David Horowitz

This book addresses a conflict that for two hundred years has dominated the political history of the West. It is a conflict that drives America’s “culture wars” in the present and that provided the mo­tive force behind the Cold War now past. But it is still referred to in terms that have their origins in the French Revolution, when radicals sat to the left in the National Assembly and their opponents to the right. Many will argue that we have moved beyond these political categories; several books and dozens of articles have appeared bearing the title “Beyond Left and Right,” which seek to establish as much. It is widely accepted in the pop­ular culture that we have entered a “post-ideological” age; in the political spectrum, for reasons I will examine, the Left itself has become all but invisible.

The argument of this book, however, is that these epitaphs for the conflict that has dominated our epoch are premature: The terms “Left” and “Right” define political forces that have not only shaped modernity but continue to shape the post-Cold War, “postmodern” world. In par­ticular, as I will show in chapter 6, “A Radical Holocaust,” the ideas of the Left have dominated the handling of the AIDS epidemic, result­ing in the avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of young gay males.

It was during the French Revolution that the Left created the so­cialist and communist movements, whose agendas were to “complete” the transformation the revolution had begun. The efforts of these radicals culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, whose leaders saw themselves as the direct heirs of Robespierre and the Jacobins, and whose goal was an egalitarian state. But now the empires that socialists built have crashed ingloriously to earth. The catastrophe of the Soviet system has ended for all but the most obdurate the idea that a social plan can re­place the market and produce abundance, or that government can abol­ish private property without also abolishing political freedom.

One might conclude from these facts that the Left is now no more than a historical curiosity, and the intellectual tradition that sustained it for two hundred years is at an end. But if history were a rational process, mankind would have learned these lessons long ago, and rejected the so­cialist fallacies that have caused such epic grief.

It could also be argued that there has never been a true Right in America, a party committed to monarchy, with religious attachments to “blood and soil.” Indeed, as a frontier nation, America has been so future-oriented that, until recently, an American conservatism seemed a contradiction in terms. The contemporary conservative movement emerged only in the 1950s, launching its first presidential bid with the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Yet, barely twenty-five years later, the end of Communism had already put the future of this movement in question. Many argued that American conservatism was so much a coali­tion of convenience—the marriage of disparate philosophies united only by anti-Communist passion—that it would not outlive its ideological ad­versary.

But the Right has survived its triumphs, even as the Left has outlived its defeats. A few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a leader of intel­lectual conservatism observed: “There is no ‘after the Cold War’ for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sec­tor after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the lib­eral ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other.” What Irving Kristol refers to in this passage as the “liberal ethos” is really not liberal, but the radical enterprise that now dresses itself up in “liberal” colors. Group collectivism, racial preferences, “substantive equality” and moral relativism—these are the rallying themes of contemporary liberals. But they have little in common with the liberalism of the pre-Sixties era, or with its classical antecedents. In fact, they make up a radical creed.

Even so, many will contend that today no significant Left exists in America, outside the liberal arts faculties of universities or among the leadership of government unions. They will further claim that the “lib­eral ethos,” to which Kristol refers, is indeed liberal in its agendas, that it aims at no more than a tempering of free-market individualism with so­cial concerns. In this view, the domestic “cold war” is a political chimera, created by the Right to keep its (anti-Communist) faith alive.

It is the argument of this book that such conclusions are misguided. They confuse a momentary equilibrium in the political balance with the deeper forces that shape an epoch. It is true that the Left is rhetorically in retreat and for the moment has adopted more moderate self-descriptions. But that is hardly the same as surrendering its agendas or vacating the field of battle. It is more like adopting a political camouflage on entering a hostile terrain. In the era when Stalin was conquering Eastern Europe, American Communists were calling themselves “progressives” to avoid the taint that Stalinism had inflicted on them. But this was only a pro­tective coloration. It did not involve the slightest change in their real commitments as Marxist radicals, or in their ultimate goals of overthrowing the American government and subverting its Constitution. Far from signaling the end of an anti-American radicalism, as the movements of the Sixties showed, this metamorphosis of Communists into progres­sives was just the beginning.

It is also true that many liberals, despite sharing a common political front with the Left, are not committed to radical agendas. They are prag­matic enough to tack in a conservative direction should the political wind shift. But by the same token, they are not anchored to any conser­vative principles that would hold them on course when the same wind shifts again.

Those who question the existence of a Left are influenced, in large part, by an optical illusion created by a culture that is instinctively pro­tective of the Left and that reflects the long-standing dominion of social­ist sentiments. In the present post-Communist moment, radicalism is so tainted by its complicity in recent crimes that merely to identify someone as a partisan of the Left would be a damaging accusation. Political by­standers, who may be vaguely sympathetic to leftist ideas or even neutral in the historical debate, will recoil instinctively from the left-wing label as from the stigma of an inquisition. No one wants to be perceived as a “McCarthyist.” As a result, even self-avowed Communists like Angela Davis are regularly identified as “liberals” by the media, unless they them­selves choose otherwise. The very idiom “to red-bait” shows how in­grained this universal reflex is. There is no comparable term to describe the hostile exposure of loyalties on the Right.

