door. “Reform amounted to autoliquidation,” Kotkin writes.

Above all, the Communist establishments proved incapable of fixing their states because they lacked “initiative, independent judgement and integrity.” Their monolithic bureaucracies, where advancement was based on loyalty and obedience to superiors as well as on ideological conformity, eliminated individuals with those qualities. “Incompetence in Communist systems,” writes Kotkin, “was therefore structural.” Oppressive state security apparatus minimized and marginalized any organized opposition except in Poland, where the Catholic Church provided an encouraging example of an alternative social institution. Yet even Solidarity had not really planned to take over the government, and only ascended (briefly) to power via the Communists’ spectacular mismanagement of electoral design.

When the bloc governments began to teeter, Kotkin argues, it was the littlest things that set them off. A pastor in Romania asked 40 elderly parishioners to protest his eviction from his home. Theology students gathered to pray for peace in a Leipzig church. An East German official misspoke at a press conference. These events, tipping points in an ongoing loss of credibility, triggered what Kotkin describes as “political bank runs” on the entire system. In days, spontaneous mass demonstrations filled the streets.

Unlike hard-liners of the past, the rulers of 1989 couldn’t count on Soviet tanks and troops to subdue the crowds and provide them with a “Chinese solution” (a reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre of that summer). Gorbachev had made it clear that the USSR would not step in to save their asses as it had in Prague in 1968. But above all, what did the establishment really have to defend? “Many Communists lost interest in preserving their own system,” Kotkin writes. “Not all, but a number, of party officials preferred to become an asset-owning bourgeoisie.” They could bloody their streets to sustain regimes they already knew to be economically untenable, or (for the few with a shred or two of wherewithal), they could start thinking about how to feather their post-Soviet nests.

In their introduction, Kotkin and Gross concede that this story — in which the brave and idealistic are largely sidelined and victory comes in the form of the exhausted capitulation of an incompetent villain — is “depressing.” However, it’s not, they sardonically note, as “disheartening” as the West’s current crisis, in which elites who were supposedly selected to run things via a free-market meritocracy were equally guilty of “spectacular incomprehension, lucrative recklessness and not infrequent fraud … We can only hope that the market and democracy prove their resiliency and good governance and accountability return.” I’m guessing, though, that they won’t be holding their breaths.

The one true intellectual among 20th-century revolutionaries, Trotsky has been the subject of numerous biographies, including the one he wrote himself (“My Life”) and Isaac Deutscher’s overly worshipful but still definitive three-volume treatment. Patenaude is not exactly competing with those, although at this point in history his book will provide a completely adequate summary of Trotsky’s life and achievements for most general readers. (As Patenaude observes, if you’re inclined to read Trotsky’s own work, his masterpiece remains the epic-scale “History of the Russian Revolution.”) Instead, he paints a distinctive portrait of a human Trotsky, in exile and in disgrace, and hence at his most sympathetic. Trotsky feeds bunnies and chickens at his house in Coyoacán, sleeps with Frida Kahlo and feuds with her husband, Diego Rivera, and launches all-too-accurate broadsides against his nemesis Joseph Stalin, which would be widely and shamefully ignored or resisted by many Western leftists.

At the same time, Patenaude argues that Trotsky’s political, philosophical and personal failures were profound and inescapable. In this telling of the tragedy, our hero’s tragic flaw is a mixture of incurable optimism and stubbornness. Trotsky became V.I. Lenin’s principal lieutenant just before the October Revolution of 1917 and was without doubt its greatest rhetorician and orator, as well as the founder and commander of the Red Army. But as Patenaude reminds us, it was Trotsky, a lifelong believer in social democracy as a mass movement, who had warned a few years earlier that the political philosophy Lenin dubbed “democratic centralism” was dangerous: “The entire structure of Leninism is at present based on lies,” he wrote in 1912, “and carries within it the poisonous seeds of its own destruction.”

