Honor, Courage and Sacrifice: Confronting Woke and the New Marxists, Marshall Snyder, Liberty Hill Publishing, 2024, pp. 355, $20.00 softcover.
Marshall Snyder’s Honor, Courage and Sacrifice: Confronting Woke and the New Marxists is a defense of the moral, religious, and historical foundations of Western civilization. A retired Nashville attorney, Snyder argues that the West has drifted from its Judeo-Christian roots, surrendered many of its institutions to leftist ideology, and abandoned the objective moral framework that once sustained Western civilization. To reverse that civilizational decline, Snyder calls on readers to recover the virtues contained in the book’s title: honor, courage, and sacrifice.
Snyder opens with a reference to Edmund Burke, whose belief that “good order is the foundation of all good things,” serves as the book’s philosophical cornerstone. Society flourishes when rooted in order, tradition, and moral restraint. Snyder then builds a sweeping critique of the forces he believes are undermining our good order.
The opening chapters define the adversaries. The “woke” and the “New Marxists” are ideological revolutionaries seeking to overturn the moral and cultural foundations of the West. Their project extends beyond politics, reaching into schools, universities, churches, the media, corporations, and other institutions that shape public life. The specific villains are familiar.
As one progresses through the pages, Snyder criticizes Barack Obama for having “drop[ped] the poisonous pill of racial division into the nation’s water supply.” Ibram X. Kendi appears as an architect of identity politics. Climate activists come under fire, as do universities, corporate America, the legacy media, and virtually every institution that has embraced leftist orthodoxy. In all of it, Snyder repeatedly returns to the same conclusion: the left has become untethered from objective moral truth, and the consequences are now visible throughout American society.
One such consequence, familiar to readers concerned with higher education, is the nation’s historical amnesia. Snyder sees one of its chief causes in The New York Times‘s 1619 Project. Snyder devotes an entire chapter to arguing that the project attempts to recast the nation’s founding by making slavery—not the Declaration of Independence or the ideals of 1776—the central organizing principle of American history. This approach encourages Americans to interpret virtually every institution, event, and achievement through the singular lens of race while minimizing the nation’s broader intellectual and constitutional inheritance.
To give some insight into the chapter, Snyder writes:
The boorish 1619 Project argues all of American history surrounds 1619, equivalent to pulling the year 1619 out of a hat and proclaiming, “The year 1619 represents the nation’s founding.” By token logic, the New York Times could have legitimately named its endeavor “The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Project,” the legal battle that ended public school segregation; or “The 1964 Project,” the year of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; or “The 1965 Project,” the year of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The Times instead, under heightened pressure from woke, New (Neo-Cultural) Marxists and progressives, takes a deep dive into pseudo-history that cannot be defended, justified, or sustained.
Juxtaposed to the 1619 Project is Peter Wood’s 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. Snyder praises Wood’s argument that the Mayflower Compact marked a decisive beginning in the American story, setting the nation on a path that ultimately culminated in the abolition of slavery and the expansion of liberty.
“Slavery, no doubt, forms a deep scar on the American experience,” Snyder writes. “But it does not exist in a vacuum, set apart in any special place or time, absent the drama of other history.” The Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, abolition, westward expansion, industrialization, immigration, civil rights, and countless other developments all deserve their place in understanding the nation’s past.
Still, the 1619 Project really serves to illuminate Snyder’s larger concern that our civilization is forgetting its achievements and has thus lost confidence in itself. That history should be told in its fullness rather than through a single ideological lens is one of the book’s strongest, most understandable contributions.
The 1619 Project, however, is not the centerpiece of the book. Rather, taken as a whole, Snyder identifies the West’s abandonment of its Judeo-Christian foundations as the root cause of the problems he sees throughout society.
Chapter Seven, “Virtue and Tradition,” captures that argument better than perhaps any other section of the book. It opens with a quote from Dante’s The Divine Comedy: “Consider your origins. You were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.” Echoing John Adams’s famous observation, “Liberty can no more exist without virtue… than the body can live and move without a soul,” Snyder argues that freedom cannot survive unless citizens possess the moral character necessary to exercise it responsibly. Virtue is a civic necessity, and virtue is found in a Christian understanding of man. As Snyder writes:
Virtue is a building block closely associated with personal contentment, fulfillment, and the means by which society governs itself. Doused with a plethora of “rights” and “entitlements,” many today know little, if anything, about virtue in the civic realm of responsibilities owed to a republican form of government.
The closing chapters apply that framework to contemporary America. Snyder continues his criticism of progressive politics, but he also faults conservatives for turning a blind eye to the left’s cultural takeover. His attention increasingly shifts from diagnosing the West’s decline to preserving what remains worth defending. He even concludes the book with a numbered list of measures to preserve Western civilization, calling on readers to safeguard the Judeo-Christian tradition, preserve the Bible, and other foundational religious writings, defend the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, preserve the Great Books and the Western canon, and ensure that the West’s cultural inheritance survives for future generations.
Snyder rejects the temptation toward apathy. “History,” Snyder writes, “does not slouch away,” and understanding the past makes the present intelligible. Cultural decline is not an excuse to adopt an “I don’t care, just leave me alone” mentality. Rather, readers are called to recover the virtues that give the book its title and to preserve what previous generations have handed down. Even if the lights of Western civilization appear to dim, Snyder insists “the candle of hope” will continue to flicker until a future generation is prepared to restore what has been lost.
A word of warning: Honor, Courage and Sacrifice would have benefited from a firmer editorial hand. Snyder’s prose often obscures his own arguments. Individual points become buried beneath metaphor after metaphor, literary allusion, sermon-like rhetoric, and lengthy digressions, making it difficult to determine exactly what he is trying to say. More than a dozen times, I found myself rereading passages because the prose made them unnecessarily difficult to follow. The introduction is perhaps the worst of it. Before explaining what distinguishes Honor, Courage and Sacrificefrom the many other conservative critiques of woke ideology already available, Snyder spends a needless amount of time telling readers that this is a book that belongs on their bookshelf. By the time the substantive discussion begins, readers have already been assured several times that the book is an important contribution.
Snyder’s writing in Chapter Nineteen is particularly frustrating. In that chapter, Snyder turns to Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed. He begins by accurately summarizing Deneen’s critique of liberalism. But rather than clearly stating whether he agrees or disagrees with Deneen’s central thesis, the chapter veers into discussions of the Book of Ruth, Winston Churchill, and a host of other historical and literary figures whose connection to Deneen’s argument is difficult to discern. By the chapter’s end, I was still unsure whether Snyder believes, as Deneen does, that liberalism itself is the problem or whether he believes liberal institutions can be renewed by recovering the Judeo-Christian moral foundations that once sustained them. It is more likely the latter.
The book also largely preaches to the choir. Readers already convinced that the woke and Marxist movements have damaged Western civilization will be affirmed. Snyder spends comparatively little time trying to persuade skeptics, preferring instead to reinforce a worldview that many conservative readers will already recognize and share.
None of this should obscure the value in Snyder’s project. Despite its uneven prose and tendency to preach to the converted, Honor, Courage and Sacrifice is an earnest and wide-ranging defense of the moral and religious foundations that made Western civilization possible.
Jared Gould is Managing Editor of Minding the Campus.
Photo by Howard Chandler Christy – The Indian Reporter, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=662340