Copyright 2003
Spence Publishing Company,
ISBN 1-890626-51-1
Note: Left Illusions is available on the Spence Publishing website.
David Horowitz's book Left Illusions is a uniquely eye-opening
look into the radical left. Why? Because David was one of the founders and
principle players in the New Left movement since its inception in the 1960s. He
is an American, raised by his actively Communist parents on marxist doctrine in
a communist neighborhood and environment, a recognized intellectual and
influential writer in the New Left movement, and an activist who depended on
the socialist agenda of the Democrat party to further the goals of his
movement. As the Village Voice wrote, "Other writers of the New Left
figured larger in the awareness of the general public, but no one in those days
figured larger among the leftists themselves."
But it all came crashing down when he saw the failure of that movement in history and practice, and witnessed all the hypocrisy and brutality manifested in the application of its doctrine. Left Illusions is that story complete with commentaries that run Horowitz's course from New Left to Conservatism. And it exposes the New Left movement for what it is from the inside: a radical, misguided, and deceptive attempt to undermine our culture and government and its inherent (and unprecedented) liberties and tolerance to forward a failed experiment in utopian socialism. This is an important lesson for all Americans, so I encourage you to get this book and I've listed some excerpts to illustrate that this is not a wild "conspiracy theory" but an indictment from within the New Left movement itself and from the mouths of its own.
By 1969 the great hopes of the 1960s 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... This meant that you couldn't remake the world as the left intended without totalitarian coercion. ...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."
-Introduction by Jamie Glazov, page xvii
...no one among them really cared about the murder of [Betty Van Patter], even though they were people who made a point of their "social conscience", because the murderers were their political friends. ...[Horowitz] realized that it was the enemies of the left who had been correct in their assessment of [Betty's murderers] the Panthers... The Panthers were not victims of police repression because they were political militants. They were common criminals who were dangerous to others. It was the "revolution"...which protected them from the consequences of their deeds.
[Horowitz] recognized a familiar historical reality being played out in the events of his own. Real human flesh and blood had been sacrificed on the altar of utopian ideals. A collusive silence followed. ...He was willing, further, to connect what had happened to him to the crimes his parents' generation of the left had defended, and thus to accept the fact that there was no "new" left, and that his generation of radicals had repeated their parents' guilt: ..."Our injustice, albeit mercifully smaller in scale, was as brutal and final as Stalin's."
In pursuing answers to Betty's death, Horowitz discovered that the Panthers had murdered more than a dozen people... To Horowitz surprise, the mainstream press also protected the killers; local media refused to cover the story. ...Notwithstanding the media blackout and the silence of the Panthers' supporters, the details of their crimes have surfaced over the years principally as a result of Horowitz's efforts.
-Introduction by Jamie Glazov, page xviii-xxi
"To be reborn, the left had only to rename itself in terms that did not carry the memories of insurmountable defeat, to appropriate a past that could still be victorious." Thus leftists now call themselves "progressives", "post-modernists", and even "liberals". ...[Horowitz] argues that the negative result of two hundred years of socialist efforts means that from its beginnings the modern revolutionary left cannot be regarded as a "progressive" force, but one that is destructive and reactionary.
-Introduction by Jamie Glazov, page xxvii-xxxii
"The world is cursed by ignorance, and the task of progressives is to set everybody right."
-2. Idols, page 13
A summary expression of [1960s] utopian regrets can be found in Steven Talbot's PBS documentary, "1968: The Year That Shaped a Generation." ...Talbot himself is a veteran of this movement that promoted itself as an avatar of "participatory democracy" but closes off debate over its own history in a way worthy of the Communist regimes it once admired.
"I experienced King's assassination as the murder of hope," writes Talbot... In fact, no white spokesman of the New Left...still regarded King as his leader in the year before King was assassinated. At the time, the black heroes of the New Left, like Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, and the martyred Malcolm X, were prophets of separatism and violence. ...The political agendas of the black radicals who pushed King aside were "black power" and revolutionary violence, both of which King explicitly rejected.
With King dead in April and [Robert] Kennedy in June, the stage was set for
what Talbot calls "the inevitable showdown" in
As [David Horowitz's] cover line [on the leftist magazine Ramparts] said, "Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win." This represented what we actually believed...
-9. Telling It Like It Wasn't, page 72-79
There was plenty of injustice in the system we opposed. But it had created procedures and institutions designed to redress grievances, correct injustices, and put checks on the power of government. In rejecting our radical agendas, our opponents had always stressed the importance of "process" and following rules, even when the issues seemed obvious. As radicals, we were impatient with order and had contempt for process. ...We were going to eliminate "checks and balances" and let the people decide.
