From Radical Son to Conservative Champion

Some of the most powerful criticism of the radical Left has come from former leftists who were repulsed by the violent tactics and intolerance of the Leftist ideology. One of the most prominent of these individuals is David Horowitz, who is now the president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a Los Angeles based think tank which publishes the journal Heterodoxy and the webmagazine frontpagemag.com. In his autobiography Radical Son, Horowitz recounted his intellectual and personal journey from Sixties New Left activist to conservative intellectual. He has just published a new book, The Politics of Bad Faith, which assesses the survival of radical communist thought in America after the Cold War, and has also authored the pamphlet Marx's Manifesto: 150 Years of Evil, which is being distributed on college campuses nationwide.

Editor-in-Chief Lee Bockhorn recently had the opportunity to speak with Horowitz about his new book, his insights on the Left, and his thoughts on the current political scene.

MR: You write about conservatism and its future at the end of your new book, The Politics of Bad Faith. Given that the Left has such a stronghold on cultural institutions like the media and academia, what tactics or methods should conservatives adopt to promote their ideas? For instance, many conservatives have decided that the culture has moved so far away from them that they are retreating into their own "subculture," you might say, by home-schooling their children, things like that.

HOROWITZ: Well, I think with home schooling, where one's children are concerned, one does what's in their best interest. When we're talking about the culture war and the struggle for our country, I hope that people are not going to give up and retreat. I would hope that people would be more aggressive, rather than less. I think in doing this, we need to take some leads from the Leftists' playbook, particularly in the universities where there is an oppressive, anti-intellectual regime in place that violates the academic freedom of all students in denying them access to ideas other than the ones that the tenured Left finds politically correct ... So, I think conservatives have to see themselves more as the oppressed, as the community of the oppressed in the universities, and just be more aggressive in their defense.

Following up on that specific point, again at the end of The Politics of Bad Faith, you talk about how conservatism (in the European sense), as Hayek wrote, "cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving," and this is a problem because, given the fluid nature of American society - the dynamism of capitalism, things like that ...

In fact, we are not "conservatives" in the true sense, because there's precious little left to conserve, for example, in the American academy. Its noble profession of pursuing knowledge in a disinterested fashion has been thoroughly subverted by the Left, so now it's a highly politicized atmosphere in which learning tries to take place. The American Studies Association (ASA), which pretends to be a professional association of "scholars," just announced its formal opposition to laws outlawing discrimination in California and Washington and said that it won't hold its conventions in any state that attempts to outlaw discrimination. This is a travesty, and in a way the fullest manifestation of the anti-intellectualism of the ASA professors, because they've defined a political stance which one apparently has to take in order to be an ASA scholar.

You write about how conservatives need to think of themselves as constituting the real "counterculture" now, in order to meet the challenges currently facing them. Could you talk about how that might play out in some specific current political debates or issues?

Sure. In a democracy, the crowd favorite is always the underdog, because everybody identifies with the little guy. Therefore, in any political combat, if you position yourself on the side of the underdog, you have a significant advantage over the opposition. Therefore, it's really the language - notice how the reactionaries and totalitarians on the Left call themselves "liberals." That gives them a great advantage in any battle, because the word "liberal," no matter how much the term may gain a bad odor because of things that liberals have done, the term itself still suggests only positive things - tolerance, openness, all the characteristics that the Left lacks. So again, on the campus, if you're conducting a campus battle, [point out] the ways in which the Left exploits students and abuses their rights - students have a right to hear both sides of an issue ... If you look at the national level, the recent budget battle showed all the weaknesses of the Republican side. It was wholly predictable that Clinton, wretch that he is, would hide behind the children - as the Democrats are wont to do, they hide behind women, children, minorities, and the poor - and that he would say, as he did, let's throw a billion dollars at the children. Of course Clinton intends to run the billion dollars through the education bureaucracy and into the pockets of the teachers' unions, which is his political base. But still, he could count on the Republicans to play the role of the mean-spirited Scrooges who would say that there was no money for the children, which of course, they did. And of course, the obvious comeback is "come on, it's a five hundred billion dollar budget, you mean there's not one teensy-weensy billion for the children?" And of course the Republicans would fold, as they did, and so they look mean-spirited, and then cowardly, and ultimately stupid. The way to combat this would have been to say, "We want two billion dollars for the children, but we want it in the form of scholarships for inner-city kids who are trapped in failing and dangerous schools by liberals and Democrats who send their own children to private schools." That would have put Republicans way up in the battle. In other words, conservatives and Republicans are the party of reform and are the party that really cares about poor people, minorities, and children.

