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Category: Horowitz, David
The Moral Depravity of the Democrat Party
“Woke” has become a term to describe the enemies of our country who have colonized our schools and taught our next generations to hate America, hate white people and trash our history and national pride. How to explain this travesty? It began fifty years ago when the anti-American, Marxist left set its sights on taking over our schools.
[. . .]
Many of you may have thought that the takeover of our educational system by anti-American Marxists happened overnight. It didn’t. It was five decades in the making. But conservatives and Republicans chose not to notice it. And when they did notice it, they were reluctant to fight.
If you want to understand the disasters that have befallen our country, you have to begin with the failure of Republicans and conservatives to aggressively wage the political war necessary to defend it.
The anti-American left attacks patriotic Americans as “white supremacists,” “racists” “domestic terrorists” and “insurrectionists.” And we respond by calling them “liberals.” There is nothing about them that is liberal. They are vindictive bigots, determined to demonize and destroy us.
[. . .]
The Democrat Party is no longer controlled by a liberal left but by Marxist zealots who willfully disregard the Marxist atrocities and failures of the past. Democrats no longer respect the sovereign individual, the rule of law, or the primary values of the Constitution –the equality of races, the spirit of compromise or the decentralization of power.
Instead, Democrats regard the Constitution as a white supremacist document written by rich white slaveowners, designed to oppress all other genders and races. Its mentality is that of European fascism and Soviet communism, and its immediate goal is a one-party state.
{. . .]
January 6th was the date set to certify the electors. On that day Trump gave his famous “Stop the Steal” speech, which has been maliciously described by Democrats as a criminal “incitement to insurrection.” This was absurd on its face, since Trump had offered the Capitol Police and Nancy Pelosi 10,000 national guardsmen to control the crowds. Trump’s offer was duly noted by the Inspector General who attended the meeting. Pelosi and the Democrat-controlled Capitol Police rejected the offer.
[. . .]
Biden’s inauguration was January 20. He began with a brazen lie that he would unify the country and represent both those who voted for him and those who did not.
Then he issued a series of executive orders that illegally and unconstitutionally nullified our immigration laws, and welcomed a flood of unvetted illegals from 200 countries to invade our country. This was the greatest crime ever committed by our government against its own people.
[. . .]
Read it all and propagate it. Do your bit. Vote with your feet and your wallet. Study the many works of David Horowitz to understand the depredations of communism and its latest incarnation as 'wokery.'
Every Generation Faces a Barbarian Threat in its Own Children
David Horowitz, Radical Son:
Irving Kristol, who had second thoughts before me, has observed that every generation faces a barbarian threat in its own children, who need to be civilized. This is the challenge perennially before us: to re-teach the young the conditions of being human, of managing life's tasks in a world that is and must remain forever imperfect. The refusal to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age. (Emphasis added)
The world is imperfect, and it cannot be perfected by us either individually or collectively. This is a defining truth of conservatism. The conservative stands on the terra firma of a reality antecedent to his hopes, dreams, and desires, a reality from which he must learn what is possible and what is not. The conservative is not opposed to such piecemeal ameliorations as are possible, but he does not conflate the possible with what he can dream up or imagine. He is rightly unmoved by the utopian imaginings of a leftist like John Lennon in his song Imagine, imaginings that presuppose human perfectibility and the possibility of a quasi-religious immanentization of the eschaton. But of course Lennon's leftist imaginings are not mere imaginings but veiled prescriptions for such destructive actions as the suppression and ultimate eradication of religion together with the eradication of the belief that we as individuals have a spiritual origin and destiny; the spread of a smiley-faced half-way nihilism, that of Nietzsche's Last Man ("noting to kill or die for") which, while denying genuine transcendence does not reject this life but degrades it to a life of self-indulgence; the levelling of all differences and the ultimately futile assault on natural hierarchies which of course reassert themselves in the end. In short:
- Humans are imperfect. They are structurally flawed and in such a way as to disallow any possibility of perfection.
- Being imperfectible, they cannot be improved in any fundamental ways by human effort whether individual or collective.
