I'm going to post random quotes from The Blank Slate as I review the book.
Here goes:
" The brains behind the American Revolution...inherited the tragic vision of thinkers like Hobbes and Hume. The legal scholoar John McGinnis has argued that their theory of human nature could have come right out of modern evolutionary psychology. It acknowledges the desire of individuals to further their interest in the form of an inalienable right to " life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The state emerges from an aggrement instituted to protect those rights, rather than being the embodiment of an auotonomous superorgainism. (Additionally) Rights need to be protected. ... John Adams wrote, 'The desire for the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger (emphasis Pinker). It is the principal end of government to regulate this passion' "

Incredible! Ding dong socialism is DEAD ! Pinker goes onto say essentially socialism is dead and we ( the political left) better get on the ball because we've already ceded too much ground to the intellectual Right. :)

He tries to say that that the Right today cannot lay claim to being validated in its current lugubrious form. I don't see us as lugubrious at all. The Right is on the move, and there may be a point to calling the Right shrill at times (one thinks of the near maniacal Mike Savage), but after 40+ years of captivity, what can you expect? There will be the Savage's but they will die down as the political pendulum starts really swingging Right. I think now the pendulum is just coming off its Left apex. With science, experience, and a new intellectual and not necessarily Christian Right, I predict better political debates, and a more rational field as the far left is chopped off and sent out to sail in the dingy of history's failed ideologies.