The Black Book of the American Left. David Horowitz
In a sense that is true; I had left the left, but the left had not left me. For better or worse, I have been condemned to spend the rest of my days attempting to understand how it pursues the agendas from which I have separated myself, and why. When I was beginning this quest nearly three decades ago, I paid a visit to the New York intellectual, Norman Podhoretz, who had had his own second thoughts a decade earlier, though not from so radical a vantage as mine. Podhoretz asked me why I was spending my time worrying about an isolated community on the fringes of politics. I should focus, he said, on liberals not leftists. This advice reflected what seemed an accurate description of the political landscape at the time. Many would have seconded his judgment when the walls of Communism came tumbling down shortly thereafter. But the progressive faith is just that, a faith, and despite the exceptions of individual cases no fact on the ground will dispel it.
When Podhoretz and I met, progressives and radicals had already escaped the political ghettos to which my parents’ generation had been reasonably confined. The massive defeat they suffered in the fall of the Marxist states they helped create had the ironic, unforeseen effect of freeing them from the burden of defending them. This allowed them in the next decade to emerge as a major force in American life. In the wake of the Communist collapse, this left has become a very big thing—so big that by 2008 it was the dominant force in America’s academic and media cultures, had elected an American president, and was in a position to shape America’s future. Because of its post-Communist metastasis, what Norman Podhoretz once saw as a parochial interest in a fringe cause has become an effort to understand the dominant development in America’s political culture over the last fifty years. That is the subject of these volumes.
The essays contained herein describe the left as I have known it; first from the inside as one of its “theorists,” and then as a nemesis confronting it with the real-world consequences of its actions. In all these writings I was driven by two urgencies: a desire to persuade those still on the left of the destructive consequences of the ideas and causes they promoted; and second, the frustration I experienced with those conservatives who failed to understand the malignancy of the forces mobilized against them. Most conservatives habitually referred to leftists who were determined enemies of America’s social contract as “liberals.” In calling them liberals, conservatives failed to appreciate the Marxist foundations and religious dimensions of the radical faith or the hatreds it inspired. And they failed to appreciate the left’s brutal imposture in stealing the identity of the intellectually pragmatic, patriotic, anti-totalitarian “Cold War liberals” whose influence in American political life they began killing off in 1972 with the McGovern coup inside the Democratic Party.11
One consequence of this was the large number of conservatives who voted in 2008 for Barack Obama, a man whose political outlook was shaped in the same radical crucible as mine—first Communist, then New Left. “Exit Polls Reveal Conservatives Abandoned McCain.” Newsmax, November 9, 2008, http://www.newsmax.com/InsiderReport/Conservatives-Abandoned/2009/12/14/id/342127. On Obama’s career in the radical left, see Stanley Kurtz, Radical-in-Chief.
When this syllabus of my conservative writings was finally assembled and I had read their contents through, I realized that even though they would take up multiple volumes they added up to a single book, which my colleague Peter Collier quickly christened the “The Black Book of the American Left” (a flattering allusion to The Black Book of Communism, the authoritative 1997 work by several European academics outlining the terror and catastrophe created by communist states.) Contained in these volumes is a diary, written over more than half a century, that describes one man’s encounters with a movement which, in the words of its most prominent figure, Barack Obama, is seeking to “fundamentally” transform the United States of America. The diary records the progress of that transformation, documenting the changes of a shape-shifting movement that constantly morphs itself in order to conceal its abiding identity and mission, which, as these pages will make clear, is ultimately one of destruction.
It is almost a certainty that no other “book” will be written like this one, since it can only have been the work of someone born into the left and condemned Ahab-like to pursue it in an attempt to comprehend it. Yet this is not so much a project of monomania, as my adversaries will undoubtedly suggest, but of discovery; an attempt not only to understand a movement, but to explore its roots in individual lives, including my own. While I hope this book may be useful to those fighting to defend individual freedom and free markets, I do not deceive myself into believing that I have finally set the harpoon into the leviathan, a feat that is ultimately not possible. Progressivism is fundamentally a religious faith, which meets the same eternal human needs traditional faiths do, and for that reason will be with us always. In the last analysis, the progressive faith is a Gnosticism that can only be held at bay, never finally beaten back to earth.
1One consequence of this was the large number of conservatives who voted in 2008 for Barack Obama, a man whose political outlook was shaped in the same radical crucible as mine—first Communist, then New Left. “Exit Polls Reveal Conservatives Abandoned McCain.” Newsmax, November 9, 2008, http://www.newsmax.com/InsiderReport/Conservatives-Abandoned/2009/12/14/id/342127. On Obama’s career in the radical left, see Stanley Kurtz, Radical-in-Chief.
The essays included in this, the first of nine volumes on the American left—a tenth will feature a comprehensive bibliography and index—are shaped by a biographical perspective, drawn directly from my life-experiences in that left.11 They contain reflections first on the political path my life took, and then on the course pursued by others who shared that path but did not have second thoughts that prompted them to leave it.
See my autobiography, Radical Son (1997). Several shorter autobiographical testimonies that can be found in other books I have written: Destructive Generation (1989), The Politics of Bad Faith (1998), The End of Time (2005), A Cracking of the Heart (2009) and A Point in Time (2011).
Because the left is a religious movement that engages an individual identity at the deepest levels, there can never be a separation between the personal and the political. Members of the faith know very well the implications of doubt: to leave the progressive faith is to invite expulsion from its utopia and the fellowship of its community, and forever after to be shunned as a person morally unfit for decent company. This is a daunting prospect that discourages challenges to its orthodoxy and keeps its adherents in line. This reality makes the narrative of one who departed its ranks not only a deeply personal document but also a political text.
Part I
In December 1974, my life was forever altered when members of the Black Panther Party murdered a bookkeeper named Betty Van Patter whom I had recruited to keep accounts for a Panther school I had helped to create. The tragedy threw me into a personal crisis, creating an ideological turmoil that was compounded five months later by the bloodbath in Southeast Asia following the Communist victory in Vietnam. The state of distress into which I was thrown by these events was such that for more than a decade I did not engage in any political activities. During this period I took time to reflect on the beliefs that had guided me and then betrayed me, and I tried to figure out how I was going to function without them. In 1979, I had dinner in Berkeley with the leftwing author E. L. Doctorow, whose novel about the Rosenbergs had referenced one of my books. I told him of my concerns about the left, and he suggested I write them up for The Nation on whose board he sat. The result was an article I called “Left Illusions,” which The Nation retitled “A Radical’s Disenchantment.”