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Archives for December 2021

Reviews of Radicals by David Horowitz

by David Horowitz

BOOK REVIEW: ‘Radicals’

By Windsor Mann – Special to The Washington Times – Monday, October 15, 2012
RADICALS: PORTRAITS OF A DESTRUCTIVE PASSION
By David Horowitz

George Orwell said the real objective of socialism was not happiness but human brotherhood, which explains why so many socialists are unhappy. Their objective is unachievable as well as undesirable. Who, after all, wants to live in a world of seven billion siblings?

Some people, apparently. David Horowitz, professional debunker of utopian myths, supplies six case studies in “Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion.” This collection — an assemblage of essays previously published online — is a lot like Paul Johnson’s “Intellectuals,” which surveyed the private lives and moral credentials of several leading thinkers and concluded: “Beware intellectuals.” Like Mr. Johnson, Mr. Horowitz is an apostate of the left, an ex-communist who saw the light and turned to the right.

“Radicals” begins with a chapter on Christopher Hitchens, whose radicalism defies easy categorization. “One of these days,” Hitchens wrote in 1997, “I’m going to write a book called ‘Guilty as Hell: A Short History of the American Left.’” He promised a companion volume: “Soft on Crime: The American Right From Nixon to North.” It’s a wonder he had any friends.

Hitchens eventually fell out with Edward Said, Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky and even ceased calling himself a socialist, but he stopped short of a full political conversion. One thing that Hitchens admired about Orwell was that Orwell never underwent a Stalinist phase and thus never had to repent in the way that, say, Whittaker Chambers did. Mr. Horowitz chides Hitchens for failing to renounce many of his old leftist affinities, but he does so fairly and with sympathy.

Mr. Horowitz is less sympathetic toward Bettina Aptheker — a Marxist, feminist and Buddhist “spiritualist” for whom the political is congenitally personal. Her father, a dedicated communist and child molester, resorted to Stalinist tactics to keep her from exposing “family secrets.” “It was a terrible irony,” she confides in her memoir, “that my parents faced the terror of the McCarthy era with so much courage, and yet lined my heart with so much fear.”

Communism was for her a family value. She feared losing “my Communist belief system, and with it my loyalty to my father and mother and the world I knew.” Putting her politics before her uterus, she marched in a violent protest three days before giving birth to her son. The day before going into labor, she was asked to speak at an anti-war demonstration the following day. “I hesitated before saying no,” as she puts it.

Many years and traumas later, she found in Buddhism a new liberatory vehicle, endowing her with “a compassion so vast, so limitless that it embraced not only my father, but every being in the world.” As Mr. Horowitz points out, her limitless compassion was narcissism without limits.

The same holds true for Cornel West, author of such must-not-reads as “Black Theology and Marxist Thought.” This self-described “prophet” and “jazzman in the world of ideas” loves everyone, particularly himself for being so loving. (“In abstract love of humanity,” Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “one almost always only loves oneself.”) His radical affectations notwithstanding, Mr. West is less Karl Marx than Karl Malone — which is to say, a mildly entertaining jazz player, soon to be forgotten.

Mr. Horowitz then considers the cases of three unrepentant criminals — Linda Evans, Kathy Boudin and Susan Rosenberg — two of whom President Clinton pardoned on his last day in office. While giving a talk on “political prisoners,” the newly de-prisoned Ms. Evans, asked to define the term, said, “Every prisoner in American jails is a victim of political circumstance.” Charles Manson, the Unabomber, Jerry Sandusky — all victims of American politics.

Ten years after her release, Ms. Rosenberg published a book called “An American Radical: A Political Prisoner in My Own Country,” which Mr. Horowitz subjects to a harsh and cogent critique. Thanks to a (highly political) pardon, Ms. Rosenberg became a political ex-prisoner — a beneficiary, if you will, of political circumstance.

Mr. Horowitz concludes his book with an appraisal of Saul Alinsky, the founding father of modern community organizing and a radical of Machiavellian persuasion. Tellingly, Alinsky dedicated his 1946 primer “Rules for Radicals” to “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment Lucifer.”

Alinsky preferred expediency to idealism (“he who fears corruption fears life”) and believed radical ends justified radical means, noble or ignoble. This methodology has unwholesome effects. “If the radicals’ utopia were actually possible,” Mr. Horowitz writes, “it would be criminal not to deceive, to lie, and to murder in order to advance the radical cause.” Their pursuit of heaven on earth makes the world a hellish place.