The same protective impulse is manifest in the standards used in public opinion surveys, which are calibrated on scales that range from “liberal” to “conservative” and “ultraconservative,” but lack the balance of a “Left.” Was the Clinton Administration’s attempt to nationalize one-sixth of the economy inspired by socialist illusions? The question may or may not have an affirmative answer. But in the contemporary American culture it is ill-mannered to ask.

A recent report by Americans for Democratic Action shows that forty-seven Democratic House members in the 104th Congress voted to the left of Representative Bernie Sanders, who (alone among them) describes himself as a socialist. An even greater number of politicians who identify themselves as liberal, despite the demise of the socialist bloc, seem to think it unjust that some people earn more than others, a pre­sumption that is the core of leftist belief.

As a result of the prevailing cultural gravity, media arbiters regularly misapply political labels to both sides of the spectrum. Noam Chomsky, the America-loathing MIT socialist, is routinely described in the press as a “liberal,” while a political adversary like sociologist Charles Murray, who is a libertarian, is normally referred to as “conservative.” In the current cultural lexicon, a liberal is thus no longer one who ascribes to the prin­ciples of Madison or Locke, or to the institutions of private property and free markets, but to almost anyone who is not labeled a “conservative.”

In Europe, by contrast, parties described as “liberal” still reflect the classical origins of the term itself and are associated with economic indi­vidualism and free markets. One reason is that in Europe there is a stand­ing socialist tradition that goes back more than a hundred years. It would be inconvenient for radical parties with long socialist histories to sud­denly adopt the term “liberal” in order to make a cosmetic adjustment to post-Communist reality. In the United States, however, where the en­trance of radicals into the political mainstream has been as recent as the 1970s, such a cosmetic remake is effortless.

For some radicals the term “liberal” is still so distasteful that only the alternatives “progressive” and “populist” are acceptable masks for their chosen agendas. In 1995, The Nation magazine printed a manifesto titled “Real Populists Please Stand Up,” which read in part:

We are ruled by Big Business and Big Government as its paid hirelings, and we know it. . . . The big corporations and the centimillionaires and billion­aires have taken daily control of our work, our pay, our housing, our health, our pension funds, our bank and savings deposits, our public lands, our air­waves, our elections and our very government. . . . The divine right of kings has been replaced by the divine right of CEOs.

This “populist” vision of America and its ruling class does not differ in any particular from those featured in the Stalinist tracts published in the 1930s, when The Nation was a promoter of the Soviet dictatorship and a proud participant in its “Popular Front.”

The changes in labeling that have blurred distinctions on the politi­cal landscape and obscured the existence of a Left can be traced to the end of the Sixties and the failure of its radical apocalypse. Twenty years earlier, radicals marched out of the Democratic Party to protest its anti-Communist foreign policy and formed the Progressive Party to advance their pro-Soviet agendas behind the presidential candidacy of Henry Wallace. Once having stepped outside the Democratic fold, they shed their liberal masks and, in the Sixties, emerged as New Left radicals con­demning both parties as shills for the corporate “ruling class.” It was not until the 1972 presidential campaign of former Progressive Party activist George McGovern that the Left returned to its Democratic base.

In making the transition back to the Democratic ranks, radical ac­tivists sought to create a fire wall between themselves and their recent ca­reers as political revolutionaries. Without abandoning their old agendas, they sought to escape the taint their leftism had acquired through its re­sort to violence and its easy embrace of totalitarian causes. They accom­plished this, as they had during the Popular Front of the 1930s, by modifying their rhetoric and enveloping themselves in the less threaten­ing mantles of “liberal,” “progressive” and “populist.”

To acquire even more protective coloration from the political center, socialist radicals coined the term “neoconservative” to describe those ad­versaries who were genuine liberals opposed to an alliance with the Left. Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol and other neoconservative spokesmen have written at length of their efforts to retain the term “liberal” for themselves and preserve the integrity of the political language. But, de­spite the indisputable logic of their position, they were unable to with­stand the dominant influence of the Left in the culture, and the “neoconservative” label stuck.

An ironic result of the Left’s success in transforming the lexicon of American politics was that university speech codes and other forms of censorship, in the 1980s, were imposed by people the press identified as “liberals.” The authors of these codes were actually the radicals who had entered the academy following the failure of their revolutionary projects in the 1960s. Nor were their opponents, who rejected the idea of “polit­ical correctness,” really the conservative actors in these campus dramas. By the 1980s, the status quo order at American universities was almost everywhere controlled by the Left. The determined reformers of the cen­soring regimes were their political opponents on the Right.

A key architect of academic speech codes was radical law professor Catharine MacKinnon, whose theoretical presumptions were laid out in a crude Marxist text, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, and amplified in a tract equating pornography with rape, published by Harvard Uni­versity Press. In her defense of censorship, Professor MacKinnon revealed how campus commissars were self-consciously carrying on a radical tra­dition that went back to Marx. “The law of equality and the law of free­dom of speech are on a collision course in this country,” she announced, expressing the traditional radical disdain for individual rights (free speech) as against group rights (equality). Before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, she continued, “the Constitution contained no equality guarantee.” As a result, “the constitutional doctrine of free speech has developed without taking equality seriously—either the prob­lem of social inequality or the mandate of substantive legal equality. . . [entrenched] in the Fourteenth Amendment.” According to MacKin­non, the task of legal radicals like herself was to make sure that “substan­tive” equality was enacted into law, and to embed the principle of equal outcomes in the American constitutional framework.

