The Politics of Bad Faith

by David Horowitz

Reviewed by Wes Wynne

If there is one thing the American left dislikes more then America itself, perhaps it is a turncoat. And if to be a turncoat weren’t bad enough, to be a vociferous, publicly penitent one must be despicable. Enter David Horowitz. In last year’s powerful autobiography, Radical Son, Horowitz recounted growing up as a member of New York’s radical community. He was a “red diaper” baby, raised by deracinated Jewish parents for whom the millennial hope of world communism was a religion. Reaching adulthood in the Sixties, Horowitz found himself at Berkeley, where he became a leader of the New Left, editing the influential journal Ramparts and associating with the Black Panthers and other radical groups.
Up until the mid-Seventies, Horowitz continued his work as a leftist writer and activist. But then, the Panthers’ brutal murder of a friend, along with the left’s broken promises and increasingly evident failures, made him begin to have second thoughts about the movement to which he had devoted his life. Over an agonizing span of almost a decade, Horowitz re-evaluated his political premises and the consequences of the forces and ideas he had championed. Astonishingly, he transformed himself from a radical leftist into a Reagan conservative. Turncoat par exellence.
The author’s newest effort, The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future, gives new insight into Horowitz’s political metamorphosis. In this series of six essays, he deals with the fate of Marxism and the left after the fall of communism, the religious roots of radicalism, the meaning of left and right, and, in a chapter entitled, “The Radical Holocaust,” the American AIDS epidemic.
Observing the tragic misdeeds and failures of the revolutionary left from Robespierre’s time to the present, Horowitz writes, “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 one finds in America today is the wolf of radical leftism in sheep’s clothing, calling itself “liberal” or “progressive” or “populist” or anything other than what it actually is. 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 spirit of leftism is alive and well, travelling incognito.
A marvelous example of the left’s tenacity is illustrated by the “liberal” response to the passage of the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI). CCRI officially barred racial discrimination in state public employment, education, and contracting. In so doing, it had the effect of deep-sixing affirmative action. The ACLU and NAACP fought in court to declare CCRI unconstitutional. The basis? Ironically, this law banning discrimination was argued to be discriminatory, violating the Equal Protection Clause. The paradox begins to make sense once one recognizes that the NAACP, the ACLU, 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, i.e., if you have more than me, conditions are unequal and unjust.
In one particularly insightful passage, Horowitz examines the left’s view of the right, and vice verse. Leftists often ask themselves how anyone can not be progressive and not be concerned with social justice and their attempts to better the world. Leftists believe 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.” The right also looks at the left and asks, “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? How can they have learned so little from the history their ideas have engendered?”
Horowitz believes that this conflict of visions is rooted in a simple fact: the right attempts to understand the left, but the left makes no serious effort to understand the right. He castigates the left for an insularity in it’s thinking which causes it to ignore scholarship and opinion that is critical of its premises. Names such as von Mises, Hayek, Kirk, Sowell, Kristol, and Strauss are virtually unknown to the left, whereas Marx, Heidegger, Galbraith, Chomsky, Foucault and other leftist intellectuals, while not all household names, are certainly familiar to the educated conservative as well as to the progressive.
Horowitz’s new book may not be everyone’s cup of tea. His chapter on the religious origins of the radical mindset, although penetrating, is fairly obscure. And in toto, the work is quite challenging, requiring at least a journeyman’s grasp of twentieth century political history to be of much interest. One exception is his illuminating chapter on the AIDS epidemic, which in it’s American manifestation he partly blames on the wrongheaded notions of the left. In the epidemic’s early stages, gay opposition to such measures as closing bath houses and tracing carriers’ sexual contacts was based squarely on the leftist rhetoric of revolution and liberation. The political cachet of “liberal” gay groups stymied public health officials’ efforts to contain the disease when it was still containable. The ensuing holocaust was in large measure avoidable, Horowitz argues.
The politically unengaged reader may wonder, why did Horowitz choose conservatism, that is, why did he go from one extreme to the other politically? 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. Having been raised to believe that communism was the historical path to justice, peace and plenty, Horowitz was a leftist. A lifelong process of learning made him a conservative.

Wes Wynne is a graduate student in psychology.