The radical temperament is destructive and self-destructive. It afflicts the sort of people who, as H.L. Mencken once said, cannot look at the crunching of a cockroach without feeling the snapping of their own ribs. As long as there are cockroaches, there will be exterminators.

Windsor Mann is the editor of “The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism” (Da Capo Press, 2011).

This review was originally published in The Washington Times

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Introduction to Radicals by David Horowitz

by admin

A Universal Aspiration

All the totalitarian movements of modernity have been inspired by the same fantasy of a world made right and finally brought into harmony with itself. This utopian delusion is not restricted to aspiring commissars or religious fanatics. In one form or another, it is the ideal of every believer in a universal progress, including those who would be dismayed to think of themselves in such destructive company.

The desire to make things better is an impulse essential to our humanity. But taken beyond the limits of what is humanly possible, the same hope is transformed into a destructive passion, until it becomes a desire to annihilate whatever stands in the way of the beautiful idea. Nihilism is thus the practical extreme of the radical project. Consequently, the fantasy of a redeemed future has repeatedly led to catastrophic results as progressive radicals pursue their impossible schemes. It is an enduring irony of the human condition that the urgency to make the world “a better place” is also the chief source of the suffering that human beings have inflicted on each other from the beginning of time.

The present volume focuses on individuals who are adherents of the progressive faith, a label that has been embraced by Marxists and anarchists, socialists and liberals alike. “Radical” normally connotes a sharp and violent break with the existing order, which would suggest that the careers described in these pages were confined to the fringes of the political culture. Nothing could be further from the truth. Christopher Hitchens was an internationally celebrated journalist and author; Bettina Aptheker is an acclaimed professor at an elite university; and Cornel West is a celebrity academic who has been friends with two Democratic presidents, and is the author of best-selling books praised by arbiters of the literary culture. Saul Alinsky, a prominent figure in the radical Sixties posthumously became the political guide to an entire generation of American progressives, including an occupant of the Oval Office.

Radicals have often been described as “liberals in a hurry”—sharing similar goals but with expectations that were high and timetables that were short. These are indeed attributes of the terrorists Kathy Boudin and Susan Rosenberg, whose stories are told in this text. But far from being condemned by liberals who would not themselves think of committing their crimes, they have been treated as spiritual comrades, and embraced as victims of a society whose injustices encouraged them to commit their desperate acts. Liberals of this disposition were once referred to as “fellow travelers,” people who failed to muster the courage of their convictions but nonetheless shared the radical dream of a universal progress and a world that would be socially just.

The type of this fellow traveler was dissected in a famous Cold War novel by Lionel Trilling in the character of John Laksell. Men like Laksell, Trilling observed, were not actually for communism, but were convinced that “one was morally compromised, turned toward evil and away from good, if one was against it.” Because Laksell did not oppose the Communists’ vision of a liberated future, he was unable to oppose the war that Communists had declared on the society they actually inhabited. Laksell refused to become an anti-Communist and join the war against totalitarianism, Trilling explained, because “one could not oppose [Communist ideas] with-out being illiberal, even reactionary. One would have to have some-thing better to offer and Laksell had nothing better. He could not even imagine what the better ideas would be.” Laksell therefore became an “anti-anti-Communist,” and took his stand as an opponent of those who opposed the Marxist totalitarian idea.

Sixty years later, Trilling’s observations apply to the fellow travelers of radicalism, who are generally referred to as liberals, and who make up the expansive ranks of the progressive cause. They refuse to oppose the fundamental ideas behind the radicals’ assault on free societies because to do so would make them illiberal and reactionary and put them in the camp of the conservative right. The failure of these fellow travelers to oppose radical ideas explains the success radicals have achieved in pushing their cause beyond the social margins. Over the last several decades, the radical critique of American democracy has become the curriculum of American universities, and the culture of its liberal elites—a fact reflected in the otherwise inexplicable career of Professor Cornel West, which is described in the pages that follow. Once a partisan of the progressive cause, I have devoted myself since leaving its ranks to an effort to comprehend it—first to understand what  prompts people to believe in world-encompassing and world-transforming myths; and second, to explore the tragic consequences of the attempts to act on them. This was the subject of Radical Son, an auto-biography published in 1997, and of a series of essays and books I have written over the last twenty years, including Destructive Generation, The Politics of Bad Faith, Unholy Alliance, and Left Illusions. I have also written two small volumes, The End of Time and A Point in Time, which explore the way the radical passion is a religious response to our common human fate. The present work is perhaps the last I will write about a subject that has occupied me in one way or another over the course of a lifetime.