But neither the doctrine of social equality nor MacKinnon’s imagi­nary “mandate of substantive legal equality” is, in fact, compatible with Madisonian liberalism or with the written Constitution or with the prin­ciple of liberty as understood by the American Founders. On the con­trary, the “law” of freedom and the “law” of equality were understood by the Framers to be fundamentally in conflict with each other—a conflict that the socialist experiments of the last century have demonstrated with such tragic effect. Whenever a state seeks to enforce “substantive equal­ity” in society, the principles of free speech, private property, and indi­vidual freedom inevitably raise insurmountable obstacles to the totalitar­ian project and are invariably suppressed.

The crypto-Marxist doctrine of “substantive equality,” however, is now not limited to radical feminists posturing as liberal academics. What might be called “Fourteenth Amendment Marxism” is a powerful and growing school of jurisprudence on American law faculties, and has pro­foundly influenced the direction of liberal legal theory in general. In The Irony of Free Speech, Owen Fiss, a prominent legal scholar at Yale, advo­cates the soft version of the MacKinnon doctrine and identifies it with “liberal” jurisprudence as such:

“Whereas the liberalism of the Nine­teenth Century was defined by the claims of individual liberty and re­sulted in an unequivocal demand for limited government, the liberalism of today embraces the value of equality as well as liberty.” And further: “Today, equality has another place altogether [than it had previously in the American constitutional framework]—it is one of the center beams of the legal order. It is architectonic.” By this, Fiss means that “a truly de­mocratic politics will not be achieved until conditions of equality have been fully satisfied.” This is the classic Marxist view—the Rights of Man will only be realized in a socialist state. In a typical academic muddle, Fiss proposes to combine the contradictory values, political liberty and equal­ity of condition, ignoring the Founders’ explicit recognition of their irre­solvable conflict.

More ominous for America’s constitutional future is that the doc­trine of Fourteenth Amendment Marxism has become the basic charter of the so-called civil rights movement. The presence of the radical agenda in the American mainstream is nowhere more clearly seen than in the battle over the system of racial preferences called “affirmative action.” No other issue goes so directly to the heart of America’s social contract, to the survival of its pluralist enterprise, or to the shape of its political future.

In November 1997, voters in the largest state in the union over­whelmingly passed the California Civil Rights Initiative, outlawing gov­ernment preferences and discrimination by race and gender. Known as Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative was designed to conform to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting racial segregation. The words of the initiative are straightforward and simple:

The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

The opposition to this measure was led by the organizations tradi­tionally identified with civil rights that had become radicalized in the preceding decades. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Legal De­fense Fund of the NAACP, the AFL-CIO and other opponents of the California Civil Rights Initiative formed a roster of organizations that virtually defined the word “liberalism.” When the initiative passed by a 54 percent to 45 percent margin, this liberal coalition appealed to a fed­eral judge for an injunction that would stop its implementation. The ini­tiative, they maintained, was “unconstitutional.” The chief litigator for the ACLU called it “the most radical restructuring of the political process to the detriment of minorities in the history of this country”—an indi­cation of just how deep was the division over an understanding of the most basic principle of American pluralism.

In their opposition to the California Civil Rights Initiative, the ACLU-NAACP plaintiffs invoked the Fourteenth Amendment. Draw­ing on the radical law theories of the academic Left, they argued that it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the amendment. If the courts let the initiative stand, they maintained, it would “impose a special burden on minorities.” After hearing the argument, Judge Thelton Henderson granted the injunction. Henderson had been specifically sought out by the plaintiffs to hear the case because he himself was a former left-wing activist and board member of the ACLU. In the ACLU-NAACP com­plaint, and in Henderson’s decision, the radical outlook of the new liber­alism could not have been more clearly or more paradoxically expressed: a law banning racial preferences was held to violate the Equal Protection Clause, and was therefore regarded as unconstitutional.

The conservative backers of the California Civil Rights Initiative were also veterans of the 1960s civil rights movement, and they appealed Henderson’s opinion to the Ninth Circuit Court, where a three-member panel reversed his ruling and lifted the injunction. In reinstating the ini­tiative, the Ninth Circuit found the position of its opponents not only wrong, but incoherent. One could not invoke equal protection of the laws to oppose a law banning racial preferences unless one was in pro­found disagreement with the constitutional framework itself:

Proposition 209 amends the California Constitution simply to prohibit state discrimination against or preferential treatment to any person on ac­count of race or gender. Plaintiffs charge that this ban on unequal treatment denies members of certain races and one gender equal protection of the laws. If merely stating this alleged equal protection violation does not suf­fice to refute it, the central tenet of the Equal Protection Clause teeters on the brink of incoherence.

Not daunted even by this harsh judgment, opponents of the California Civil Rights Initiative announced they would appeal the decision and dig in for a long war. In their appeal, they were joined by the U.S. De­partment of Justice and the president of the United States. The determination to press the disagreement as a matter of constitutional principle emphasized the radical break that had occurred in the American social contract. A principle that had once been a common foundation for na­tionhood—equal treatment by the law—had become a ground of funda­mental conflict.