As a result, we had no justice. There were no means to redress the crimes
committed by the Panthers or other tribunes of the people - in
Socialists believed that private property divided human beings, making some rich and some poor, some oppressors and others oppressed, and was the root cause of social conflict. Socialists proposed to abolish property and unite people in the state. But the abolition of property was really the abolition of private association and civil society, and of the bourgeois rights they underpinned. Socialist unity could only be achieved as a totalitarian solution. ...the class of people that decided who would be made equal, and at what rate, would - by the very fact of that power - become a new ruling caste. The quest for equality would create a new inequality.
If we [leftists] really cared about liberty and justice, we would have to give up our superior status as revolutionary opponents of "bourgeois" order, and enter the universe of its morality and thought.
-10. Questions, page 89-92
I began to review events of the past to which I had paid little attention before, like the expulsion of the Jews from the civil rights movement in 1966. Jews had funded the movement, devised its legal strategies, and provided support for its efforts in the media and in the universities - and wherever else they had power. More than half the freedom riders who had gone to the southern states were Jews, although Jews constituted only 3 percent of the population. It was an unprecedented show of solidarity from one people to another.
When
[Marx] had built his entire theoretical edifice on a concept - class - which was pointedly free of ethnic and national characteristics, in order to formulate the idea of socialism as a community liberated from these distinctions. Socialism would "solve" the Jewish question by eliminating Judaism, along with all other ethnic and national identities.
-10. Questions, page 95-98
As our opposition to the war grew more violent and our
prophecies of impending fascism more intense, I had taken note of how we were
actually being treated by the system we condemned. By the decade's end, we had
(deliberately) crossed the line of legitimate dissent and abused every First
Amendment privilege and right granted us as Americans. ...I thought to myself:
if we did this in any other country, the very least of our punishments would be
long prison terms and the pariah status of traitors. In any of the socialist
countries we supported - from
These events confronted me with a supreme irony: the nation I had believed to be governed by corporate interests, a fountainhead of world reaction, was halted in mid-course by its conscience-stricken and morally aroused populace; the forces I had identified with progress, once freed from the grip of U.S. "imperialism", revealed themselves to be oppressive, predatory, and unspeakably ruthless. ...My experience has convinced me that historical ignorance and moral blindness are endemic to the American left, necessary conditions of its existence. ...In the effort to achieve a historically bankrupt fantasy - call it socialism, call it "liberation" - it undermines the very privileges and rights it is the first to claim.
-12. My
In 1961, Khruschev boasted that the socialist economy would
"bury" its capitalist competitors, and that by 1980 the Soviet Union
would overtake the
Mikhail Bakunin, Marx's arch-rival...described the political life of the future that Marx had in mind: "This government will not content itself with administering and governimg the masses politically... There will be a new class, a new heirarchy... the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!" ...The totalitarian state was not an aberration of the progressive spirit, but its consummation. The radical project is a war against nature.
-14. The Road to Nowhere, page 129-147
Socialism belongs to a social stage based on the simple economy of small groups, a stage that had to be overcome in order to realize the great wealth-making potential of the market system. Far from being a progressive conception, the socialist ethic is atavistic and represents the primitive morality of pre-industrial formations: the clan and the tribe. ...It's values - equality, cooperation, unity - are the survival codes of small, vulnerable groups with knowable goals and shared interests.
-33. The Meaning of Left and Right, page 338
In recent decades, anti-white racism has, in fact, become a common currency of the "progressive" intelligentsia.
Where my views have changed is in the appreciation I now have for
-15. Memories In
It is an interesting and important feature of modern liberalism that not only is its moral posture almost irrelevant to the facts, but it is also a pressure on the facts. ...there is a psychological payoff. The more racism you are able to see, the better you can feel about yourself. In discovering racism, even where it may not exist, you are able to realize your own virtue and its self-reward.
But liberal denial and liberal confusion over race persist. ...Every survey
of public attitudes on race shows that over the last sixty years there has been
a dramatic decline of racist attitudes among white Americans. ...in 1940 only 1
percent of blacks were middle class (defined as having twice the income of the
poor). The figure is now 49 percent. ...[A recent poll asked], "In
order to give minorities more opportunity, do you believe race or ethnicity
should be a factor when deciding who is hired, promoted, or admitted to
college...?" Ninety-four percent of whites interviewed answered this
question negatively...86 percent of blacks also answered this question
negatively and 88 percent of Hispanics. ...74 percent of blacks have incomes
above the poverty line, and don't live in inner cities or "ghettos".