- The failure of leftists to understand these truths and their consequent misguided attempts at perfecting the imperfectible have led to an over-all worsening of the human condition. And that is to put it mildly: in the 20th century alone communist governments murdered over 100 million. That is a lot of eggs to break for an impossible omelet.
- Leftists are reality-deniers who refuse the tutelage of experience.
Anthony Flood Reviews David Horowitz, Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win
An Amazon review by our long-time correspondent. I award it the plenary MavPhil endorsement. Tony coins a brilliancy, 'academedia complex.' I would add a qualifier, 'academented.'
Anthony Flood
Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2020
Anthony Flood Reviews David Horowitz, Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America
Cultural Marxism is but the latest form of the cultural cancer now metastasizing throughout the body politic. (Marxism-Leninism was only the deadliest form, not the first, but even today old-fashioned Communism does not lack adherents.) That the Democratic Party is now this malignancy’s host is the grim, but well-documented, conclusion of Horowitz’s long literary career.
In Dark Agenda’s last chapter, Horowitz puts forward the metaphor of civil war to define what might be in front of us. It’s a possible outcome of the divisions that beset us and which we’re all supposed to want to “heal.” One prosecutes a war, however, not to heal one’s enemies, but rather to incapacitate them.
For Americans only the Age of Lincoln offers the closest comparison to our parlous state. But shall Christians and their Jewish allies (agnostic and observant alike) prepare for military conflict and await—or initiate—our Fort Sumter? Is it not quixotic to put all our eggs in the electoral consensus-building basket? Are we restricted to chronicling our enemies’ crimes, as Horowitz has masterfully done in dozens of popular and scholarly tomes? Urgency calls forth a response, but if Horowitz has an idea of how Americans might defeat the Left’s dark agenda, he doesn’t share it here. No suggested plan of action follows the note of urgency he sounds.
In the third paragraph, Flood touches upon a point that troubles me as well. We have reams of incisive conservative commentary on what the Left has wrought but precious little by way of concrete proposals for ameliorative action by individuals. In fairness to Horowitz, however, it needs noting that in the concluding chapters of Big Agenda (Humanix 2017), he lists various things the Republican party and President Trump can do. So he does outline a plan of action, and he is appropriately combative:
The movement galvanized by Trump can stop the progressive juggernaut and change the American future, but only if it emulates the strategy of the campaign: Be on the offense; take no prisoners; stay on the attack. To stop the Democrats and their societal transformation, Republicans must adhere to a strategy that begins with a punch in the mouth. That punch must pack an emotional wallop large enough to throw them off balance and neutralize their assaults. It must be framed as a moral indictment that stigmatizes them in the way their attacks stigmatize Republicans. It must expose them for their hypocrisy. It must hold them accountable for the divisions they sow and the suffering they cause. (Big Agenda, Humanix, 2017, p. 142)
Still and all, I would like to see a list of what individuals can do beyond voting and writing letters and blog posts. Does Tony Flood have any suggestions? I suppose I myself should put up or shut up while well aware of the dangers of saying anything that might incite violence among the unhinged. (But violence is being done every day by leftists to the unborn and to our Constitutional rights and sacred American values). So here are three suggestions, just to keep this post short. I invite Tony to e-mail me with any thoughts he may have.
- Buy guns and learn how to use them. The idea here is deterrence and not aggression. A well-armed populace is a mighty check against both the criminal element that leftists work to empower, and against leftists themselves and their agents. We can demoralize them without firing a shot. Call it winning through intimidation. They will never respect us, but they can be brought to fear us. (An analysis of respect might show that fear is is a large part of it.) Grandmaster Nimzowitsch's remark is apropos: "The threat is stronger than the execution." 2A is concrete back-up for 1A and all the rest of our rights. Leftists know this. This explains the mindlessness and mendacity of their confiscatory assault on our Second Amendment rights.
- Vote with your feet and your wallet. Leave blue localities and let them languish in the feculence their policies have birthed, and bring your money and tax dollars to healthy places.
- Defund the Left. For example, refuse to support your leftist alma mater, to use a border-line pleonastic expression.
Flood's review concludes:
Of course, Dark Agenda is no more an essay on spirituality than on political philosophy. The case it makes, however, cries out for at least a hint of the response that its author believes will meet this greatest of all challenges. If there’s no political way to overcome the darkness, only the spiritual route is left.