But again, how can they best get that message out, considering that the Left has almost a total hegemony on all the cultural institutions?

That's something to factor in ... it is unfair, life is unfair, but conservatives have to stop - it's like going into Boston Garden to play the Celtics and complaining about the floorboards. We have to accept that as a given. The reality is that when Democrats talk, every other word out of their mouth is about women, minorities, and the poor, while Republicans argue about flat taxes versus capital gains tax cuts. Their language and their appearance is that of businessmen and accountants, not champions of the little people, and they've got to change that. There should be real concern, for instance, that women are abused, and conservatives should be there to protect them. Look, one of the biggest abuses that women suffer is that they can't walk the streets safely because liberals let criminals out of jail with alarming regularity. I'm not saying that conservatives should have different principles, the principles are fine; it's the way they sell them that isn't so fine.

Let me get to your thoughts on Karl Marx. You've written a pamphlet, 150 Years of Evil, on Marx's Communist Manifesto and how this year, on its 150th anniversary, it's gotten some rather gushing praise in features in mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. You make a very strong case in the pamphlet as to why Marx's theories should be thoroughly disregarded as intellectually incoherent and morally indefensible, yet you also make the case that the Left has, if anything, embraced Marx's thought even more strongly since the collapse of the communist bloc. How does the Left justify its ignorance of the disastrous human consequences and misery which resulted from Marx's theories being put into practice?

They say that "real socialism" hasn't been tried. The Left's arrogance knows no bounds, not only towards those who disagree with them, but everybody who agrees with them as well. Remember the slogan of the Sixties, "You can't trust anybody over thirty." That's their attitude towards Lenin and the Bolsheviks - that they, the current leftists, understand Marx better than they did. They have taken the view ... that Marx didn't understand the importance of racism and gender, and then what they do is they take the Marxist paradigm, the "oppression" paradigm, and just transfer it wholesale to gender and race areas, so that instead of preaching class war they, in effect, preach race and gender war. The way they do that is by demonizing white males and putting the responsibility for every non-positive social impact, every negative aspect of black life or female life or a particular female's life or particular minority's life, on the oppressive patriarchy, and on whites. This is a form of racism. It's no different than southern "crackers" claiming that blacks wrecked southern society, or Nazis complaining about Jews being the source of everything bad. It's exactly the same attitude, and it's embedded in Marx's Manifesto, although I think Marx was more civilized than current latter-day Leftists.

As someone who used to be an active part of the New Left, why do you think that socialist and Marxist thought continues to be so appealing to intellectuals and academics?

Well, it's very seductive. First of all, Marxism is very satisfying to mediocre minds, because it provides a formula for everything. You can see this in the unbelievably trivial, from an intellectual point of view, results of twenty years of feminist studies. If you have no imagination and if you are not too bright, just look at the gender aspect of anything that's been looked at before, and you can write a whole new literature. The Marxist formula or the feminist formula or the Afro-centrist formula is so easy to master - it's just whites bad, blacks good; men bad, women good. And then you can just plug this little formula into anything and get a paper or a monograph, or a book. It's incredibly attractive to the intellectual mediocrity that finds its haven in the universities.

Continuing on the same line, you mention in the introduction to The Politics of Bad Faith that one of the main reasons for "the ability of the intellectual Left to survive the catastrophe of its Communist enchantments derives from its essentially religious nature." Many other conservatives - Whittaker Chambers is one that comes to mind - have made the argument that socialist and communist thought satisfies the religious impulse in intellectuals who can't bring themselves to view traditional religion as intellectually acceptable. There is a debate on the Right now as to how prominent religious conservatives should be. Do you think, given that a certain warped religious appeal is what makes Leftist thought so appealing, that contemporary conservatism needs to have a prominent religious element to combat Leftist ideology?

