Left Illusions Part I

The following is the first of two parts of Jamie Glazov's introduction to David Horowitz's new book Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey, (Spence Publishing, 2003). Part II will run in our Monday issue, November 17.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed that American lives have no second acts. The odyssey of David Horowitz refutes Fitzgerald’s claim. Born into a Communist family, Horowitz became one of the founders and intellectual leaders of the New Left in the 1960’s. Then, as the result of a tragedy that was both personal and political, he became profoundly disillusioned with the radical movement and its social vision. In the 1980’s he began a second career as a conservative intellectual, establishing an educational center in Los Angeles, writing a series of books, and launching several magazines that played an influential role in the culture wars the 1960’s had spawned.

Horowitz’s first career as a left-wing intellectual is perhaps best summarized by a hostile critic who once shared his political allegiances. In a 1986 Village Voice article, the writer Paul Berman wrote the first public attack on Horowitz’s political turn, which also provided a testament to Horowitz’s shaping influence on 1960’s radicalism. “Other writers of the New Left figured larger in the awareness of the general public,” wrote Berman, “but no one in those days figured larger among the leftists themselves.....(snip)

David Horowitz was born in Forest Hills, New York, on January 10, 1939. It was the year of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, which shattered the illusions of many Communists and other members of the “progressive” left. Until then they had thought of themselves as “premature anti-fascists,” but most were able to rationalize even this pact with the devil as a pragmatic “necessity.” After all, they had already rationalized Stalin’s purges, show-trials, and collectivization policies that had led to the deaths of millions in the 1930’s, whose only crime was to present obstacles on the path to the socialist future.

For some, however, the Nazi-Soviet pact proved a disillusioning event that inspired them to abandon their progressive faith. The fact that they were able to have second thoughts and break with the authority of the Communist Party revealed that powerful as the utopian spell might be, a person of strong character could resist it. Perhaps the hand of fate is detectable in the coincidence that David Horowitz was born in that year.

Horowitz’s parents had met in the Communist Party in the early 1930’s. They were enthusiasts of what their son has described in his autobiography, Radical Son, as a “political romance,” thinking of themselves as “secret agents” of the Soviet future.1 Phil and Blanche Horowitz were humble schoolteachers who probably never broke a law, but did hope and work for a Soviet victory in the Cold War. For many Party members, like the Rosenberg spies, their identity as secret agents was, in fact, “a fantasy waiting to happen.”

Horowitz’s early years were spent in a communist enclave in Queens called Sunnyside Gardens. As a child, he attended the Sunnyside Progressive School, a pre-kindergarten program the Party had set up and, as an adolescent, spent summers at a Party-run children’s camp called “Wo-Chi-Ca,” which was short for “Workers’ Children’s Camp.” In 1956, when Horowitz was seventeen, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivered a secret speech about the crimes of Stalin to the Soviet Communist Party. The “Khrushchev Report,” as it was subsequently called, was leaked by western intelligence agents to the public causing a crisis in the international progressive movement. Many abandoned Soviet communism and resigned from the Party, while others decided to form a “new left,” with which they hoped to rescue socialism from its Stalinist fate. Paradoxically, instead of inspiring doubts about the socialist project, the Khrushchev revelations prompted New Leftists to be even more confirmed in their political faith. They no longer had to defend the indefensible and this allowed a sentiment to grow among them that “real” socialism was achievable, and that a new radical movement was about to be born.

By 1969 the great hopes of the 1960’s left had disintegrated in futile acts of violence and extremist rhetorical postures. Horowitz was gradually coming to realize that social engineers could not reshape human nature. But his loyalty to the cause prevented him from recognizing the implications of his thoughts. He now reflects,

"I pretty well realized even at that time that you couldn’t sit everybody down and re-educate them, make them good parents and good citizens. This meant that you couldn’t really remake the world as the left intended without totalitarian coercion. But it was much more difficult to accept the consequences of that realization. For a long time, I simply could not face the possibility that there was no socialist future, that I was not going to be a social redeemer, and that we didn’t have the answers to humanity’s problems—in short, that I wasn’t part of an historic movement that would change the world.

The difficulty of coming to terms with one’s own insignificance—which is a consequence of this realization—is why so many leftists can never leave the faith and are leading the same lives they did thirty and forty years ago. To give up the progressive fantasy would be too great a blow to their amour propre and beyond that, their raison d’etre. When I look at my former comrades today, it is as though all that has happened to them and all they have witnessed have had no effect on their expectations or illusions or real life choices. It’s really quite sad.".....(snip)

From further into the article......