Yet David Horowitz leaves this tension unresolved. For him, the Christian Scriptures are not (as far as I know) a source of divinely revealed truth; Christianity is but the historically contingent arrangement that works for people who happen to love instead of hate Western civilization; things don’t go any deeper than that. Am I wrong about him?
Like all human arrangements, however, Western Civ will eventually pass away into the void out of which all things, including humans, allegedly emerged . . . unless the Christian worldview is overarchingly true. Maybe Horowitz has one more book in him in which he can address this question. But I’d prefer to be shown that something in his vast literary oeuvre already has.
Having read more Horowitz than Tony has, I believe he is right in the second paragraph lately quoted.
And I am sympathetic with the third paragraph, though not with Flood's enthusiasm for Van Til. See the entries in my Van Til and Presuppositionalism category.
Finally, I have a deep-going analytic post on Horowitz' agnosticism as he presents it in Dark Agenda. See Five Grades of Agnosticism.
Hitchens, Horowitz, Clinton, and Impeachment
Christopher Hitchens died on this date in 2011. The synergistic effects of his excessive consumption of smoke and spirits did him in at the tender age of 62. By comparison, David Horowitz is still going strong at 81 churning out books, manning the ramparts, and fighting the good fight. May he live to be 100!
We who live the life of the mind celebrate the longevity of Horowitz while mourning the loss of Hitchens despite the latter's excesses and aberrations. I will quote David Horowitz on Hitchens on Bill Clinton. This is relevant to the current impeachment proceedings against Donald J. Trump. The case for impeaching Clinton was much stronger than the case that was actually brought against him. There is no case at all against Trump.
In his mordantly incisive articles in both Vanity Fair and Salon, Hitchens has demonstrated that the nation's commander in chief cynically and mendaciously deployed the armed forces of the greatest power on earth to strike at three impoverished countries, with no clear military objective in mind. Using the most advanced weaponry the world has ever seen, Clinton launched missiles into the Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq for only one tangible political purpose, to — as Hitchens puts it — "distract attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing cupcake."
Hitchens' claim that Clinton's military actions are criminal and impeachable is surely spot-on. Republicans, it seems, were right about the character issue, and failed only to demonstrate how this mattered to the policy issues the public cares deeply about. Instead they got themselves entangled in legalistic disputes about perjury and obstruction, losing the electorate along the way. In making his own powerful case against Clinton, Hitchens has underscored how Republicans botched the process by focusing on criminality that flowed from minor abuses of power — the sexual harassment of Paula Jones and its Monica Lewinsky subtext — while ignoring a major abuse that involved corrupting the presidency, damaging the nation's security and killing innocents abroad.
[. . .]
Given the transparent morality of Hitchens' anti-Clinton crusade, it is all the more revealing that so many of his comrades on the left, who ought to share these concerns, have chosen instead to turn on him so viciously. In a brutal display of comradely betrayal, they have publicly shunned him in an attempt to cut him off socially from his own community. One after another, they have rushed into print to tell the world at large how repulsed they are by a man whom only yesterday they called "friend," yet whom they now apparently no
longer even wish to know.Leading this pack was Hitchens' longtime colleague at the Nation, Alexander Cockburn, who denounced him as a "Judas" and "snitch." Cockburn was followed by a second Nation columnist, Katha Pollitt, who smeared Hitchens as a throwback to McCarthy-era informers ("Let's say the Communist Party was bad and wrong — Why help the repressive powers of the state? Let the government do its own dirty work."). She was joined by a 30-year political comrade, Todd Gitlin, who warned anyone who cared to listen that Hitchens was a social "poison," in the same toxic league as Ken Starr and Linda Tripp.
Consider the remarkable nature of this spectacle. Could one imagine a similar ritual performed by journalists of the right? Bob Novak, say, flanked by Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley, pronouncing an anathema on Bill Safire, because the columnist had called for the jailing of Ollie North during the Iran-contra hearings? Not even North felt the need to announce such a public divorce. When was the last time any conservative figure (let alone a gathering of conservatives) stepped forward to declare they were ending a private friendship over a political disagreement?