When all is said and done, what has impressed me most, after all these years, is how little we human beings are able to learn collectively from our experience, how slowly we do learn, and how quickly we forget.

The chapters that follow begin with an inquiry into the life and thought of Christopher Hitchens, a writer who had serious second thoughts about some of his radical commitments but was unable to leave the progressive faith. Hitchens’ life and work offer an opportunity to examine the issues that define a radical outlook, and the moral and intellectual incoherence that overtake an intelligent mind whose second thoughts remain incomplete.

The second chapter follows the life of an icon of radical feminism, and is a study in the totalitarian quest for a unity of the political and the personal. We are all prisoners of what Hegel called an “unhappy consciousness,” reflecting the division between the world and the self. Radicals seek to overcome this division by creating a new world that will resolve this dilemma. The practical result of this effort is the embrace of a totalitarian politics and the inevitable detachment of the individual from her own reality.

The third chapter follows the improbable career of Professor Cornel West, a remarkably shallow intellect whose rise to cultural eminence has been made possible by his personification of progressive clichés. His career is consequently a reflection of a general cultural decline.

The fourth chapter focuses on a group of individuals who are best described as “Nechaevists,” after the nineteenth-century Russian terrorist of that name—privileged youth who jettison the opportunities bestowed on them by a generous society to become criminals in the service of a political idea. It is also a tale of the Laksells, perched comfortably on the heights of society and culture, who work assiduously to create sympathy for the perpetrators of indefensible deeds.

The fifth chapter diverges from the others as the story of an un-political woman whose coming of age in a political decade encouraged her to pursue the idea of self-liberation to the point of personal disaster. Following decades of drug abuse and descent into chaos, she finally rescued herself from ruin by rejecting her identity as a cultural victim to grasp the specific truth of her life.

A final chapter examines the prescriptive advice of Saul Alinsky, mentor to the present generation of post-Communist progressives. It explores the paradox at the heart of the utopian outlook—that its idealism is a nihilism—providing a summary statement of the central theme of this book.

Earlier versions of these chapters have appeared as articles in FrontPageMag.com and NationalReviewOnline.com. They have been edited for this volume and in several instances re-written.


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Radicals – Portraits of a Destructive Passion

by David Horowitz

Overview

It is an irony of our human condition, writes David Horowitz, that the efforts by progressive radicals to make the world “a better place” have also been the chief source of human suffering from the beginning of time.

Bestselling author David Horowitz, once a radical himself, has now written Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion—his ultimate reflection on radicalism and its inevitably tragic consequences, focusing his analysis not on abstract ideology but on the people who have embraced it.

Among those profiled in Radicals:

  • The witty and brilliant, if self-destructive Christopher Hitchens, a friend who had second thoughts but couldn’t break with his radical faith.
  • Bettina Aptheker, whose troubled life illustrates the totalitarian dimensions of radical feminism.
  • Cornel West, a celebrity academic whose preposterous success is a reflection on the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the liberal culture.
  • Saul Alinsky, the radical mentor of the most successful leftist politicians of our time, from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama.
Radicals

Incisive in its critique, and alternatively moving and devastating in its portraits of leading radicals, Horowitz’s book lays bare the roots of radicalism, how it is abetted by liberalism, and how liberals have utterly failed to learn from its repeated personal and political disasters.


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Of Rights and Character Assassination: A Review of Indoctrination U

by admin

From Magic City Morning Star

By Bernard Chapin

Should Conservadom, in the spirit of positive reinforcement, ever decide to create awards for its most valuable commentators, it is quite likely that David Horowitz will be summoned to the podium each and every year until the time of his death. Few other figures have so resolutely, and creatively, battled the left over the course of the past two decades. His ingenuity, zeal and sense of humor are apparent in the titles of his works, such as How to Beat the Democrats and Other Subversive Ideas, The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits, and Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes. His careful and inflammatory choice of wording is again discernible in his latest release,  Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom. The book is essentially a postscript to last year’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America as it provides an antidote to the toxins disseminated by the 101 pseudo-scholars detailed within.

