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Title: The Politics of Bad Faith: Library Edition by David Horowitz, Jeff Riggenbach ISBN: 0-7861-1724-9 Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks Pub. Date: February, 2000 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $44.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.58 (38 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A little stilted at times, but....
Comment: a good examination of the inherent contradictions of the politics of the modern Left. Horowitz is at times dull and self-absorbed, as when he repeats ad nauseum the story of a failed reconciliation with a childhood Marxist friend, a story documented well enough in *Radical Son*, but at others provides an excellent argument on how the Left cannot see the world as it is due to ideological blinders that allow its adherents only to see the world as they want it to be.
The book is at its best in a chapter looking at how the ideological agenda of the leaders of the San Francisco gay community caused them to oppose basic public health interventions in the early 80s, allowing AIDS to spread. Laurie Garrett (*The Coming Plague*) and Randy Shilts (*And the Band Played On...*) both have discussed this elsewhere in greeater detail, but without showing how this relates to the larger, coherent if detached paradigm of left-wing social and political thought.
Rating: 5
Summary: New Insight into the Leftist Mindset
Comment: Observing the catastrophic misdeeds and failures of the revolutionary left from Robespierre's time to the present, former left-wing activist David Horowitz reflects, "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." Instead, what exists in many arenas in American life today is the wolf of radical leftism in sheep's clothing, now calling itself "liberal" or "progressive" or "populist" or anything other than what it actually is. Horowitz reveals that in the past twenty years the hard left has come to permeate academia, government bureaucracy, and the Democratic Party. Far from being a "historical curiosity," the radical left is alive and well, travelling incognito.
Horowitz gives a marvelous example of its tenacity in discussing the "liberal" reaction to the recent passage of the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI). CCRI officially bars racial discrimination in public employment, education, and contracting. In so doing, it effectively outlaws affirmative action. The ACLU and NAACP went to court to have CCRI declared unconstitutional. Ironically, these groups argued that CCRI - a law banning discrimination - was discriminatory. The paradox begins to make sense once one recognizes that the ACLU, the NAACP, and American "liberals" in general no longer hold that the concept of equality means equality before the law and equality of opportunity. To them, as to the Bolsheviks and Stalinists who went before, equality means equality of outcome. With an Orwellian wink, the "liberal" opponents of CCRI are really saying they want to force California to discriminate in order to end discrimination, in the interest of racial justice.
In an especially perceptive section, Horowitz examines the left's view of the right, and vice versa. People on the left often ask themselves how anyone can not be progressive and not be concerned with social justice and their attempts to better the world. Leftists conclude it is because "their conservative opponents are prisoners of a false consciousness that prevents them from recognizing human possibility . . . opposition to progressive agendas grows naturally from human selfishness, myopia and greed." People on the right look back at the leftists and ask, "How is it possible for progressives to remain so blind to the grim realities their efforts have produced. How can they overlook the crimes they have committed against the poor and oppressed they set out to defend?"
Horowitz suggests that this conflict of visions is rooted in a simple difference: the right attempts desperately to understand the left, but the left makes no comparable effort to understand the right. Indeed, it acts - in bad faith - to ignore and suppress scholarship and opinions that are critical of the left's ideology and historical legacy. Names such as von Mises, Hayek, Kirk, Sowell, Kristol, and Strauss are virtually unknown to the left and are systematically omitted from university curricula. In contrast, names like Marx, Heidegger, Galbraith, Chomsky, Foucault and other leftist intellectuals, while not household terms, are certainly familiar to the educated conservative.
Some people may wonder, why did Horowitz become a conservative, that is, why did he go from one political extreme to the other? In answer, Horowitz would probably deny that his brand of conservatism is "extreme" in any meaningful sense of that term. Essentially, Horowitz became a man of the right because conservatives adhere to two core principles -- the free market and limited government -- which history has vindicated as superior to socialist economic planning and Leviathan state power. Having been raised to believe that the path to communism led to justice, peace and plenty, Horowitz was a leftist. A lifelong process of learning made him a conservative. The Politics of Bad Faith is a memorable exploration into the reasons behind that transformation.
Rating: 3
Summary: The POLITICS OF BAD FAITH: The Radical Assault on America's
Comment: An ineffective diatribe against all things on the left of the political spectrum. Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and author of numerous works, including The Race Card (1997) and Destructive Generation (1996), asks if the traditional political appellations of ``left'' and ``right'' retain any meaning in postCold war America. He answers most emphatically that they do. While he admits that the left may be ``rhetorically in retreat,'' its goals and agenda, he feels, remain the same and consist of nothing less than a war against the democracies of the West.'' That we dont see the true nature of the leftwhether it now calls itself progressive'' or ``liberal'' or whateverreflects, for Horowitz, ``the long-standing dominion of socialist sentiment'' within our culture. Despite cosmetic differences, the left is of a piece. Grounded in utopian dreams, coming to fruition in the grotesque tragedy of the Soviet Union, the left continues to insist on absolute economic equality and the abolishment of private property. The right, on the other hand, continues to believe in and defend that which is good: the free individual and the free market. Having presented these themes, however, Horowitz really has nowhere to go, and so the book mostly consists of empty rhetoric. If the left is indeed of a piece, and all left argumentation and critique is therefore Stalinist, there is no need for Horowitz to engage with such critique; its by definition bad. This all makes for a tremendously boring book; one can only read page after page of invective for so long. Readers will look in vain for the precise scholarship and sound logic of which the often brilliant Horowitz is certainly capable. A thrown-together book with no real purpose. Interested readers will be better served reading the author's vastly superior Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (1997).
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Title: RADICAL SON: A GENERATIONAL ODYSSEY by David Horowitz ISBN: 0684840057 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 21 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes by David Horowitz ISBN: 1890626317 Publisher: Spence Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: DESTRUCTIVE GENERATION: Second Thoughts About the '60s by Peter Collier ISBN: 0684826410 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 12 August, 1996 List Price(USD): $21.95 |
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Title: How to Beat the Democrats and Other Subversive Ideas by David Horowitz, David Horowitz ISBN: 1890626503 Publisher: Spence Pub Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey by David Horowitz, Jamie Glazov ISBN: 1890626511 Publisher: Spence Pub Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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