The dispute also reflected the distorted terms of political discourse. A law against racial preferences, drafted to conform to the historic civil rights measures of the 1960s, was now “conservative;” opposition to an antidiscrimination law was now “liberal.”

The heart of the dispute between liberals and conservatives lay in their opposing views of the Fourteenth Amendment. Did the Equal Pro­tection Clause require government to make its citizens substantively equal (the view of the Left), or did it require government to treat its citi­zens as equals before rhe law (the view of the Right). This dispute, of course, engages the entire 150-year history of conflict between Marxist movements, disdainful of “bourgeois rights,” and the capitalist democra­cies of the West. Except that now, the Marxist position is argued by “liberals.”

In the debate over the Civil Rights Initiative, the “liberal” side had invoked the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment as the grounds for striking down the antidiscrimination statute. The Ninth Circuit called this argument “paradoxical,” as surely it was. The Fourteenth Amend­ment had been adopted as a protection for Negroes in the postslavery South who were being stripped by government of their individual civil rights under the infamous “Black Codes.” The Fourteenth Amendment was most emphatically not designed, as Catharine MacKinnon and the ACLU-NAACP radicals maintained, to guarantee equality for groups, whether through government-sponsored affirmative action policies or government programs to redistribute wealth. The Fourteenth Amend­ment was intended to prevent government from discriminating against individuals, especially on the basis of race. To underscore this point, the Ninth Circuit, citing a previous Supreme Court decision, observed:

After all, the “goal” of the Fourteenth Amendment, “to which the Nation continues to aspire,” is “a political system in which race no longer matters.”

Of course, not everyone opposing the California Civil Rights Initia­tive was radical in their perspective. Nor is every supporter of affirmative action inspired by the idea of group fights based on race, gender or class. But the principle of group rights is integral to every claim for affirmative action preferences, and is antithetic to the most fundamental principles of the American founding. It is the very constitutional idea of “social justice” between groups, which has always been at the heart of the radical project, that now drives much of the political agenda currently described as “liberal.” It is this idea that lies behind the attack on America’s consti­tutional framework mounted by “multiculturalists,” “critical legal theo­rists,” “critical race advocates,” and activist judges who refer to the authority of a “living constitution” unanchored in any written text. The combination of these forces and their pervasive influence in the institu­tions of American culture and politics, backed by the American presi­dency, makes the current radical assault on the American founding both formidable and disturbing.

In establishing the proper terms with which to describe this conflict, there remains one final introductory issue, namely, whether the bipolar distinctions “Left” and “Right” still usefully describe the actors themselves. Does this dichotomy accommodate the complexity of views on both sides of the political spectrum? Does the term “Left” really em­brace both radicals and liberals, and are libertarians properly associated with the Right?

The answers to these questions are, inevitably, both yes and no. While the terms may not be entirely satisfactory in describing complex individual commitments, they are nonetheless indispensable. Left and Right represent distinct and conflicting attitudes toward property, liberty and social equality, which are the axes of contemporary political battles and define their historical possibilities.

On the Right, it is true, the conflicts between libertarians and con­servatives remain in many areas fundamental—for example, in those cases where conservatives look to the state to defend the institutions of moral order. But the two parties share a common belief in property as the foundation of human liberty, and a common understanding of the in­herent conflict between liberty and equality. These inevitably join them in opposition to the Left.

On the Left, the conflicts between radicals and liberals are less fun­damental, concerning means rather than ends. Radicals and liberals share a structure of belief that creates a permanent alliance between them. In Destructive Generation, Peter Collier and I attempted to summarize the nature of this alliance in the following formulation: “If the bloodstained reality of the Left is indefensible within the framework provided by lib­eral principle, its ideals nonetheless seem [to liberals] beyond challenge.” We referred to the passage in Lionel Trilling’s classic novel The Middle of the Journey, where the author makes the same observation:

Certain things were clear between Laskell and Maxim [Trilling’s representa­tive liberal and radical]. It was established that Laskell accepted Maxim’s ex­treme commitment to the future. It was understood between them that Laskell did not accept all of Maxim’s ideas. At the same time, Laskell did not oppose Maxim’s ideas. One could not oppose them without being illiberal, even reactionary. One would have to have something better to offer and Laskell had nothing better. He could not even imagine what the better ideas would be.

Trilling was referring to ideas like “equality” and “social justice,” which define the aspirations of the Left and set their parameters. While not ac­tually supporting Communism, liberals like Laskell were convinced that “one was morally compromised, turned toward evil and away from good, if one was against it.” In the conviction that radical goals are noble, how­ever problematic the radical means, lie the seeds of liberalism’s historic al­liance with—and protection of—the antiliberal Left.

The continuing resonance of this protective attitude can be seen in the loyalties inspired by the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers trial in midcentury, an episode that divided the political culture during the early Cold War. The Roosevelt Administration—the fount of modern Ameri­can liberalism—had protected Alger Hiss and—wittingly or unwit­tingly—made it possible for him to function as a Soviet agent and spy. Even after Hiss was proven a traitor, the liberal culture continued to view him as a victim, never the villain of the piece. This attitude of forbear­ance was extended to the traitor Hiss until the end of his life, after the fall of the Soviet empire, when he was eulogized by liberals—including news anchors for the major networks—as a man who suffered at the hands of dark forces, while gamely maintaining his innocence to the end. His an­tagonist, on the other hand, the disparaged and long-forgotten Chambers (Trilling’s model for the character of Gifford Maxim) was never embraced by liberals as the patriot he was, nor viewed as the hero his ser­vice merited. This remained so even after his ideas and actions were vin­dicated by the fall of Communism and the universal acknowledgment of its terrible crimes.

