In the work of David Horowitz, personal history and political analysis are often conjoined. Horowitz’s memoir Radical Son told how as a Marxist intellectual and activist, he came to reject the revolutionary violence of progressivist ideology along with the utopian longings and commitments that inspired it. In works such as Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties (with Peter Collier) and Left Illusions, he exposed with first-hand passion the self-deceptions and cultural chaos generated by such utopian faiths. A significant segment of his work, including The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America and Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom, has investigated the corruption of American universities by radical politics; and even here, there is a personal element as he remembers the scrupulous professors, models of disinterested intellectual engagement, who taught him as an undergraduate at Columbia. His recent A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in This Life and the Next is exemplary in its blending of personal and broadly philosophical discussion of the spiritual roots of totalitarianism.
Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion continues this work of political reflection sharpened by autobiographical insight. It collects portraits of contemporary left-wing intellectuals, writers, and activists, all but one of whom embraced anti-American propaganda and its justification of violence, including journalist Christopher Hitchens, who worked for years at the rabidly anti-American paper The Nation, feted academic Cornell West, who has fawningly promoted the murderous Nation of Islam, and Saul Alinsky, who has embraced nihilistic destruction in the name of “the people.”
Each chapter focuses on the manner in which intelligent people accommodate the evident contradictions and brutal repressions of the ideologies to which they profess allegiance, and the personal deformations, moral compromises, and unacknowledged trauma that such allegiances often exacerbate. Red-diaper baby Bettina Aptheker, for example, endured bouts of self-hatred and Communist-inspired paranoia that never led to any thoroughgoing repudiation of the extreme causes to which she dedicated her life, and she has remained publicly unrepentant about her defense of Black Panther murders and other far-left atrocities. Becoming a radical feminist professor at UC Santa Cruz, she built a comfortable life preaching the moral equivalency between the United States and the totalitarian foes that seek its destruction. Professor Cornel West is also a successful far-left and anti-American academic, living well off books and talks that vent grievance-filled rage and obscene encomia to murderers. He has been able to elide the fact that the Nation of Islam executed his hero Malcolm X, such repression allowing him to declare his solidarity with “the fiery passion for racial justice and deep love for black people” of its leader Louis Farrakhan, who orchestrated the murder. The intensity of his hatred for white America leaves him unable to see anything good in his country or anything bad in his black brethren.
The degree of intimacy in the portraits varies, depending on the subject’s own capacity for honest self-reflection. One has little sense of psychological complexity in West’s glib self-aggrandizement, perhaps because there is none to be found or because he is someone for whom Horowitz has little personal knowledge and sympathy. More personally revealing is the portrait of Susan Lydon, product of the hippy counterculture who became famous for a widely cited feminist essay called “The Politics of Orgasm.” Lydon wrote a confessional account of her decades-long struggle with addiction and self-hatred, a struggle that led her far away from the self-destructive radicalism of her youth. Hers is the story of an individual who turned away from a damaging mindset and ultimately found some measure of personal peace.
As its title suggests, however, this is mainly a book about people who maintained their radical faith, recasting reality to fit their beliefs. Horowitz recounts attending a film and talk at a Santa Monica bookstore by released convict Linda Evans, of the Weather Underground, who had served less than half of a forty-year sentence for possession of explosives and terrorist organizing. Now she was attempting to generate sympathy for fellow criminals still in jail who needed public support. Horowitz is fascinated by the sanitized account she provided of the reasons for her allies’ incarceration as well as the warped vision that led her to label as “political prisoners” every person behind bars in America. How can one go on believing, in the midst of so much deliberate and often pointless violence (associates of Evans killed a young black police officer during a botched Brinks robbery), in the righteousness of one’s cause and the innocence of one’s fellow killers? As Horowitz shows, the remarkable upside-down logic is endemic to the hard left, in which nearly any level of violence is justifiable so long as it seeks to destabilize an evil America, seen as unparalleled in its malignancy.