The curses rained on Hitchens' head are part of a ritual that has become familiar over generations of the left, in which dissidents are excommunicated and consigned to various Siberias for their political deviance. It is a phenomenon normal to religious cults, where purity of heart is maintained through avoiding contact with the unclean. To have caused the left to invoke so drastic a measure, Hitchens had to have violated some fundamental principles of its faith. So what were they?
Read it all. An updated and extended version appears as "Defending Christopher," Chapter 23 of Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (Spence 1999), pp. 240-248.
Like Islamists, Leftists Hate Apostates
David Horowitz, Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (Spence Publishing, 2003), pp. 274-276:
The radical commitment is less a political than a moral choice. Leaving the faith is a traumatic experience because it involves an involuntary severing of communal ties. That is why "political correctness" is a habit of the progressive mind – it is the line of fear that holds the flock in check.
No greater caution exists for those tempted to leave the faith than the charge of "selling out." Prior to the temptation, leaving the faith is inconceivable, a sign that one is no longer a good person. Only pathological behavior – a lust for money or some other benefit – could explain to a leftist the decision to join the opposition. To the progressive mind, no decent person could ever freely make such a choice. Even in the post-communist world, the most untheoretical progressive remains in this way a vulgar marxist despite all that has historically transpired. The fact that Peter [Collier] and I actually lost opportunities for personal gain as a result of our change of heart made no impression on out former comrades, who labeled us "renegades" and accused us of selling out just the same.
Five Grades of Agnosticism
In David Horowitz's Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America (Humanix, 2018), we read:
My own theological views are those of an agnostic — one who doesn't know. I do not know whether there is a Divine designer or not. (p. 24)
Well, I don't know either. I agree with Horowitz when he tells us, on the preceding page, that
. . . the question of whether God exists cannot be resolved. Both sides must rely on faith. (p. 23)
So what is the difference between me and Horowitz? We are both agnostics by his definition. But I am a theist whereas he is not. It appears that we need to distinguish different types or grades of agnosticism. It will develop that one can be both a theist and an agnostic.
AG-1: "I don't know, and I don't care. The existence of God is not a (live) issue for me." This sort of agnostic is a practical atheist. He lives as if there is no God, but without denying or doubting his existence.
AG-2: "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the importance of the question. But I see no good reason either to affirm or to deny, and so I suspend judgment. Rather than trouble my head over such a question, I content myself with the ordinary life of a mortal man. I do not dream of immortality or hanker after transcendence. While I grant that the question is of some importance, I do not consider the question of enough importance to trouble myself over it." This sort of agnosticism is close to Pyrrhonism.
AG-3: "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the importance of the question. And while I see no good reason to affirm or deny, I don't suspend judgment; I continue to inquire. I sense that my ultimate happiness is at stake, and that it would be imprudent simply to dismiss the question as unanswerable and sink back into everydayness."
AG-4: "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the great importance of the question. What's more, I find nothing epistemically disreputable about believing beyond the evidence, seeing as how we do this regularly in other areas of life; I cannot, however, bring myself to believe."
AG-5: "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the great importance of the question. I am inclined to believe, and I do believe, for reasons that are not rationally compelling, but also not epistemically disreputable. My faith is a living faith, not merely intellectual assent to a proposition; it is something I live, and my living as I do attests to the psychological reality of my believing."
The fifth grade of agnosticism is a type of theism. It is not the theism of the one who claims to know that God exists, or who claims to be able to prove that God exists. But it is theism nonetheless, for it is an affirmation of the existence of God. It follows that one can be both an agnostic and a theist. In fact, I would argue further that an agnostic is the only sort of theist one ought to be.
To conclude, what is the difference between me and Horowitz? We are both agnostics by his definition. But whereas I am an AG-5 agnostic, he, as far as I can tell, is an AG-3 agnostic.
