I agree.  

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

P:
 ...I'm really looking for those universal lessons, lessons reiterated by people throughout history. ...

 Histories are full of facts, theories are full of theory, but I guess I'm looking for insight, perspective, something about the human condition. ...

 You're now reading The Communist Manifesto; very well.  Question: why did that document, which literally set the world on fire in so much of the rest of the world, find so little resonance with the American people of the late 19th century?

RH:
"The side of the left in American political history--that is, the side of popular causes and reform--had always been free of the need or obligation to combat feudal traditions and entrenched aristocracies.  It had neither revolutionary traditions, in the bourgeois sense ( the American Revolution itself was a legalistic and socially conservative affair), nor proletarianism and social democracy of the kind familiar in all the great countries of the West in the late nineteenth century."

P:
...it does appear that we are in a brand new unique place in American history. ...

RH:
The political and moral codes of the immigrant masses of the cities, of the political bosses, of labor leaders, of intellectuals and administrators, now clashed with the old notions of economic morality.  Some of the social strata and many of the social types that had seen great merit in the more limited reforms of the Progressive era found themselves in a bewildering new situation and, especially after the passing of the most critical depression years, grew increasingly offended by the novelties with which they were surrounded.

"During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, a revolution took place in international communications."

RH:
"It is evident that Western Populism was, among other things, the outgrowth of a period of incredible expansion, one of the greatest in the world history of agriculture."

RH:
"As we review these aspects of Populist emotion, an odd parallel obtrudes itself.  Where else in American thought during this period do we find this militancy and nationalism, the apocalyptic forebodings and drafts of world-political strategies, this hatred of big businessmen, bankers, and trusts, these fears of immigrants and urban workmen, even this occasional toying with anti-Semitic rhetoric?"

RH:
During the late 1880's and the 90's there emerged in the eastern United Statesa small imperialist elite representing, in general, the same type that had once been Mugwumps, whose spokesmen were such solid and respectable gentlemen as Henry and Brooks Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay, and Albert J. Beveridge.  While the silverites were raging openly and earnestly against the bankers and the Jews, Brooks and Adams were expressing in their sardonic and morosely cynical correspondence the same feelings, acknowledging with bemused irony their kinship at this point with the mob.  While Populist Congressmen and newspapers called for war with England or Spain, Roosevelt and Lodge did the same, and while Mrs. Lease projected her grandiose schemes of world partition and tropical colonization, men like Roosevelt, Lodge, Beveridge, and Mahan proposed more realistic plans for the conquest of markets and the annexation of territory."

RH:
Whenever an important change takes place in modern society, large sections of the intellectuals, the professional and opinion-making classes, see the drift of events and throw their weight on the side of what they feel is progress and reform.  In few historical movements have these classes played a more striking role than in Progressivism.  While those intellectuals and professional men who supported Progressive causes no doubt did so in part for reasons that they shared with other members of the middle classes, their view of things was also influenced by marked changes within the professions themselves and by changes in their social position brought about by the growing complexity of society and by the status revolution."

RH:
"It was in the Progressive era that the urban consumer first stepped forward as a serious and self-conscious factor in American social politics. 'We hear a great deal about the class-consciousness of labor,' wrote Walter Lippmann in 1914. 'My own observation is that in America today consumers'-consciousness is growing very much faster.' "

and, finally, here is one which we ought to lend perhaps a good deal more attention to:

RH:
"War has always been the Nemesis of the liberal tradition in America. ...

"Periodically war has written the last scene to some drama begun by the popular side of the party struggle."

"In such an environment it is not surprising that the ills of technology should seem curable only through the application of more technology..." John W Aldridge

 "I suppose I should respond."

  Silly, silly, silly me!

"In such an environment it is not surprising that the ills of technology should seem curable only through the application of more technology..." John W Aldridge