All the what-ifs, in Patenaude’s view — what if Trotsky had out-maneuvered Stalin, after Lenin’s death? What if Trotsky had acknowledged the revolution’s crimes and turned away from orthodox Marxism? — are irrelevant, because Trotsky could never have done those things. His genius lay in language, not politics. (It sounds like he’d have made a great TV personality.) I’m not quite sure about this. Trotsky did allow himself momentary room for doubt, writing just before the end of his life that should worldwide proletarian revolution not arrive with World War II, “nothing else would remain except only to recognize that the socialist program … ended as a Utopia.” Even with all the blood on his hands and all his misguided certainty about Marxian “dialectical materialism,” Trotsky still stands out as a vital, monumental figure somewhat larger than his context. As philosopher John Dewey wrote to his fiancee after watching Trotsky speak, “‘Truth, justice, humanity’ and all the rest … are receding into the background before the bare overpowering interest of the man and what he has to say.”

Even if the turnout wasn’t the 2 million that some conservatives tried, briefly, to claim, it was still enough to fill the streets near the Capitol. It was also ample testament to the strength of a certain strain of right-wing populist rage and the talking head who has harnessed it. The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together six months ago to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell.

In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck’s life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite “death panel” wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing “socialism.” In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck’s favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, “The 5,000 Year Leap.” A once-famous anti-communist “historian,” Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.

Anyone who has followed Beck will recognize the book’s title. Beck has been furiously promoting “The 5,000 Year Leap” for the past year, a push that peaked in March when he launched the 912 Project. That month, a new edition of “The 5,000 Year Leap,” complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top 15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for months. The book tops Beck’s 912 Project “required reading” list, and is routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use it as their primary source material. At one 912 meet-up I attended in Florida, copies were stacked high on a table against the back wall, available for the 912 nice price of $15. “Don’t bother trying to get it at the library,” one 912er told me. “The wait list is 40 deep.”

What has Beck been pushing on his legions? “Leap,” first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. “Leap” argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs — based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith — that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah’s George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year’s annual fundraiser).

But more interesting than the contents of “The 5,000 Year Leap,” and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book’s author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen’s own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of “The 5,000 Year Leap.”

As Beck knows, to focus solely on “The 5,000 Year Leap” is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck’s bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.

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Willard Cleon Skousen was born in 1913 to American parents in a small Mormon frontier town in Alberta, Canada. When he was 10 his family moved to California, where he remained until he shipped off to England and Ireland for Mormon missionary work. In 1935, after graduating from a California junior college, the 23-year-old Skousen moved to Washington, where he worked briefly for a New Deal farm agency. He then began a 15-year career with the FBI, also earning a law degree from George Washington University in 1940. His posts at the FBI were largely administrative and clerical in nature, first in Washington and later in Kansas.

After retiring from the FBI in 1951, Skousen joined the faculty of Brigham Young University, the Latter-day Saints university in Utah. He then enjoyed a tumultuous four years as chief of police in Salt Lake City. During his tenure he gained a reputation for cutting crime and ruthlessly enforcing Mormon morals. But Skousen was too earnest by half. The city’s ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. “Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government,” Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. “The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man [and] one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government.”

During his stint as police chief, Skousen began laying the groundwork for his future career as a professional anti-communist. He published a bestselling expose-slash-history called “The Naked Communist.” In the late ’50s, America’s far right began to bubble with organizations peddling stories about the true state of the Red Menace. Groups like the Church League of America and the John Birch Society organized to channel, feed and satisfy Cold War paranoia. Members of these groups were the original postwar “domestic right-wing extremist threat.” Then as now, they were very much on the government’s radar.

After his firing from the police force, Skousen became a star on the profitable far-right speakers circuit. He worked for both the Bircher-operated American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The two groups competed in describing ever more terrifying threats posed by America’s enemies, foreign and domestic. As the scenarios became more and more outlandish, the feds grew concerned. In an internal memo, the FBI described Skousen’s friend and employer Fred Schwarz as “an opportunist,” the likes of which “are largely responsible for misinforming people and stirring them up emotionally … Schwartz [sic] and others like him can only do the country and the anticommunist work of the Bureau harm.” 

