Is David Horowitz Recovering from His Long Madness?
ADRIAN BLEIFUSS PRADOS
Probably not. Here he helpfully corrects wingnuts who equate Obama with Hitler when, actually, Obama is the new Neville Chamberlain. (Who hasn’t been accused of being Chamberlain these days? Nous sommes tous Chamberlain!)
Still, there are some signs that Horowitz may climb down from his lunacy to become a mere run-of-the-mill asshole. After watching Obama’s Cairo speech, I raced to the Frontpage website for what I had hoped would be some top-shelf, sputtering apoplexy (Frontpage is basically what you’d get if a Maoist newsletter adopted the politics of Fox News).
Instead I found a Horowitz piece titled “An American Leader Stands Up for His Country.” David the Lionheart, Foe of the Saracens, loved the speech and interpreted it, correctly I think, as a beautifully argued case for the legitimacy and goodness of American power and supremacy.
Horowitz:
Conservatives will make a great mistake if they fail to see this speech for what it was, and treat it as another round in the partisan food fight. It was not an appeasement our enemies. It was a forthright statement by an American leader in a Muslim capital explaining why America is in fact the global leader in those battles that matter most to people everywhere: freedom, equality, and peace.
Also worth reading is Horowitz’s moving tribute to his late daughter Sarah, who seems to have been a very remarkable person.
Well neoconservatives are generally more articulate than other forces on the Right. In general most of them aren’t “reactionaries”. This isn’t to complement them, but they at least attempt an analysis that has a grip on historical context and see themselves as agents of transformation.
Horowitz rightly critiqued the excesses and delusions of the New Left and “actual existing socialism”. I think a lot of his thinking on the Middle East and on the United States is grossly simplistic however and of course he has totally abandoned any criticism of America.
In seeing the United States as a progressive vehicle internationally, especially in the post-Cold War era, against “reactionaries”, he has aligned himself with our domestic reactionaries — the Christian Right and crypto-racist elements of the Republican Party.
Am I giving him too much undue credit by seeing him as a symptom of the Left’s decay and ineptitude?
He’s a farce compared with someone like Sorel. Having had a (most likely) Trotskyist background, he like Sorel preferred a sort of “action for action’s sake.” When he couldn’t get this from workers, he turned to other forces. In Sorel’s case, it was Italian fascism.
Horowitz had a sort of New Lefty-Maoist background, I think. I’m not sure, though. I know he edited Ramparts for some time and he was close with some members of the Black Panthers like Newton before a falling out based on his suspicions of Panther involvement with the murder of Betty Van Patter.
He seems like the type of guy that googles himself (hey I would too
) so maybe he’ll elucidate on this subject for us.
As I recall, after the election, or was it the inauguration, Horowitz made some statements to the effect that Obama is the president, and no he isn’t leading us into socialism. I wonder if because Horowitz actually was a leftist, he recognizes that Obama really isn’t one. He basically has a better grasp on reality.
Bhaskar, I stand corrected. I was thinking of him to be in the same lot as Irving Kristol and his ilk.
Horowitz was a close associate of Issac Deutscher in the ’60s. He was also close to Ralph Miliband at that time.
“Horowitz with another former Ramparts editor, Peter Collier, this little creep has written a series of best-selling portraits of ruling class families–The Rockefellers, The Fords, The Kennedys–and boasted in print about voting for Ronald Reagan. Horowitz and Collier say they once believed fervently in left causes and institutions (from the Soviet Union to the Black Panther Party), and when they discovered these institutions to be corrupt and murderous they had to denounce them and come out for the other side.
There are many flaws in this ‘logic.’ For openers, there aren’t just two sides in this world (the fake left and the cruel right). And sure it’s demoralizing to learn that the party that supposedly stands for equality is run by opportunists and actually stands for privilege. But that wouldn’t lead a real radical to endorse the all-out pursuit of privilege. It should lead you to call for a movement that’s serious about establishing equality. Horowitz and Collier were never radicals for a minute. Their goal was and is personal success. It’s no coincidence that they were ‘left’ in the ’60s and ‘right’ in the ’80s.”
And Deutscher was no longer a Trotskyist in the ’60s, right? I’ve read “The Prophet Outcast” which is great and that’s all I know of him.
Speaking of Miliband his sons are New Labour and getting caught in that Gordon Brown fiasco. To their credit they are on the “left-wing of New Labor,” which I suppose is the center as opposed to the center-right.
Deutscher thought the formation of the Trotskyist Fourth International was an error. He also thought that the USSR’s ruling bureaucracy would engage in self-reform after the death of Stalin. Both ideas put him outside of Trotskyism proper.
I don’t know how it is that sons of the late lamented Ralph Miliband grew up so pro-capitalist.
I wish the Miliband brothers would spare us their buzzwords and focus-group tested slogans and tell us, concretely, what they are doing to bring about the just and democratic society their father imagined for humanity’s future.