Horowitz’s chapter on “Pardoned Bombers,” about Evans, Kathy Boudin, and Susan Rosenberg, all Weather Underground alumni, is a gripping story of violence, decades-long unrepentance on the part of the trio, and the collusion of journalists, politicians, left-wing do-gooders, and members of the intelligentsia such as Noam Chomsky to whitewash their crimes and massage public opinion. The three women, who sought for years to bring about so-called racial justice through bombing campaigns and armed struggle, continue to proclaim the rightness of their aims. Horowitz’s detailed analysis of Rosenberg’s self-pitying book An American Radical: A Political Prisoner in My Own Country details its failures of empathy and outright lies in a way the mainstream media, unaware of or unconcerned about the truth, has never done.
The final chapter of Radicals provides a detailed close reading of the political theory of Saul Alinsky, a man who idolized Al Capone, Fidel Castro, and rebel angel Lucifer, and who dedicated himself wholeheartedly to destroying his country. Horowitz’s reading shows clearly that the radical’s commitment to an unrealizable higher purpose — the earthly salvation of mankind — not only excuses but also mandates disregard for law and personal morality. Alinsky’s hatred of law-abiding liberals stemmed from the fact, as he stated, that they allowed conscience and principles, neither of which he believed in, to limit their work for fundamental change: “They do not ‘care enough’ for people to be ‘corrupted’ for them,” he charged, putting “corrupted” in quotation marks to show that he didn’t believe in such a scruple. Convinced that the overthrow of the American order was an end that justified any means, he advocated the infiltration of the Democratic Party by closet revolutionaries to radicalize it from within. That Barack Obama spent years working with Alinskyites in Chicago and even teaching Alinskyan methods during his tenure as a community organizer highlights the degree to which an anti-American radicalism is now inside the White House. This chapter is essential reading for anyone who wonders why Obama’s activist connections matter to the future of America.
The book’s tour de force is undoubtedly the chapter on “The Two Christophers,” an in-depth analysis of Christopher Hitchens’s memoir Hitch-22, interleaved with memories of Horowitz’s personal relationship with him. The reading is masterly in teasing out the blind-spots, half-truths, and evasions that fill this account by a one-time Marxist radical who was able to go only so far in repudiating his leftist dreams. In a superb reading designed to show that “Loyalty to bad commitments leads to moral incoherence,” Horowitz pores over the memoir to find both the overt contradictions of Hitchens’ self-congratulation — his pleasure in having marched in opposition to the Vietnam War, his hatred of Israel and Ronald Reagan, his love for defenders of totalitarianism — and also those moments in the text where the confessing self, in detailing his formative influences, crises, and political sea-changes, reveals more than he intends. Such moments come in verbal evasions, especially a crippling refusal to examine the human misery caused by the causes he supported and to explore the psychological roots of his residual salvationist fervor.
One is struck through this book by the depth and human forthrightness of Horowitz as man and as political commentator. Always incisive, elegant, and wise, his penetrating analyses of the perils of radicalism are tempered by sadness as much as anger, and leavened by the cautious belief — bedrock of all his writing — that human beings can rethink misguided commitments in the light of evidence and reasoned argument. Though exasperatedly impressed by the fact of “how little we human beings are able to learn collectively from our experience, how slowly we do learn, and how quickly we forget,” he has kept on writing in the tempered hope that readers’ nascent second thoughts can grow into a principled refusal of violence.
David Horowitz is the master, in exposing revolutionary radicals embedded within the US body politic, and beyond. Those who fail to heed his clarion call are whistling past their own graveyards – literally.
http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/10/05/if-it-looks-like-a-socialistmarxistcommunist-plan-it-is-peekingpeeling-back-into-obamas-looking-glass-his-surrogates-too-their-bomblets-waiting-to-explode-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
However uncomfortable these truth are, they are still true! Therefore, to beat them back will take many avenues, but nothing can be done until David’s lessons are internalized.
It is what it is.
The polarization of society will become more pronounced in the future, with “undecided” parties and wishy-washy types forced to choose a side, as the evidence against the leftist agenda becomes too large and stark to ignore. The behaviour and connections among “leftist” groups (I think of them as childish thieves with no understanding of propriety or law) and the threat that they represent will be like a buzz of locusts at the doorstep. People will either wake up or it will be too late. The subtle cunning of the left is to convince so many well-meaning people that they are the voice of compassion and fairness, obfuscating the fact that they enforce this equalization by force, which is Satanical in and of itself. The campaign against intellectual laziness will only bear fruit if people are willing and able to see. How on earth people can reconcile leftist nonsense and still claim to be Christians is beyond me.