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A Review of Indoctrination U

by admin

No Shock, Just Facts: Liberal Indoctrination on Campus

By C. Chumley
May 01, 2007
Originally published at HumanEvents.com

“Cream pie,” writes David Horowitz, in his latest exposé of malfeasance in higher education, is “deeply … sexual.”

Well, not really.

Not all in one place, anyway. “Cream pie” comes from page 20, “deeply,” from page 41, and “sexual,” page 37.

But the book isn’t titled “Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom” for nothing. And if the standards set by the nation’s intellectual elite might be stretched outside the classroom — and their guiding principle of “no higher principle, except for that which furthers personal political bias and politically charged correctness” might be applied in these outer arenas — then most certainly, to some, David Horowitz believes in the aphrodisiac powers of cream pie.

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Indoctrination U Introduction

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Preface

During the last twenty years, I have spoken at more than three hundred universities, where I interviewed students and professors about the intellectual climate on their campuses. In the course of these visits I became concerned about the changes that had taken place since I attended college half a century ago. I was particularly troubled by the increasingly intol­erant atmosphere of the schools I visited and by the relentless intrusion of political agendas into an academic environment where they did not belong.

As a result, in the fall of 2002 I began an effort to address these problems by reviving doctrines of academic freedom that were an integral part of university governance but had been increasingly abandoned as a practice in recent decades. I had first encountered these doctrines during my undergraduate years at Columbia College, in the McCarthy period, when they provided a bulwark against the turbulence of those troubled times. Their origins could be traced back yet another half century to the Pro­gressive Era, when professors had been forced to defend them­selves from the meddling of benefactors who were angered by academic critiques of their business practices. The principles of academic freedom were devised at that time to ensure that schol­ars could publish the results of their professional research with­out fear of reprisals from donors and politicians who lacked their academic expertise.

In recent years, by contrast, it is faculty members who have intruded a political agenda into the academic curriculum and have sought to close down intellectual discussion and prevent open-minded inquiries into “sensitive” subjects. Ideas deemed “reactionary” and “politically incorrect” are suppressed through “speech codes” and a collective disapproval that renders them verboten. Unlike previous attempts to interfere with disinterested inquiry, the new political assault comes from faculty insiders who regard their scholarship as a partisan activity and the university as a platform from which they hope to change the world.

The radical attempt to turn schools into agencies for social change is a recent development that coincides with the emer­gence of “political correctness” as the signature feature of a rad­icalized academic culture. “Political correctness” is a term that describes an orthodoxy or party line, in this case reflecting the agendas of the left. Ideas that oppose left-wing orthodoxy— opposition to racial preferences, belief in innate differences between men and women, or, more recently, support for Amer­ica’s war in Iraq—are regarded as morally unacceptable or sim­ply indecent. The proponents of such ideas are regarded as deviants from the academic norm, to be marginalized and shunned.

In defending their position, faculty radicals are quick to deny that an orthodoxy is something new to the academic world. In their view, a conservative orthodoxy has always governed the educational curriculum. The objection, they contend, is not to the establishment of an orthodoxy as such, but to an orthodoxy that is not conservative. In this view, conservatives are merely defending the status quo ante, objecting to change. As evidence, radicals point to the “consensus” view of American history as an orthodoxy that prevailed in the preceding generation, and has now been overthrown.

This argument is misconceived. It is true that there has always been an American consensus, but only as a common heritage of shared national memories and common civic virtues. Contrary to the radical claim, the consensus view of American history was not one that excluded ideas because they were dissenting. On the contrary, it embraced them as expressions of American pluralism. The consensus view was more like a patriotic accord: a shared appreciation of the wisdom of the American founding and the value of the democratic, multi-ethnic republic the Framers cre­ated. The embrace of this legacy represents a unity indispensable to the social cohesion of a nation that is not based on blood and soil, but on a social contract established at its founding—a nation “conceived in liberty” and dedicated to propositions that its con­stituent elements shared.

Within this American consensus there has always been ample room for dissent and for views that are sharply self-critical, even of the American project itself. The American consensus has always embraced a wide-ranging spectrum that includes the disaffected, provided they seek redress of grievances through the democratic process. In other words, this consensus is not an orthodoxy of the political right; it is the social contract of a historically con­structed nation and a community, diverse in its origins and plu­ral in its views. The preservation of this diversity and its democracy is the heart of the consensus. The consensus, in short, is the com­mon cultural bond of the democracy of which all Americans are a part: out of many, one. It is this bond that is now under assault from radicals who have entrenched themselves in the university culture.