British Labor politicians are cleverer and more articulate than U.S. Democrats but their very beautiful patter can be more content free than the breeziest Obama speech.
I can’t blame the sons for not being anti-capitalists.
Labour had to figure out how to cope with electoral failings, a vanishing industrial proletariat and the hegemony of neoliberal thought in an era of globalization. They had to move somewhere. I don’t blame New Labour; even though they happily embraced every morsel of neoliberal dogma, it’s not like they were marching out of step with the rest of the world.
The idea of deregulation and allowing markets to flow freely while using social taxation to maintain chunks of the welfare state appealed to the middle class.
With the collapse of state socialism and its utter discrediting what alternative did anyone really have? The left alternative didn’t exist, its was just a mere depoliticized mess of identity politics reacting to forces far beyond its power. And to be honest the left didn’t mind this position. In the same way it glorified any and all “resistance” movements under the sun, the whole postmodernist notion to “changing the world without taking power” all demonstrated an inability of the left to interpret the world and come up to protagonistic solutions. Instead the anti-capitalistic left today has basically accepted capital, the idea of the nation state, etc etc, and merely aspires to put up resistance to it and set up little zones of autonomy from it. Obviously resistance for resistances sakes reinforces the paradigm that we will aways be the oppressed and they the oppressors.
It’s not a matter of creating parties of the left, it’s about creating viable alternatives and rallying the elements of the left and the radical segments of the trade unionship behind these programs. The calls of the radical left are so vague right now.
Of course the center-left right now does have a program and is trying to sell that program — a sort of neo-keynesianism, fair trade, cap and trade. They have mainstream unions, think tanks, media elements all pursuing this aim and center-left opinion is relatively united across the developed world.
The neoliberals of course created the most dominant world ideology in history that absolutely changed the world by taking power. They reasserted class power and promised (and to an extent) delivered on a world predicated upon freedoms (as opposed to democracy).
Right-reactionaries are reacting to the expansion of EU, the turmoil of the markets, the influx of immigration, multi-cultural inroads with well… reactionary ideology.
What I’m trying in a round about fashion was there really was no left for the sons to go to. There needs to be a coherent, somewhat united democratic, egalitarian program.
At least in the 1930s they knew what they wanted to do. Overthrow the bourgeoisie with workers and soldiers, establish Soviets, nationalize everything into a planned economy, etc etc. The Soviet Union was the “example”, the alternative that many radicals admired and the ruling class feared. What do we have now? There’s a reason why Labour voters stayed home or voted Green even if at points during their lifetimes they identified as socialists, some even Trotskyists.
(This is more in reference for the European situation, as for the United States, I think I’ll settle for universal health care and some higher education subsidies and call it a day.)
I’ll assume Bhaskar is being sarcastic, at least in his last sentence.
What could the Labour Party leadership have done? It could have supported the 1984-85 miners’ strike, for starters. While out of office it could have put up far more determined resistance to Thatcher’s desire to destroy the British labor movement. And in office the very least it could have overturned what are still the most restrictive labor laws in Western Europe. I don’t believe that it was an absolute necessity for the LP leadership to be so overtly hostile to the unions in order to govern. And even if it was, it was still a betrayal of the very basis of the LP.
Of course I was.
The miner’s strike predates New Labour’s total ascendency, back then even Militant Labour was nearing its peak. And of course Labour should’ve been more spirited against Thatcher, but that didn’t change the fact that the Keynesian model reached an impass in the 1970s. Even the Conservatives were wedded to it, which caused the spiraling inflation of the 70s in the UK.
There was also a groundswell of resentments against unions in the UK. So you had a combination of an electorate against you, the world economy against you, what where they suppose to do besides for figure out a way to get into office and figure out a model that attempted to at least preserve part of the aim of social justice but reconciled to neoliberal economic ideology.
Now we’ve seen a rejection of “third way” social democracy in Europe for a variety of reasons, there needs to be a left alternative, a post-capitalist one.
Of course Horowitz loves Obama – didn’t any of you morons check Obama’s voting record before election day? Let’s see, he voted to renew the Patriot Act, he voted to authorize every spending bill on Iraq (except one during the primaries just as Cliton did), Obama has openly discussed the possibility of “having” to attack Iran to prevent them from pulling a Dimona, Obama has continued the bailouts of our power criminal class, and – nothing has changed.
If you wanted change, you’d have voted for Mike Gravel or Ron Paul – they’re not lying scumbag politicians, but all you know about whose running for election is what the media tells you, or lies about.
Preach on, brother. You had me at ‘morons.’
None of us are Obama supporters, “Ricahrd”. And I love that Ron Paul, that reactionary nit-wit, is your ideal politician.
And what in the world is the “power criminal class”… do you mean the bourgeoisie?
“all you know about whose running for election is what the media tells you, or lies about.”
Right. You’re barking up the wrong tree, buddy; why don’t you take a good look around the site before you post.