The reason people can reconcile totalitatian leftism and believe they remain one of empathy and virtue lies in modern technology.
Because we have such a vast array of time saving conveniences today, everybody can now become a pseudo intellectual. Go back 150 years and beyond, survival was difficult enough so that there was no time to care about the what the kooks among us may be thinking. The malcontents existence was just as difficult thus they where too busy putting food on the plate to act out any silly idea their twisted mind may conjure up.
Grandma used to say; “Satan finds deeds for idle fingers”
Whether we believe in Dante’s circle matters little. Alinsky did, even if he was joking
Reading this review it is easy to think these radicals views are not penetrating into the typical person’s everyday life. That these are radicals “over there.” No sense that urban schools have been deliberately kept weak to nurture a sense of grievance coupled with group identity and created ignorance precisely to make it easier for Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation to use the schools as it base to community organize all over the country.
That Cornel West helped push a renewed interest in John Dewey in the 1990s to push an interest in using schools to create a mass mindset that would seek socialism as 21st century democracy and never really appreciate what was being advocated. That Utopianism is being taught in college courses as “the hope that makes life worth living” to students without enough knowledge of history to know there is a downside.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/using-education-to/ Create the Behavior Government Officials Want in Future Citizens is a current example of why these radicals find academia so inviting. It really is the vehicle for imposing another try at Utopianism while simultaneously preventing reality from introducing any safety checks that this could be a bad idea.
It is so common for me to read these planned blueprints for education justified in the name of avoiding what happened to Germany in the 30s. And then proposing as the mandated solution precisely what the Germans themselves manadated in the name of education as their 19th century intentions.
We keep adopting as the cure the precise poison that caused the illness in the first place. In the era of the “student-centered classroom” of dialogue and interaction of cultural perspectives, no one will know what created the past’s tragedies.
Except Horowitz and me and Robert Conquest and Richard Pipes. Boy, we could use Revel. At least go back and read his Last Exit to Utopia as a suitable companion for this book.
Why do we call them radicals when they are pushing totalitarian ideology? Totalitarians are grindingly ordinary today and throughout history. They are the rule not the exception.
Horowitz: idiot radical turned idiot reactionary.
If you really want to know what leftists are thinking, why not actually read a serious lefty academic blog like Crooked Timber instead of relying on a guy like Horowitz who simply presses your buttons?
You have a point, both should be read. But anyone that has gone to college in anything but a hard science or business has heard it all already. But it is shockingly difficult to find someone that can defend the left with actual arguments (not just attacks or jingoism).
That’s because there aren’t any valid arguments in defense of the left.
Just as there aren’t any valid arguments in defense of evil.
If David Horowitz is an idiot I hate to think what that makes you. And I agree with “Stano432″ one this one. Been there done that. Been to college. Read the books. Subscribed to the magazines post college. Why don’t you try reading Horowitz instead of just dismissing him? Oh, wait, I forgot. Lefties already know everything. Not.
Jim, what buttons? Could you list a few of them (just minimally, a word or phrase per each will do)?
Thanks!
Without writing a treatise on the subject:
In a way your complaints always seem to come down to an ill-tempered version of “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree.” What’s seductive about a college education is precisely the enormous range of possibilities it can open up, especially if you’ve been raised in the tight confines of an authoritarian family and a traditionalist religion. In this respect, the eternal bit (let’s call it the mega-button #1) about how profs indoctrinate their students is a huge exercise in projection since what gets supplied to students in right wing academies and universities is precisely indoctrination. You guys just don’t have very many ideas, at least in comparison to the rest of the mental world. Of course right wingers aren’t the only folks who impose a party line on their followers; but since the decline of the for-real Left back in the 60s, you’re certainly the most significant collection of true believers left around.