No, and this is the reason. First of all, let me say that Leftism and what we today call "liberalism" is a pseudo-religion, and what distinguishes it from an authentic religion is that it lacks basic humility; it does not believe in a divinity, or if it does, it confuses its own mission with that of a divinity. What the Left and liberals are about is saving the world - it is about a social redemption. That is why they are so rude and obnoxious and intolerant, and why they are so dangerous, because if you believe that you can bring about the kingdom of heaven on earth by political agencies and by the power of the state, then there's no lie that you won't tell and there's no crime that you won't commit to achieve it, and "progressives" have commited every kind of crime in our lifetime. But, it would be a mistake for conservatives to create a parallel mission to this. Religion is about saving individual souls; it cannot be about reshaping the social landscape. It would be very destructive if it was, because if you're convinced that you are implementing God's plan, you too will be subject to the temptation to tell any lie or commit any crime. The conservative Truth, with a capital T, is that the source of social problems is us - human beings, and our own fallibility. Conservatives understand that human beings in power in the state are even more dangerous than the human beings you meet on the street, because they have more power. That's why we're for limited government, and our objectives are always modest. And so, I think having religious crusaders in politics is a very dangerous thing ... The idea that you can use the power of the state to make citizens moral is just in itself a very dangerous idea. What we really need to do is persuade people.

Along those lines, in the debate between conservatives and libertarians, one claim conservatives make against libertarians is that they make the same mistake that the Left does in thinking that, if we just come up with the right social arrangements or arrangements for the state, this will necessarily create a utopian society. What do you think about this criticism?

I completely agree with that, and I would go further. Libertarians make the same mistake as the Left in thinking that people are more rational than they actually are, and better than they are.

Getting back to curriculum in universities ... you mention in your book that academia is purposely ignorant of conservative thinkers like von Mises, Hayek, Kirk, Leo Strauss, and other conservative intellectuals.

It's not only ignorant, it's calculated ignorance.

Since it's unlikely that the majority of university faculties or student bodies are going to become conservative, or even more tolerant of conservative thought, overnight, what do you think conservative students and faculty can do to spread the ideas of these conservative thinkers among their peers, given the current atmosphere?

There are a lot of avenues they could take. One, for example, is to demand that in sociology courses - or any courses where the term "race" is even mentioned - that Thomas Sowell is put on the reading list, and made available to students. I would do this in the name of intellectual diversity and in defense of the academic freedom of students to hear both sides of an issue. I think that resonates with people. I think that most people aren't political; most students at the University of Michigan and elsewhere are just not political.

Apathetic?

Whether they're apathetic or not, they're interested in other things. Therefore you always have to keep this in mind, and phrase your positions in terms that appeal to peoples' sense of fairness and peoples' support for those who have less power against those who have more. Those are the basic two principles of politics - you always position yourself in the defense of the principle of fairness and of the weaker against the stronger, and you'll always be in a good position when you go into battle.

In our state (California), we just had the initiative (Proposition 227) on ending bilingual education, and it won even though every major institution in the state - every newspaper, every piece of the establishment - was against it, including not only the Democratic candidate for governor, but the Republican candidate for governor. And it still won. So you have to ask yourself, why did it win? The answer is the way Ron Unz (the initiative's main sponsor) positioned it. You can argue the case against bilingualism on the grounds that the country will split apart, it will be like Canada - that a bilingual state is untenable. I think that's a very reasonable argument, and a very important one, but it's not going to play politically, because the other side will be able to position you as xenophobic and hostile to immigrants. But the way Ron Unz positioned it was, he created it in response to when he read in the paper of a demonstration of Hispanic parents who want their kids to learn English and can't get it in the present bilingual setup, and they want their kids to have a shot at the American dream and be able to get into the economy. So he positioned the entire campaign as being on behalf of Hispanic kids - giving them a chance at the American dream. And that's why it won. That's a classic example of positioning an issue in a way that you can win over the middle, which is what you have to do to win.

Bilingualism brings up the topic of language, which I also wanted to ask you about. You talk about this in your book - how the Left has very effectively been able to change the meaning of terms used in politics. One of the great concerns in politics these days is that our language, in terms of politics and everything else, is being debased. We see things like our current president's linguistic gymnastics, for example. What can conservatives do to stem the tide of the debasement of our political language?

We have to start calling things by their right names. I'm not that concerned with Clinton because everybody perceives what a liar he is; there's nobody who doesn't say he's a liar and isn't disturbed by the way he fractures the language in order to lie. Of much more concern to me is the way that we call people who are leftists "liberals". I myself get introduced as a former liberal - I was a Marxist. Often, it's as a "peace activist" and a liberal.

I think we need to call leftists leftists... Feminists who are leftists need to be called that. Then, that kind of term connects them to the history of the Left, which is a sordid and criminal history. It automatically connects that in peoples' minds, and that's very important. MR

This article was published in the 9 December 1998 edition of The Michigan Review (Volume 17, Number 5).
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