article “Fidel, Pinochet and Me” is another attempt to confront my former comrades with the results to which our political advocacies had led. In this article, I compare the achievements of Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet, whom progressives loathed, to those of Cuba’s dictator Castro, whom they adored and whose excesses they excused. Comparing those histories provided a measure of progressives’ disconnect from reality in the service of a destructive illusion, and of their blindness to the human consequences of their ideas and actions. Shortly after publishing the article, I found myself on a radio show with Christopher Hitchens who at the time was one of the radical harassers of the terminally-ill Pinochet, calling for his arrest and extradition for crimes he had committed as Chile’s dictator decades before. When I pointed out that Pinochet’s dictatorship was no worse for Chileans than Castro’s was for Cubans, and arguably a lot better, Christopher burst out on air: “How dare you, how dare you!” I was taken aback by this fervor but replied in as amicable a tone as I could muster: “Christopher, aren’t we getting a little old for ‘how-dare-yous’?” This was the first time Christopher and I had spoken in nearly twenty years and it was to his credit that the next time we did we became friends.66
See “Defending Christopher” and note, Volume 2; also “The Two Christophers” in David Horowitz, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion.
It was a continuing source of fascination to me that progressives, who had been so demonstrably on the wrong side of history during the Cold War, were able to maintain their air of superiority when it was over, while simultaneously marginalizing conservatives in the academic and literary cultures they dominated. The essay “Marginalizing Conservative Ideas” is another facet of my ongoing effort to identify the differences between the two perspectives that lead to such different outcomes.
In the two articles “Can There Be A Decent Left” and “The Left and the Constitution,” I analyze the nature of the left by engaging the ideas of two of its more intellectually interesting figures, Michael Walzer and Hendrik Hertzberg. Regrettably, neither one responded to these overtures, a not uncommon occurrence. The nature of the left is also the subject of the three essays on “Neo-Communism,” which were written after the onset of the Iraq War—an American intervention vigorously opposed by almost the entire progressive spectrum, with notable but rare exceptions such as Hitchens and Paul Berman. (The latter was steadily moving from his earlier positions and was no longer an antagonist of mine.) That war proved to be a defining political crossroads, and I used the occasion to articulate my understanding of what the “post-Communist” left shared with its Communist precursors. The continuities of the left by now had become a central theme of my work.
“Neo-Communism,” a term I chose to characterize the left, failed to catch on, as I had suspected it would. This was a credit to leftists’ success in embargoing attempts to link them to their Communist predecessors by associating their critics with problematic figures like Senator Joseph McCarthy. The very use of the word “communist” is taken to be evidence of “McCarthyism.” But the effect of accepting the preferred euphemisms, such as “progressive” and “liberal” (a term applied by The New York Times even to card-carrying Communists like Angela Davis) has had the dual effect of obscuring their agendas and burying the lessons of their past. The second volume of this series, Progressives, returns to these issues.
The chapter “Discover The Networks” is the defense of an online encyclopedia of the left I created by that name, and a further attempt of mine to provide a taxonomy of the species.77 “Keeping an Eye on the Domestic Threat” is a further explication of this database, and thus another inquiry into the nature of the faith.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/
Part III
The essays in this section, “Slander as a Political Discourse,” address several attempts to distort the facts of my life in order to discredit my ideas and neutralize my criticisms of the left and its deeds. It includes an exchange provoked by Sidney Blumenthal’s libel suit against Matt Drudge, which throws light on the techniques leftists employ to defame and then quarantine critics, and reflects the particularly low state of political discourse at the time. I knew John Judis, the author of one of these attacks, when he was an editor of Socialist Revolution. Later he became an editor of The New Republic, and was able to write a fairly objective biography of William F. Buckley. The fact that he would advocate a boycott of the magazine Peter and I published is just one indication of the determination of progressives to create a wall of silence around our work and prevent us from reaching the next generation with what we had learned.
Part IV
This volume concludes with the texts of two talks I gave on autobiographical themes. The first was given over the fierce objections of my leftwing classmates to my 50th class reunion at Columbia College. In it I attempted to weigh the changes that had taken place over the course of the half-century since we had graduated, and explain the conservative viewpoint to an audience that remained steeped in the presumptions of a progressive culture. The second is a speech I gave at the annual dinner of the Zionist Organization of America, which provided me an opportunity to reflect on my identity as a Jew, my attitudes towards Israel and America, and to the war against them.
1See my autobiography, Radical Son (1997). Several shorter autobiographical testimonies that can be found in other books I have written: Destructive Generation (1989), The Politics of Bad Faith (1998), The End of Time (2005), A Cracking of the Heart (2009) and A Point in Time (2011).
2My reasons for concluding this are laid out in Radical Son, pp. 221–250.
3Cf. Stanley Kurtz, Radical-in-Chief
4This is a prominent theme of the essays contained in Volume 5 of this series, 9/11 and the “War on Terror.”
5 http://discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511
6See “Defending Christopher” and note, Volume 2; also “The Two Christophers” in David Horowitz, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion.
7 http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/
For most of my adult and professional life, I regarded myself as a man of the left. The identification was stronger than just politics. Ever since marching in my first May Day parade down New York’s Eighth Avenue 30 years ago, I had looked on myself as a soldier in an international class-struggle that would one day liberate all humanity from poverty, oppression, racism and war. It was a romantic conception to be sure, but then revolution as conceived in the Marxist and socialist canons is a romantic conception; it promises the fulfillment of hopes that are as old