Do profs in real universities inflict their opinions on students? Sometimes they do, but you vastly overestimate the uniformity of opinion in academia if you think they’re all selling the same thing. Mega-button #2 is the idea that there is a monolithic something that can meaningfully be called The Left that dominates the Universities. If there is such a thing, I don’t know what it is. You can certainly identify certain attitudes or tendencies that go along with the academic world, the willingness to entertain unpopular ideas, for example, and a general skepticism about received wisdom. Ironically, in the part of the intellectual world that really is on the left, there is nothing remotely resembling a consensus, a fact which is endlessly debated on websites like Crooked Timber.
You guys are tremendous lumpers. You not only throw together every kind of leftist but you glue together the leftists and the liberals, two groups or groups of groups that for the most part don’t even like each other very much. Lumping is an economical technique that removes the need to do very much thinking, but it results in a very peculiar view of reality in which moderate Democrats like Obama are supposed to be raging radicals and George Soros, who is actually a follower of the political ideas of Karl Popper, gets called a Marxist. Hard not to register such silliness as anything but mere ignorance.
Mega-button #3 is the notion that some of your favorite ideas—intelligent design, climate-change denialism, traditional religion—are unpopular with younger people is because the profs won’t allow them to be taught. In a lot of these cases, unfortunately for you, the problem with your ideas is that they are demonstrably false. The world just isn’t 6,000 years old, CO2 really does make the climate get hotter, the animals evolved. No university that does its job is going to make you happy about that’s reality’s fault.
No Bill Ayers, or did you just leave him out of the review?
I would be very disappointed to see a discussion of radicalism that didn’t cross swords with ol’ Billy.
D
Here was another guy on the same quest as Dave. Maybe not as intellectual, but still very observant.
http://vimeo.com/52009124
The progressive/left/liberal types I’ve dealt with for nearly my entire life (notably relatives) bear little resemblance to Horowitz’ “self-hating” ones. The majority, in fact, suffer from an irrational belief in their own perfection.
The true “radical mindset”, at any of the outer edges of the political/social/philosophical continuum, is more like this;
In short, there is little to choose between a “radical leader”- and the average schoolyard bully.
Never attribute to angst what can be explained by simple conceit and egotism.
cheers
eon
I recognize your characterization of the radical mindset as very much like that of someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (having one in the family and knowing several others). In fact liberalism may get much of its membership from the considerable population of people in the US who have – or at least flirt with – this condition. It explains a lot of their behavior and why you can rarely ever get them to articulate why they think they are right and you are wrong. They simply see those who do not share their views as attacking them personally.
I have found that radical lefties and members of destructive sects have a lot in common. One could write a book about this but suffice to say that they all have one thing in common: emotional thinking. The simple observation that in all of history never a socialist or communist system ever worked to produce the happy paradise they seek, has no effect on them. In their insanity they conclude that “something was not done right” in the USSR, N. Korea, Cuba, etc. Some conclude that the problem is that most of the world is “capitalist” and therefore no socialistic scheme is going to work properly until the “enemies” are all eliminated. There is a toxicity in those ideas that arrests reason. What they call “reasoning” is merely the stringing along of preconceptions and slogans. I do believe that what we are seeing in the world is not a political wave of left leaning crowds. This is rather a huge epidemic of some kind of brain disease. Some have antibodies to resist, others succumb. I also believe that this fever will pass but not before killing a good number of those who contracted it. Unfortunately one can recognize the symptoms in people of other political persuasions.
Exactly who do you think is proposing that the U.S. go in for a demand economy like the old USSR? If you are going to pretend that the intellectual battles of the 1930s are still relevant, why not go whole hog and comment on the Investiture struggle of the Middle Ages while you’re at it? “Those friggin’ leftist/liberal/Muslims really think that the emperor should be able to appoint Bishops…”
The vocabulary word for today is fatuous. It is the adjective that best captures your whole point of view, based as it is on a total ignorance of what your ideological enemies are actually in favor of.
I rest my case.
In this response we have: first an obscure piece of reasoning lining up three disconnected points (1)demand economy in the USSR (???) (2)Intellectual battles of the 1930′s (3)Some allusion to a Byzantine dispute. That is followed by insult and accusations of ignorance. Logic is absent. The “argument” is only an emotional outburst. No need to go any further.