How did Skousen become an expert on communism? He claimed, as his apologists still do, that his years with the FBI exposed him to inside information. He also boasted that he worked closely with J. Edgar Hoover. But both claims are open to question. Skousen’s work at the Bureau was largely administrative, according to Ernie Lazar, an independent researcher of the far right who has examined Skousen’s nearly 2,000-page FBI file. “Skousen never worked in [the domestic intelligence division] and he never had significant exposure to data concerning communist matters,” says Lazar.

Skousen also trumpeted the insight he says he gained researching “The Naked Communist.” But this research was as shaky as his résumé. Among the theories Skousen charged a healthy fee to discuss was the alleged treason of FDR advisor Harry Hopkins. According to Skousen, Hopkins gave the Soviets “50 suitcases” worth of info on the Manhattan Project, along with nearly half of the nation’s supply of enriched uranium. This he told thousands of audiences across the country, sometimes giving five speeches a day.

When Skousen’s books started popping up in the nation’s high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau’s answer was an exasperated and resounding “no.” One 1962 FBI memo notes, “During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing ‘professional communists’ who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes.” Skousen’s “The Naked Communist,” said the Bureau official, is “another example of why a sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed.”

Two years on the circuit made Skousen a nationally known figure. Aligned with the Birchers and Schwarz, he also founded his own Utah-based far-right organization, the All-American Society. Here’s how Time magazine described the outfit in a December 1961 feature on what it called the “rightwing ultras”:

The All-American Society, founded in Salt Lake City, has as its guiding light one of the busiest speakers in the rightist movement: W. Cleon Skousen, a balding, bespectacled onetime FBI man who hit the anti-Communist circuit in earnest in 1960 after being fired from his job as Salt Lake City’s police chief (“He operated the police department like a Gestapo,” says Salt Lake City’s conservative Mayor J. Bracken Lee). Skousen freely quotes the Bible, constantly plugs his book, The Naked Communist, [and] presses for a full congressional investigation of the State Department.

By 1963, Skousen’s extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had “gone off the deep end.” One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen “money mad … totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends.”

When Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch’s charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy,” the last of Skousen’s dwindling corporate clients dumped him. The National Association of Manufacturers released a statement condemning the Birchers and distancing itself from “any individual or party” that subscribed to their views. Skousen, author of a pamphlet titled “The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society,” was the nation’s most prominent Birch defender.

Skousen laid low for much of the ’60s. But he reemerged at the end of the decade peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the “dynastic rich.” Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces — from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement — to serve their own power.

In 1969, a 1,300-page book started appearing in faculty mailboxes at Brigham Young, where Skousen was back teaching part-time. The book, written by a Georgetown University historian named Carroll Quigley, was called “Tragedy and Hope.” Inside each copy, Skousen inserted handwritten notes urging his colleagues to read the book and embrace its truth. “Tragedy and Hope,” Skousen believed, exposed the details of what would come to be known as the New World Order (NWO). Quigley’s book so moved Skousen that in 1970 he self-published a breathless 144-page review essay called “The Naked Capitalist.” Nearly 40 years later, it remains a foundational document of America’s NWO conspiracy and survivalist scene (which includes Skousen’s nephew Joel).

In “The Naked Communist,” Skousen had argued that the communists wanted power for their own reasons. In “The Naked Capitalist,” Skousen argued that those reasons were really the reasons of the dynastic rich, who used front groups to do their dirty work and hide their tracks. The purpose of liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, argued Skousen, was to push “U.S. foreign policy toward the establishment of a world-wide collectivist society.” Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch’s own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian émigré who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

“The Naked Capitalist” does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited “Tragedy and Hope” author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen’s interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen’s latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of “inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary.” Skousen not only saw things that weren’t in Quigley’s book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there — namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen.

“Skousen’s personal position,” wrote a dismayed Quigley, “seems to me perilously close to the ‘exclusive uniformity’ which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan.”