...In 1940, 87 percent of blacks were poor and lived in places like Harlem and
The [Detroit} News conducted an investigation of the [affirmative action]
program results at seven Michigan universities, which revealed that among black
students who were freshman in 1994, only 40 percent got their diplomas after
six years. Sixty percent had failed or dropped out. "We're throwing
them out after taking their money and they're getting nothing out of it," summed
up a history professor at
-16. Liberals and Race, page 162-169
In
-18. Racism and Free Speech, page 193
The same radicals who launched the social and political
eruptions of the 1960s have now become the politically-correct faculties of
American universities. ...Their goal remains the destruction of
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. ...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.
For maintaining my commitment to the ideals of the civil rights movement
that King led, I have been attacked many times by the very people who betrayed
those ideals. Among these attacks was a letter from the award-winning
-15. Memories In Memphis, page158-160
To be a conservative in
"
Under the smokescreen of ethnic inclusion, the left has injected an
anti-American curriculum into the American educational system which it hopes
will alienate
-19. Conservatives and Race, page 198
Shortly after Peter Collier and I first entered the conservative world, I had a lunch with Norman Podhoretz, who warned me, "When you were on the left, you got away with everything. Now that you're on the right, you'd better be careful, because they won't let you get away with anything."
-26. Michael Lind and the Right Wing Cabal, page 287
Not only are the overwhelming majority of college professors fashionably "liberal" and Democratic Party partisans, most faculties also feature a strong contingent of hard leftists whose...concentrated numbers allow them to dominate (and even define) entire academic fields.
[One senior professor of an academic department:] "We had several candidates [for a scholar of ancient history] but obviously the most qualified one was from Stanford. Yet he didn't get the job. So I went to the chair of the search committee and asked him what had happened. 'Oh,' he said, 'you'[re absolutely right. He was far and away the most qualified candidate and we had a terrific interview. But then we went to lunch and he let out that he was for school vouchers.' " In other words, if one has a politically incorrect view on K-12 school vouchers, one must be politically incorrect on the Ming Dynasty, too. This is almost a dictionary description of the totalitarian mentality. ...This attitude also reflects the priorities of an entrenched oligarchy, which fears to include those it cannot count on to maintain its control.
These agendas were originally imported into the university by radicals acting as self-conscious disciples of an Italian marxist named Antonio Gramsci. As an innovative Stalinist in the 1930s, Gramsci pondered the historic inability of communist parties to mobilize workers to seize the means of production and overthrow the capitalist ruling class. Gramsci's new idea was to focus radicals' attention on the means of intellectual production. He urged radicals to acquire "cultural hegemony", by which he meant to capture the institutions that produced society's governing ideas. This would be the key to controlling and transforming society itself.
-21. Missing Diversity, page 215-218
A tenured sociologist named Richard Zeller [of
-23. The Era of Progressive Witch-Hunts, page 237
...the Motion Picture Academy honored Elia Kazan, a theatre
legend who had been blacklisted for nearly half a century by the
This tainting and ostracism of sinners is, in fact, the secret power of the leftist faith. It is what keeps the faithful, faithful. ...This is why Alger Hiss kept his silence to the end, and why, even thirty and fifty years after the fact, the memoirs of leftists are so elusive and disingenuous when it comes to telling the hard political and personal truths about who they were and what they did. ...This is far from obvious to those who have never been insiders.
-27. Defending Christpher Hitchens, page 292-293
This is the twentieth anniversary of the onset of the AIDS
epidemic in
It was the gay radical left that defined promiscuous anal sex with strangers in public urban environments - the primary cause of the epidemic - as "gay liberation". It was this agenda of sexual liberation that caused the gay movement to think nothing of the massive epidemics of amoebiasis, rectal gonorrhea, syphilis, and hepatitus B that swept through the gay communities in the decade preceding AIDS, producing astronomical infection rates and depleted immune systems along the way.
[Gay radical Edmund] White told one [gay] audience that "gay men
should wear their sexually transmitted diseases like red badges of courage in a
war against a sex-negative society." ...Camille Paglia pointed out
some years ago the obvious truth: "Everyone who preached free love in
the 1960s is responsible for AIDS. This idea that it was somehow an accident, a
microbe that sort of fell from heaven - absurd. We must face what we did."
Michael Callen explained... "a small subset of gay men managed to
create disease settings equivalent to those of poor
The gay community tragedy lay in the fact that those who pioneered in the establishment of gay rights had become seduced by the radical illusion that they could also change the world - including the laws of nature. ...The chief obstacle to any change in this unhappy tale is the media. AIDS is without question the worst reported story in the history of American journalism.
-32. An American Killing Field, page 330-335
"No nation before ever made diversity itself a
source of national identity and unity." ...This creed is the
culmination of an evolution that extends backwards in time to
-33. The Meaning of Left and Right, page 340
...
The PLO was created at a time the West Bank was not under Israeli control
but was part of
The reason there are Palestinian "refugees" is that [none of the
twenty-two Arab states], except
There is a famous "green line" marking the boundary between
-39. Why