David Horowitz has established himself as the radical
left’s foremost intellectual nemesis, certainly in part because he used to be
one of them and understands their mindset and strategies so intimately. He has
attacked progressive
ideology in book
after book, including Radical Son, Destructive Generation, Left
Illusions, The Party of Defeat, The
Art of Political War, and
Unholy Alliance, to name a few.
His new book Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive
Generation, however, is less of an analysis of their ideology than personal
reflections on a handful of people who have embraced that ideology.
The book’s six chapters each profile a different radical
figure or figures: enfant terrible Christopher
Hitchens, Marxist feminist Bettina
Aptheker, black celebrity academic Cornel
West, domestic terrorists like Linda Evans and Susan
Rosenberg, feminist essayist Susan Lydon, and last but certainly not least,
the radical left’s favorite mentor, Saul
Alinsky.
The “destructive passion” of the title is the left’s
utopian fantasy of human perfection, which “becomes a desire to annihilate
whatever stands in the way of [that] beautiful idea.” This “fantasy of a
redeemed future has repeatedly led to catastrophic results as progressive
radicals pursue their impossible schemes.” And thus Horowitz begins the book
reiterating a theme common to all his dissections of the left, and common to
the radicals profiled here: “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.”
Bettina Aptheker, a professor at University of California
at Santa Cruz, is an icon of radical feminism and the daughter of a prominent Communist
Party intellectual who indoctrinated her into the movement. A Berkeley radical
in the ‘60s, in the ‘70s Aptheker worked
for the defense of fellow Communist Party member Angela Davis in the latter’s high-profile trial for her involvement
in the murder of a judge in a failed attempt to free her imprisoned
lover, murderer George Jackson.
Aptheker went on to pursue her revolutionary work in the field of feminist
studies, and even then, Horowitz notes, she “remained ideologically straight-jacketed,
unable to free herself from the terrible legacy of the cause she and her family
had served.”
Academic icon Cornel West, “a remarkably shallow intellect”
who tirelessly promotes himself as a sort of modern-day Biblical prophet, is
Horowitz’s next case history. The chapter on West is titled “Cultural Decline,”
reflecting that his rise to cultural eminence is a reflection of general
cultural decline, and was made possible only by his personification of
progressive clichés:
While his audiences nod agreeably,
treating his mumbo-jumbo as a discourse that somehow makes sense, what they
really came to hear are the progressive insults to their country and their
countrymen, which West serves up at every venue and every turn.
Those progressive insults are predictable accusations of
racism, sexism, imperialism, Islamophobia, and homophobia against “a society
that has bestowed on him so many undeserved privileges and honors.” For
Horowitz, he is “the archetype of an American radicalism that has set out to
destroy the American experiment, whose strength can be measured in his
unmerited triumphs and ridiculous career.”
In “Pardoned Bombers,” Horowitz describes attending a Santa
Monica bookstore presentation on America’s “political prisoners” by former Weather
Underground radical Linda Evans. Evans, a self-described fighter against
“racism/white supremacy and Zionism,” had been involved in explosives and
terrorism as a Weatherman; with 24 years remaining on her prison sentence, she
was pardoned by President Clinton and went on to resume her work “to develop
clandestine resistance, capable of conducting armed struggle as part of a
multi-level overall revolutionary strategy,” as one website approvingly
characterizes her.
At the Santa Monica presentation, Evans whitewashed the
violent careers of convicted radicals like Jamil
Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly known as H. Rap Brown before his prison
conversion to Islam), pipe bomber Kathy
Soliah of the Symbionese
Liberation Army, and unrepentant terrorist Susan Rosenberg. Horowitz cuts
through their dishonest self-mythologizing and exposes their motivation instead
as, not an ideal of social justice, but pure rage.
“Liberated Woman” is about Susan Lydon, one of the founding
editors of Rolling Stone magazine
whose claim to feminist fame came with the publication of an article for Ramparts magazine, which at the time was
edited by Horowitz and his colleague Peter Collier. The piece, entitled (by
Collier) “The Politics of the Orgasm,” was uninspired but came to define Lydon
so thoroughly that the left’s obituaries upon her death in 2005 glorified her
as a feminist icon but “ended up by trivializing her life”:
Through her death, they were paying homage
to a political movement whose agendas they shared and which made them feel
important… These reactions brought to mind the memorial service for my father
twenty years earlier, where political friends who had known him for half a
century could not remember any of the details of the life he had actually lived
but only the political gestures with which they were all associated, and which
imparted significance to their existence.
Modern Machiavelli Saul Alinsky is profiled in the final
chapter. The author of the subversive Rules
for Radicals, “community organizer” Alinsky conceived the goal of radicals to
be the redistribution of power from the “Haves” to the “Have-nots,” and he created
a practical and politically nihilistic guide for that progressive pursuit. The
culmination of his influence now occupies the White House.
At 200 pages, Radicals:
Portraits of a Destructive Generation is a short but rich and essential
read full of personal reflections upon radicals and their personally and
politically destructive obsession.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 10/9/12)