Side by side with this American consensus—and reflecting its values—there has been until recently a common understand­ing of the function of education in a democracy. This has included respect for intellectual disagreement as the necessary condition for the development of independent minds. In the modern era it embraces the idea that research and teaching are professional disciplines, which observe the scientific method and require intel­lectual objectivity and restraint; it insists on a perspective that is expert, skeptical and dispassionate; and it respects the uncertainty of human knowledge and the pluralism of views on which a democracy is based. It is consequently a consensus that opposes the imposition of ideological orthodoxies and sectarian agendas in the classroom.

The new political orthodoxies insinuated into our univer­sities by the left are quite different. They do not derive from the traditions of a shared American heritage and culture, but are sec­tarian attempts to subvert both—by deconstructing the nation’s identity and by dividing its communities into warring classes, genders and races—into victims and oppressors. For academic radicals who hope to “change the world,” teaching is not a dis­interested intellectual inquiry but a form of political combat. The banner of this combat is “social justice,” the emblem that signi­fies to the post-Communist left the triumph of the oppressed over the oppressors.

An academic movement for “social justice” has inserted its radical agenda into the very templates of collegiate institutions and academic programs, and into the curricula of secondary schools as well.2 Pursuit of this goal both requires and justifies indoctrinating students in the ideas that radicals regard as “trans­formative” and “progressive.” Far from being a consensus that supports the pluralistic community of the American social con­tract, the political correctness of the left is the orthodoxy of one social faction seeking to impose its agenda on all the others—a new and disturbing development in the educational culture.

This book describes an effort to disarm the political assault on our schools and to revive the values—professionalism, polit­ical neutrality and intellectual diversity—that previously consti­tuted their common foundation. The academic freedom campaign was launched in 2003 when I published an “Academic Bill of Rights,” designed to restore intellectual diversity and academic standards. The response is already powerful enough to have acquired a life of its own. In the spring of 2006, the student body at Princeton University passed a “Student Bill of Rights” based on the principles I had proposed, but without any direct inter­vention by myself or the organization I had created, Students for Academic Freedom. The Princeton bill was the creation of the Princeton students themselves. The same self-propelled efforts can be seen in new movements for academic freedom on more than 150 campuses across the nation.

These campaigns reflect a widespread desire among college students and the general public to restore intellectual pluralism and organizational neutrality to academic institutions, and to protect their scholarly mission. They represent a revulsion against the corruption of the classroom by academics who willfully con­fuse education with activism and who seek to suppress opposing viewpoints in the name of progressive agendas.

Because the attacks on the academic freedom campaign have focused to a great extent on me as the individual responsible, the narrative that follows necessarily deals with personal experiences. The political left which has orchestrated these attacks has a long history of conducting its campaigns through ad hominem charges. It is not for nothing that the word “purge,” for example, is a left-wing coinage, or that every purge has featured the slander of its individual targets. The political purge is a purification ritual and its roots can be traced to the fact that radical politics is essentially a religious vocation.

This religious character is determined by the fact that its adherents conceive their projects as “revolutionary” or “trans­formative”—secular terms for what in effect would be a rehgious “redemption,” albeit an earthly one. Looked at from this van­tage, the radical goal is a secular redemption of society from its vale of “oppression.” The redemption is accomplished by creat­ing a world without “racism,” “sexism” or “classism,” the cur­rent term of art for which is “social justice”—a secular version of heaven on earth.

The extravagant goal of redeeming humanity justifies uncompromising means. Social redeemers regard themselves as an “army of the saints,” and their opponents as the party of sin­ners. They do not view their conservative opponents as support­ers of alternative means for improving the lot of women, minorities and the poor, but as enemies of women, minorities and the poor. Progressive agendas cannot be opposed, therefore, on grounds that are principled or practical or compassionate. Opponents of “progressives” are defined as “reactionaries”—advo­cates of racism and sexism, practitioners of “McCarthyism,” and other incarnations of social evil.

Consequently, to be demonized by “progressives,” as in fact I have been as a result of my efforts in behalf of academic free­dom, is not a personal matter, but an ineluctable consequence of opposing their agendas. The anathemas that academic leftists have pronounced on me and the academic freedom campaign have a long and squalid history in the left’s battles with previous oppo­nents. The story of the campaign against academic freedom, therefore, can also be read as a study in the methods of the rad­ical project itself.

Los Angeles, August 2006

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