The alliance between liberals and radicals is reflected throughout a culture that in its deep structures supports the worldview of the Left. This influence is so profound as to have entered the language itself and thus become a habit of mind that is no longer noticed. We speak reflexively of leftists as “progressives,” even though their doctrines are rooted in Nineteenth-Century prejudice and have been refuted by a historical record of unprecedented bloodshed and oppression.

In similar fashion, we casually speak of the “haves” and the “have-nots,” terms that presume the “social injustice” the Left proposes to re­dress, while at the same time inflaming the passions of social resentment. Yet, as Friedrich Hayek and others have long pointed out, there is no so­cial entity that divides up society’s wealth or can be said to distribute it unjustly. The very term “social justice” describes a prejudice and incite­ment of the Left, but only this. In a society of liberal politics and eco­nomic markets, it would be more appropriate to speak of the “dos” and the “do nots,” the “cans” and the “cannots,” the “wills” and the “will nots”—terms that reflect the undeniable fact of American social mobil­ity—that individuals can and do make their own destinies, even in cir­cumstances they may not control. Yet, no matter how conservative we may be, we could hardly use these accurate descriptive terms without be­ing simultaneously assaulted by the suspicion that the very usage reflects a mean-spirited attitude on our part which “blames the victim.” Such is the power of the political language. To recognize linguistic gravities like these is another way of recognizing the cultural hegemony of the Left.

It is a hegemony with far-ranging social consequences, some of which will be explored in the observations that follow. But our first task is to understand the nature of the radical project, and why it cannot suc­ceed, and thus the reasons that its challenge to democratic order is so dangerous and destructive.

The essays in this book explore the trajectory of the radical idea from its origins in the socialist Left to its present incarnation as a movement that calls itself “liberal” and “progressive,” but whose ideolog­ical agendas are radical and totalitarian. They also necessarily address the interjection of religious ideas into the political arena, a concern normally directed to the “religious Right.” Observers as disparate as Berdyaev, Niebuhr, Voegelin, Kolakowski and Talmon long ago, however, recog­nized and explored the religious dimensions of socialism. The ability of the intellectual Left to survive the catastrophe of its Communist en­chantments derives from its essentially religious nature, and reminds us that it is this very attitude, impervious to historical experience and resistant to reason, that remains a durable obstacle to political and social progress.

This book is, finally, about what it means to be a conservative in America, to be “Right” in a context in which conserving the constitu­tional foundations means defending a fundamentally liberal framework. It seeks to provide a philosophical underpinning for the contemporary conservative coalition that would be broader and more stable than the one that now exists.

The essays were written during and after the fall of the Marxist em­pire. Three of them—”Unnecessary Losses,” “The Road to Nowhere,” and “The Religious Roots of Radicalism”—are discussed in my autobi­ography, Radical Son, and are intellectual threads of the odyssey it de­scribes. Although the essays are discrete and self-sufficient, they make up a coherent whole, and are intended to be read in the sequence in which they are presented.

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On a recent trip to the South I found myself in Memphis, the city where Martin Luther King Jr. was struck down by an assassin’s bullet just over thirty years ago. Memphis, I discovered, is home to a “National Civil Rights Museum,” established by a local trust of African-Americans active in civil rights causes. Tucked out of the way on a side street, the museum is housed in the building that was once the Lorraine Mo­tel, the very site where Dr. King was murdered. I decided to go.

Except for two white 1960s Cadillac convertibles parked under the motel balcony, the lot outside was empty when I arrived. It is part of the museum’s plan to preserve the memories of that somber day in April three decades ago. The cars belonged to King and his entourage, and have been left as they were the morning he was killed. Above them, a wreath hangs from a balcony railing to mark the spot where Dr. King fell. Beyond is the room where he had slept the night before. It, too, has been preserved exactly as it was, the covers pulled back, the bed unmade, the breakfast tray laid out as though someone would be coming to pick it up.

Inside the building, the first floor of the motel has vanished completely, hollowed out for the museum’s exhibits. The cavernous room has become a silent stage for the dramas of the movement King once led. These narratives are recounted in documents and photographs, some the length of wall frescoes, bearing images as inspirational today as then. In the center of the hall, the burned shell of a school bus recalls the freedom rides and the perils the passengers once endured. Scattered about are small television screens whose tapes recapture the moments and acts that once moved a nation. On one screen a crowd of well-dressed young men and women braves police dogs and water hoses vainly attempting to turn them back. It is a powerful tribute to a movement and leader able to win battles against overwhelming odds by exerting moral force over an entire nation.

As a visitor reaches the end of the hall, however, he turns a corner to a jarring, discordant sight. Two familiar faces stare out from a wall-size monument that seems strangely out of place—the faces of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, leaders of the Nation of lslam. Aside from a portrait of King himself, there are no others of similar dimension in the museum. It is clear that its creators tended to establish these men along with King as spiritual avatars of the civil rights cause.