Skousen was unbowed. In 1971, he founded the Freeman Institute, a research organization devoted to the study of the super-conspiracy directed by the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. (The institute later changed its name to the National Center for Constitutional Studies, which has offices in Malta, Idaho, and continues to publish Skousen’s books, including Glenn Beck’s favorite work of history, “The 5,000 Year Leap.”)

By the end of the 1970s, the death of Skousen’s biggest allies within the Mormon church hierarchy cleared the way for an official disavowal of his work. In 1979, LDS church president Spencer W. Kimball issued an order to every Mormon clergyman in the U.S. stating “no announcements should be made in Church meetings of Freemen Institute lectures or events that are not under the sponsorship of the Church. [This] is to make certain that neither Church facilities nor Church meetings are used to advertise such events and to avoid any implication that the Church endorses what is said during such lectures.”

Skousen may have been too extreme for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon found rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan’s Washington. In 1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded Council for National Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by becoming an early proponent of privatizing Social Security. He also formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and aligned the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP.

“Skousen worked to change Mormonism from a new and unique American-born faith into an evangelical form of fundamentalist Christianity,” says Rob Lauer, a leader of the Reform Mormonism movement. “By arguing that biblical principles were the basis of the U.S. government, he was among those most responsible for the LDS church becoming part of the religious right political establishment over the past 25 years.” 

In 1981, Skousen published “The 5,000 Year Leap,” the book for which, thanks to Beck, he is now best known. But it wasn’t that Skousen book that made the biggest headline in the 1980s. Toward the end of Reagan’s second term, Skousen became the center of a minor controversy when state legislators in California approved the official use of another of his books, the 1982 history text “The Making of America.” Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen’s book characterized African-American children as “pickaninnies” and described American slave owners as the “worst victims” of the slavery system. Quoting the historian Fred Albert Shannon, “The Making of America” explained that “[slave] gangs in transit were usually a cheerful lot, though the presence of a number of the more vicious type sometimes made it necessary for them all to go in chains.”

Skousen spent the 1990s in semi-retirement. He spoke occasionally around the country and welcomed visiting politicians to his Salt Lake City home on Berkeley Street. His death in January 2006 was little noticed outside Mormon circles. If LDS members debated his legacy, it was in mostly hushed tones. But by then, he was already poised for a posthumous revival.

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Glenn Beck’s first public reference to anything Skousen seems to have occurred in 2003. In his memoir-cum-manifesto, “The Real America,” was a chapter titled “The Enemy Within.” It consisted of a list titled “Communist Goals of 1963.” The list was originally published in Skousen’s 1958 book “The Naked Communist,” and was submitted to the Congressional Record by Florida Rep. Albert Herlong Jr., whom Beck identifies as the author. Beck asked readers of “The Real America” to ponder Skousen’s list, then “check off” those goals already achieved by America’s new enemies within. Replacing communists in Beck’s view: “liberals, special-interest groups, [and] the ACLU.”

It would be another few years before Beck really started boosting for Skousen’s books. Apparently, around about 2007, a friend of Beck’s sent him “The 5,000 Year Leap.” In the column linked here, Canadian newspaper columnist Nigel Hannaford says the friend was a Toronto lawyer. Paul Skousen, Skousen’s son, endorsed the outlines of the tale to Salon by e-mail, without giving dates: “As I understand it, Glenn Beck was given a copy of FYL by a friend in Canada. When Beck read it, suddenly the effusive and disembodied principles of freedom that he had been trying to dig up and put together all came together and he could make sense of them. He was so excited about the clarity it brought that he began mentioning it on his show.”

Whatever the circumstances, Beck really began touting Skousen in the latter half of 2007. The first brief mention of Skousen in the online archives of Beck’s radio show is Sept. 24, 2007. Less than two months later, Beck interviewed conservative pundit David Horowitz on his radio program. He asked him, “Have you ever read any Skousen? Have you read — do you remember ‘The Naked Communist’? I went back and reread that, it was printed in the 1950s. I reread that recently. You look at all the things the communists wanted to accomplish. It’s all been done.” Horowitz agreed.