"Every testimony by North Vietnamese generals in the postwar years has affirmed that they knew they could not defeat the United States on the battlefield, and that they counted on the division of our people at home to win the war for them. The Vietcong forces we were fighting in South Vietnam were destroyed in 1968. In other words, most of the war and most of the casualties in the war occurred because the dictatorship of North Vietnam counted on the fact Americans would give up the battle rather than pay the price necessary to win it. This is what happened. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, and tens of thousands of Americans, is on the hands of the anti-war activists who prolonged the struggle and gave victory to the Communists."

As the Indochinese tragedy unfolded, Horowitz was struck by how the left was unable to hold itself accountable for the result it had willed—a communist victory—and how it could not have cared less about the new suffering of the Vietnamese in whose name it had once purported to speak. He became increasingly convinced, as his friend and colleague Peter Collier had tried to persuade him, that “the element of malice played a larger role in the motives of the left than I had been willing to accept.”32 If the left really wanted a better world, why was it so indifferent to the terrible consequences of its own ideas and practices? He reflected:

The more I thought about the moral posturing of the Left . . . the more I saw that its genius lay not in reforms but in framing indictments. Resentment and retribution were the radical passions. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx had invoked a dictum of Goethe’s devil: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”

For a long time, I simply could not face the possibility that there was no socialist future,.....that I wasn’t part of an historic movement that would change the world. The difficulty of coming to terms with one’s own insignificance—which is a consequence of this realization—is why so many leftists can never leave the faith....

And why they are so very angry....

This says it all. I'm optimistic that when the current Baby Boomer generation is under the grass, extreme socialism will be almost wiped out (but will that happen soon enough?)

The more I [Horowitz] thought about the moral posturing of the Left . . . the more I saw that its genius lay not in reforms but in framing indictments. Resentment and retribution were the radical passions. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx had invoked a dictum of Goethe’s devil: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” It was the progressive credo. To the left, neither honored traditions nor present institutions reflected human nature or desire; the past was only a dead weight to be removed from their path. When the left called for “liberation,” what it really wanted was to erase the human slate and begin again in the year zero of creation. Marxism was indeed a form of idolatry, as Berdyaev had written, and Creator/Destroyer that the left worshipped was itself.

That paragraph deserves a hearty "Hear, Hear."

Just in case you missed it:

Left Illusions Part II
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 17, 2003

The following is the second of two parts of Jamie Glazov's introduction to David Horowitz's new book Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey, (Spence Publishing, 2003). Click Here to see Part I.

In November 1984, Horowitz turned another corner. He cast his first Republican ballot for Ronald Reagan. On March 17, 1985, he and Collier wrote a front-page story for the Sunday magazine of the Washington Post, “Lefties for Reagan,” and explained their vote.35 As they certainly expected, the article inspired vitriolic responses from their former comrades and forced them to re-enter the political arena to respond.

Dissecting the left’s hypocrisy now became a Horowitz métier. “I guess you could say,” he reflected recently, “that it was the ferocity of my loyalty to the principles of socialism that translated into the ferocity of my attack on the left for betraying those principles.”36 As a former believer in the left’s political romance, Horowitz was able to launch his attack on the progressive myth with the familiarity of an insider. He and Collier delivered their first stunning blow in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties,37 a 1989 book in which they analyzed the legacy of the New Left and its corrosive effects on American culture.

Destructive Generation represented the first dissent from the celebration of the 1960’s that had been issuing forth in volume after volume from the left itself. For a long time Destructive Generation remained the only critical work on the radicalism of the decade. In a summary indictment, the authors charged that the left had steadfastly refused to make a balance sheet of what it had done. Progressives who prided themselves on their “social conscience,” showed no concern with the destructive consequences of their acts on ordinary people like the Vietnamese and Cambodian peasants who had been slaughtered in the wake of America’s forced withdrawal.

< snip>

continued here...

Destructive Generation <<- Yeah, bought and read it a few years ago.... interesting book... but Ann Coulters approach is more to my likeing.. 1) direct 2) in your face 3) well researched and footnoted 4) with the all important bitch slap(s) to overwhelming obvious traitors.. 5) basically a declaration of war....

Horowitz & Collier (themselves self professed ex-traitors) are a good verification of some of Ann's words... Horowitz's beating about the bush would have been good in the 60's, but is passe' now , I think. Appealing to the socialist soaked acedemic's is a coffee house intellecual game. An invite to let the semantics flow.. That great patriot Joseph McCarthy had it right.

Are you a socialist (communist) now ?.. And when did you become a traitor to your country ?...<- paraphrased..

BLAM!,,, Let's, kick the conversation up a notch.. More garlic, less sham party diversity.. The republicans mostly are Neville Chamberlains to the democrats Nazi tactics... and is testified by the recent democrat Intellgence Commitee Memo and so many other less obvious acts of sedition. Republicans being civil should only indentify the next american war... and not be a decription of the whine comeing from "conservative" wheels spinning in D.C.... as it seems to be...

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