For one old enough to have supported King, such a view seems incomprehensible, even bizarre.  At the time of these struggles, Malcolm X was King’s great antagonist in the black community leading the resistance to the civil rights hope. The black Muslim publicly scorned King’s March on Washington as “ridiculous” and predicted the failure of the civil rights movement King led because the white man would never willingly give black Americans such rights. He rejected King’s call for non-violence and his goal of an integrated society, and in so doing earned the disapproval of American majority that King had wooed and was about to win. Malcolm X even denied King’s racial authenticity, redefining the term “Negro,” which King and his movement used to describe themselves, to mean “Uncle Tom.”

King was unyielding before these attacks. To clarify his oppo­sition to Malcolm X’s separatist vision, King refused to appear on any platform with him, effectively banning Malcolm from the com­munity of respect. The other heads of the principal civil rights or­ganizations, the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins and the Urban League’s Whitney Young joined King in enforcing this ban. It was only in the last year of Malcolm’s life, when the civil rights cause was all but won, and when Malcolm had left the Nation of Islam and re­jected its racism, that King finally relented and agreed to appear in the now famous photograph of the two that became iconic after their deaths.

Yet this very reconciliation—more a concession on Malcolm’s part than King’s—could argue for the appropriateness of Malcolm’s place in a “civil rights” museum. Malcolm certainly earned an im­portant place in any historical tribute to the struggle of the descen­dants of Africans to secure dignity, equality, and respect in a society that had brought them to its shores as slaves. Malcolm’s under­standing of the psychology of oppression, his courage in asserting the self-confidence and pride of black Americans might even make him worthy of inclusion in the temple of a man who was never a racist and whose movement he scorned.

But what of Elijah Muhammad? What is a racist and religious cultist doing in a monument to Martin Luther King? This is a truly perverse intrusion. The teachings of Elijah Muhammad mirror the white supremacist doctrines of the Southern racists whose rule King fought. According to Muhammad’s teachings, white people were invented six thousand years ago by a mad scientist named Yacub in a failed experiment to dilute the blood of the original human be­ings, who were black. The result was a morally tainted strain of humanity, “white devils,” who went on to devastate the world and oppress all other human beings, and whom God would one day destroy in a liberating Armageddon. Why is the image of this bi­zarre fringe racist blown up several times life-size to form the ico­nography of a National Civil Rights Museum? It is as though someone had placed a portrait of the leader of the Hale-Bopp Comet cult in the Jefferson Memorial.

After I left the museum, it occurred to me that this image reflected a truth about the afterlife of the movement King created, the moral legacy of which was in large part squandered by those who inherited it after his death. The moral decline of the civil rights leadership is reflected in many episodes of the last quarter century: the embrace of racist demagogues like Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton, as well as indefensible causes like those of Tawana Brawley, O. J. Simpson, the Los Angeles riot, and the Million Man March on Washington, organized by the Nation of Islam and cyni­cally designed to appropriate the moral mantle of King’s historic event.

The impact of such episodes was compounded by the silence of black civil rights leaders over racial outrages committed by Afri­can-Americans—the anti-Korean incitements of black activists in New York, the mob attacks by black gangs on Asian and white storeowners during the Los Angeles race riot, the lynching of a Hasidic Jew by a black mob in Crown Heights, and a black jury’s acquittal of his murderer. The failure of current civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson, Kwesi Mfume, and Julian Bond to condemn black racists and black outrages committed against other ethnic commu­nities has been striking in its contrast to the demands these same leaders make on the consciences of whites, not to mention the moral example set by King when he dissociated his movement from the racist preachings of Malcolm X.

This moral abdication of black civil rights leaders is integrally related to, if not fully explained by, their close association with a radical left whose anti-white hatred is a by-product of its anti-Americanism. The attitudes of this left toward blacks are so pa­tronizing that one disillusioned activist was inspired to write a book about them entitled Liberal Racism[1]. As a result of this alliance, ideological hatred of whites is now an expanding industry not only in the African-American community, but among white “liberals” in elite educational institutions as well. Harvard’s prestigious W.E.B. DuBois African-American Studies Institute, for example, provided an academic platform for lecturer Noel Ignatiev to launch “White­ness Studies,” an academic field promoting the idea that “whiteness” is a “social construct” that is oppressive and must be “abolished.”

The magazine Race Traitor is the theoretical organ of this aca­demic cult, emblazoned with the motto: “Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.” This is hardly a new theme on the left, echo­ing, as it does, Susan Sontag’s perverse claim that “the white race is the cancer of history.” (Sontag eventually expressed regrets about her remark, not because it was a racial smear, but out of deference to cancer patients who might feel unjustly slurred.) According to Race Traitor intellectuals, “whiteness” is the principal scourge of mankind, an idea that Louis Farrakhan promoted at the Million Man March when he declared that the world’s “number one prob­lem … is white supremacy.” “Whiteness,” in this view, is a cat­egory imposed on American society by its ruling class to organize the social order into a system of marxist-type oppression.[2] Conse­quently, “the key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race.” This new racism expresses itself in slogans lifted right out of the radical 1960s. According to the Whiteness Studies revolutionaries, “the abolition of whiteness” must be accom­plished “by any means necessary.” To underscore that this slogan means exactly what it says, the editors of Race Traitor have explic­itly embraced the military strategy of American neo-Nazis and the militia movement in calling for a John Brown-style insurrection that would trigger a second American civil war and destroy the sym­bolic (and oppressive) order of whiteness.