The very next week, Bill Bennett appeared on Beck’s radio program and received the same question. “Are you familiar with Skousen?” asked Beck. When Bennett replied yes, Beck gushed. “He’s fantastic,” he said. “I went back and I read ‘The Naked Communist’ and at the end of that Skousen predicted [that] someday soon you won’t be able to find the truth in schools or in libraries or anywhere else because it won’t be in print anymore. So you must collect those books. It’s an idea I read from Cleon Skousen from his book in the 1950s, ‘The Naked Communist,’ and where he talked about someday the history of this country’s going to be lost because it’s going to be hijacked by intellectuals and communists and everything else. And I think we’re there.”

Beck continued to mention the book during 2008, but his Skousen obsession really kicked in as the 912 concept began to take shape. Even before Obama’s inauguration, Beck had a game plan for a movement with Skousen at the center. On his Dec. 18, 2008, radio show, one month before Obama took office, Beck introduced his audience to the idea of a “September twelfth person.”

“The first thing you could do,” he said, “is get ‘The 5,000 Year Leap.’ Over my book or anything else, get ‘The 5,000 Year Leap.’ You can probably find it in the book section of GlennBeck.com, but read that. It is the principle. Please, No. 1 thing: Inform yourself about who we are and what the other systems are all about. ‘The 5,000 Year Leap’ is the first part of that. Because it will help you understand American free enterprise … Make that dedication of becoming a Sept. 12 person and I will help you do it next year.”

By then, the Skousen family was ready to respond to the Beck-inspired demand. “We as a family,” Paul Skousen told Salon, “were preparing to publish another edition, so I contacted his office with the request that Glenn write a foreword. He was gracious and kind and did just that. That is the version we’re now publishing.

According to James Pratt of PowerThink Publishing, publishers of the new 30th anniversary edition of “Leap,” which has the Beck foreword,  it was intended to replace the version that the Beck show was already touting via links on its Web site. Pratt claimed in an e-mail to Salon that the previous version was not authorized by the family. “It was presumed by Mr. Beck and staff that copyright authority was in effect with that edition, and as an author I must say, I had also assumed the same thing … I was more than a little surprised this was going on, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of copies.”

PowerThink secured the agreement of the Skousen family to create the current edition of “The 5,000 Year Leap,” which was first published on March 1, 2009. Pratt says that a federal lawsuit “is in process, to secure the copyright authority in an ‘authoritative’ way” to stop anyone but PowerThink from publishing the book.

In March, with the new book available, Beck invited Skousen’s nephew Mark onto his Fox show, where the two men discussed splitting up the United States. (Mark would later say that between commercials, Beck told him that a friend had sent him “Leap” and that the book “changed his life.”) A week later, Beck issued his famously maudlin announcement introducing the 912 Project. The teary-eyed performance was accompanied by a clarion call for all 912ers to buy ” Leap.” “I beg you to read this book filled with words of wisdom which I can only describe as divinely inspired,” wrote Beck in his introduction to a recent edition. The result has been a publishing earthquake: More than 250,000 copies have been sold in the first half of 2009. James Pratt, the book’s publisher, says Beck “has done more to bring the work of Dr. Skousen to light than any other individual in America today.”

“The 5,000 Year Leap” is not the only Skousen title to find new life on the 912 circuit. The president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, Dr. Earl Taylor Jr., is currently touring the country offering daylong seminars to 912 chapters based on Skousen’s “Making of America.” For $25, participants will receive a bagged lunch and stories about America’s religious Founders and their happy slaves. An ad for Taylor’s “Making of America” seminar, currently featured on the Web site of the Tampa 912 Project, claims that Skousen’s book is “considered a great masterpiece to Constitutional students [and is] the ‘granddaddy’ of all books on the United States Constitution.”

Like so much declaimed by W. Cleon Skousen and his 21st century acolyte Glenn Beck, this last statement is fantasy. But it is also a profitable and popular one. In coming to terms with a movement that has an ever more tenuous relationship with accepted fact, we relearn that perennial lesson grasped even by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Fantasies can have serious consequences.