Addendum (12/12). Vito Caiati responds:
I found your most recent post “Five Grades of Agnosticism” most valuable in that it succinctly sets out the quite diverse tenors of this philosophic position on the existence of God. Over the years, I have fallen into all of these “five grades,” with the exception of AG-1. As you know, I now, as for much of my life, affirm a much more specific version of AG-5, one that centers my life on Christian dogmas and practices, as taught by the Roman Catholic Church. My most recent return to Catholicism was, if you recall from our correspondence over the last few years, fraught with intellectual conflict, since my faith exists alongside of a powerful skeptical inclination, which is only further reinforced once the already daunting difficulties involved in an assertion of God’s existence are compounded by those involved in matters of dogma and doctrine. I have often thought that it would be best to remain with the embrace of philosophic theism, which is, I assume, what you are affirming in AG-5, that is, the affirmation of the existence of a theistic God and an adherence to those moral precepts that are evident to reason and conscience. Am I right about this?
Not quite. I am thinking of AG-5 as a type of theism that could be filled out and made more specific in different ways. One could add some or all of the following beliefs: immortality of the soul, resurrection of the body, triune nature of the one God, divine simplicity, divine incarnation, and so on through a range of even more specific beliefs concerning, e.g., the nature of post-mortem rewards and punishments, the impossibility of gaining merit after death, etc. None of these are precluded by the AG-5 schema. What the schema excludes is any claim to knowledge with regard to these matters. I am assuming that knowledge entails objective certainty. And so AG-5 runs counter to the traditional Roman Catholic claim that its magisterium teaches infallibly with absolute, divinely sanctioned and grounded authority, with respect to faith and morals. AG-5 rules out that sort of dogmatism.
If so, where does religion fit in, since a commitment to theism, even one that guides one’s mode of life is not a religion but a private philosophic and moral stance? Is it your position that a life-shaping belief, in a theistic God renders the choice of, say, a particular religious tradition not of first importance? So, for example, one might simply be advised to follow the theistic tradition into which one was born, as long as it possesses doctrinal, ethical, and liturgical features that are not inimical to the existence of a deity as classically construed?
AG-5 is not a merely philosophical schema that excludes religion. I am thinking of it as allowing for religious deployment and development. And if religion is communal, then the schema would permit a development that was not merely private.
I would say that a life-shaping belief in God (which goes beyond the mere belief that God exists) does not require adherence to any extant religious tradition. But that would be a hard row to hoe for most. They would be well-advised to stick to the tradition in which they were raised — except perhaps for Islam which is more of a destructive political ideology than a religion, although for peaceful Muslims it is better than no religion.
So you, Vito, would be well-advised to remain within the Roman Catholic ambit, provided you can find a parish with a Latin mass that is not manned by pedophiles or mere social workers or theological know-nothings and that adheres to and attempts to transmit traditional teachings.
Your post raises many other questions and concerns, such as those touching on revelation, but I will stop here.
Yes it does, and I am willing continue the conversation "until death do us part." It is my firm belief that there is no better and more noble way to spend the lion's share of one's brief time here below than by addressing, reverentially but critically, the Great Questions. And that includes the question of the possibility and actuality of divine revelation and all the rest of the theological and philosophical conundra, including Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, Ascension, Assumption, and so on, until death which, we hope, will lift the curtain and bring us light.
And if it doesn't? Well then, we have spent our lives in a most excellent way and have lost nothing of value.
Berdyaev: Communism as a Form of Idolatry
David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, Touchstone, 1997, p. 55:
After the Russian Revolution of 1905, the philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev analyzed communism as a form of idolatry in a way that proved to be prophetic. Berdyaev traced the origins of what he called the Marxist “heresy” back to the tower of Babel. In that story, people had tried to achieve their own redemption — without a transcendent God — by building a ladder to heaven. Communists had a similar ambition. They had projected onto fallible beings godlike powers that would enable them to overcome their human fate. In do so, Berdyaev warned, the communists had created demons they would not be able to control.
The Barbarian Threat in Our Own Children
David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, Touchstone, 1997, p. 3:
Irving Kristol, who had second thoughts before me, has observed that every generation faces a barbarian threat in its own children, who need to be civilized. This is the perennial challenge: to teach our young the conditions of being human, of managing life’s tasks in a world that is (and must remain) forever imperfect. The refusal to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age.
And what a know-nothing 'liberal' and idolater of youth one would have to be to bow down before children such as Greta Thunberg and over-grown children such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her band of 'ocasionalists.'