Such language is incendiary and fuels a widespread denigration of Americans—including Jews, Arabs, Central Europeans, Medi­terranean Europeans, East Indians, Armenians—who are multi-eth­nic and often dark-skinned, but who for official purposes (and un­der pressure from civil rights groups like the NAACP) are designated “white.” Unlike anti-black attitudes, which are universally decried and would trigger the expulsion of their purveyors from any liberal institution in America, this racism is not only permitted but en­couraged, especially in the academic culture responsible for the moral and intellectual education of tomorrow’s elites.

An anthology of the first five years of Race Traitor, for example, has been published by a prestigious, academic-oriented publishing house (Routledge) and was the winner of the 1997 American Book Award. Its jacket features praise by a prestigious Harvard profes­sor, Cornel West, who writes: “Race Traitor is the most visionary, courageous journal in America.” West’s coziness with the racist Louis Farrakhan (he was a speaker at the Million Man March) has done nothing to tarnish his own academic reputation, his popular­ity with students, or his standing in the “civil rights” community. Afrocentrist racists like Leonard Jeffries, the late John Henrik Clarke, Derrick Bell, and Tony Martin—to name just a few—have also been integral parts of the academic culture for decades, often running entire academic departments. By contrast, a distinguished Harvard scholar, Stephan Thernstrom, who is white, was driven out of his classroom by black student leftists who decided that his lec­tures on slavery were politically incorrect because they did not reflect prevailing leftist views.

In recent decades, anti-white racism has, in fact, become a com­mon currency of the “progressive” intelligentsia. Examples range from communist Professor Angela Davis, whose ideological rants are routinely laced with racial animosity (and who recently told an audience of undergraduates at Michigan State that the number one problem in the world was white people), to Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, whose boundless suspicions of white America amount to a demonization almost as intense as Elijah Muhammad’s. In her introduction to an anthology about the O. J. Simpson case, Birth of A Nation ‘Hood, for example, Morrison compared the symbolic meanings of the O. J. Simpson case to D.W. Griffith’s epic celebra­tion of the Ku Klux Klan, in order to imply that white America acted as the KKK in pursuing Simpson for the murder of Ron Goldman and Simpson’s ex-wife.

With university support, Race Traitor intellectuals in the field of Whiteness Studies have produced an entire library of “scholar­ship” whose sole purpose is to incite hatred against white America, against “Euro-American” culture, and against American institutions in general. According to the editors of Race Traitor, “just as the capitalist system is not a capitalist plot, race is not the work of rac­ists. On the contrary, it is reproduced by the principal institutions of society, among which are the schools (which define ‘excellence’), the labor market (which defines ’employment’), the law (which defines ‘crime’), the welfare system (which defines ‘poverty’), and the family (which defines ‘kinship’).”[3] The editors of Race Traitor characterize the presence of whites on this continent as an unmiti­gated catastrophe for “peoples of color” and an offense to everything that is decent and humane. In the perspective of these race radi­cals, white America is the “Great Satan.” In academic cant, they replicate the poisonous message of the black racists of the Nation of Islam.

Some of the manifestations of this anti-white racism are ex­plored in this volume, the purpose of which is to open a frank dis­cussion of a subject that is almost never directly discussed. Almost all the chapters first appeared as columns in the Internet magazine Salon, a left-of-center publication with sufficient editorial indepen­dence to include a dissident writer like myself. This, in itself, may be a hopeful sign of what may be possible if a dialogue is encour­aged. The tolerance of Salon‘s editors for the views in this book should not be surprising, since they are the same views once ad­vanced by the civil rights movement King led. Unfortunately, if experience is any judge, that will not make their author immune from charges of racism.

As those familiar with my autobiography, Radical Son, know, I once occupied the other side of the political divide. My views on race, however, have remained entirely consistent with my previous commitments and beliefs. I opposed racial preferences in the 1960s, and I oppose them now. Then, I believed that only government neutrality towards racial groups was compatible with the survival of a multi-ethnic society that is also democratic. I still believe that today.

What has changed is my appreciation for America’s constitu­tional framework and the commitment of the American people to those ideals. America’s unique political culture was indeed created by white European males, primarily English and Christian. It should be obvious to anyone with even a modest historical under­standing that these antecedents are not incidental to the fact that America and England are the nations that led the world in abol­ishing slavery and establishing the principles of ethnic and racial inclusion—or that we are a nation besieged by peoples “of color” trying to immigrate to our shores to take advantage of the unpar­alleled opportunities and rights our society offers them.

The establishment of America by Protestant Christians within the framework of the British Empire was historically essential to the development of institutions that today afford greater privileges and protections to all minorities than those of any society extant. White European-American culture is a culture in which the citi­zens of this nation can take enormous pride, precisely because its principles—revolutionary in their conception and unique in their provenance—provide for the inclusion of cultures that are non-white and non-Christian (and which are not so tolerant in their lands of origin). That is why America’s democratic and pluralistic frame­work remains an inspiring beacon to people of all colors all over the world, from Tiananmen Square to Haiti and Havana, who have not yet won their freedom, but who aspire to do so. This was once the common self-understanding of all Americans and is still the un­derstanding of those who have been able to resist the discredited and oppressive worldview of the “progressive” left.

The left’s war against “whiteness” and against America’s demo­cratic culture is integrally connected to the Cold War that America fought against the marxist empire after World War II. It is in many respects the Cold War come home. The agendas of contemporary leftists are merely updated versions of the ideas and agendas of the marxist left that once supported the communist empire. The same radicals who caused the social and political eruptions of the 1960s have now become the politically correct administrators and faculty of American universities. With suitable cosmetic adjustments, the theories, texts, and even leaders of this left display a striking con­tinuity with the radicalism of thirty and sixty years ago. Their goal remains the destruction of America’s national identity and, in par­ticular, of the moral, political, and economic institutions that form its social foundation.

The left’s response to the observations contained in this vol­ume is not difficult to predict. Impugning the motives of oppo­nents remains the left’s most durable weapon, and there is no reason to suppose that it will be mothballed soon. In the heyday of Stalinism, the accusation of “class bias” was used by communists to undermine and attack individuals and institutions with whom they were at war. This accusation magically turned well-meaning citi­zens into “enemies of the people,” a phrase handed down through radical generations from the Jacobin Terror through the Stalinist purges and the blood-soaked cultural revolutions of Chairman Mao. The identical strategy is alive and well today in the left’s self-righ­teous imputation of sexism, racism, and homophobia to anyone who dissents from its party line. Always weak in intellectual argument, the left habitually relies on intimidation and smear to enforce its increasingly incoherent point of view.

It is not that no one else in politics uses such tactics; it is just that the left uses them so reflexively, so recklessly, and so well. In the battle over California’s Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) to outlaw racial preferences, for example, the left’s opposition took the form of a scorched-earth strategy, whose purpose was to strip its propo­nents of any shred of respectability. The chief spokesman for the anti-discrimination initiative, Ward Connerly, though he himself is black, was accused of anti-black racism, of wanting to be white, and of being a bedfellow of the Ku Klux Klan. (The left invited former Klan member David Duke to California to forge the non­existent connection, even paying his expenses for the trip.)

During the campaign, NAACP and ACLU lawyers who debated the Initiative with its proponents relied almost exclusively on charges of racism and alarmist visions of a future in which Afri­can-Americans and women would be deprived of their rights should the dreaded legislation pass. To make their case, the anti-CCRI groups sponsored television spots that actually featured hooded Klan figures burning crosses. A fearful voice-over by actress Candace Bergen explicitly linked Ward Connerly, California Governor Pete Wilson, and Speaker Newt Gingrich with the KKK, claiming that, if CCRI’s proponents succeeded, women would lose all the rights they had won, and blacks would be thrown back to a time before the Civil Rights Acts.

In the years since the passage of the California Civil Rights Ini­tiative, not a single one of the left’s dire predictions has been real­ized. Women have not lost their rights and segregation has not returned. Even the enrollment of blacks in California’s system of higher education has not significantly dropped,[4] although dema­gogues of the left—including the president of the United States— have used a shortfall in admissions at the very highest levels of the system (Berkeley and UCLA) to lead the public to believe that an overall decline has taken place. One year after the Initiative passed, enrollment had significantly fallen only at six elite graduate, law, and medical school programs in a higher-education system that con­sists of more than seventy-four programs. Yet there has been no apology (or acknowledgment of these facts) from Candace Bergen, the NAACP, the ACLU, People for the American Way, or the other leftist groups responsible for the anti-Civil Rights Initiative cam­paign and for the inflammatory rhetoric and public fear-mongering that accompanied it.

When an earlier version of a chapter in this book, “Why Demo­crats Need Blacks,” was published in Salon magazine, the editors printed several long responses from black readers, including the award-winning Berkeley novelist Ishmael Reed. Reed suggested that I did not really care what happens to blacks and that I am in­sensitive to injustice when it is inflicted on blacks—a not-so-subtle imputation of racism. In a futile attempt to forestall such attacks, I had cited the opinions of black conservatives in the article itself. The critics’ response was to dismiss these conservatives as “inauthentically black,” “Sambos,” “Neo-Cons,” and “black come­dians.” From the point of view of leftists, the only good black is one who parrots their party line.

There is no real answer to such patronizing attitudes and nasty attacks. Nonetheless, in closing this introduction, I will repeat the response I made to Ishmael Reed in the pages of Salon:

I have three black granddaughters for whom I want the abso­lute best that this life and this society have to offer. My ex­tended black family, which is large and from humble origins in the Deep South, contains members who agree and who dis­agree with my views on these matters. But all of them un­derstand that whatever I write on the subject of race derives from a profound desire for justice and opportunity for every­one in this country, including my extended black family. It springs from the hope that we can move towards a society where individuals are what matters and race is not a factor at all.

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[1]Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism (New York: Penguin, 1997); see also Shelby Steele, A Dream Deferred (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).

[2]See Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, “Abolish the White Race By Any Means Necessary,” in Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996), 90-114.

[3]Ibid., 80.

[4]The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 5, 1999, reported that enrollment of blacks on all the University of California campuses was only twenty-seven fewer students than in 1997.