The Politics Of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America's Future - Softcover

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David Horowitz, the bestselling author of The Rockefellers, The Kennedys, and Radical Son, is the president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, and editor of the journal Heterodoxy. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Introduction: The Political Argument Revived

This book addresses a conflict that for two hundred years has dominated the political history of the West. It is a conflict that drives America's "culture wars" in the present and that provided the motive force behind the Cold War now past. But it is still referred to in terms that have their origins in the French Revolution, when radicals sat to the left in the National Assembly and their opponents to the right. Many will argue that we have moved beyond these political categories; several books and dozens of articles have appeared bearing the title "Beyond Left and Right," which seek to establish as much. It is widely accepted in the popular culture that we have entered a "post-ideological" age; in the political spectrum, for reasons I will examine, the Left itself has become all but invisible. The argument of this book, however, is that these epitaphs for the conflict that has dominated our epoch are premature: The terms "Left" and "Right" define political forces that have not only shaped modernity but continue to shape the post-Cold War, "postmodern" world. In particular, as I will show in chapter 6, "A Radical Holocaust," the ideas of the Left have dominated the handling of the AIDS epidemic, result-ing in the avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of young gay males.

It was during the French Revolution that the Left created the socialist and communist movements, whose agendas were to "complete" the transformation the revolution had begun. The efforts of these radicals culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, whose leaders saw themselves as the direct heirs of Robespierre and the Jacobins, and whose goal was an egalitarian state. But now the empires that socialists built have crashed ingloriously to earth. The catastrophe of the Soviet system has ended for all but the most obdurate the idea that a social plan can replace the market and produce abundance, or that government can abolish private property without also abolishing political freedom.

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.

It could also be argued that there has never been a true Right in America, a party committed to monarchy, with religious attachments to "blood and soil." Indeed, as a frontier nation, America has been so future-oriented that, until recently, an American conservatism seemed a contradiction in terms. The contemporary conservative movement emerged only in the 1950s, launching its first presidential bid with the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Yet, barely twenty-five years later, the end of Communism had already put the future of this movement in question. Many argued that American conservatism was so much a coalition of convenience -- the marriage of disparate philosophies united only by anti-Communist passion -- that it would not outlive its ideological adversary.

But the Right has survived its triumphs, even as the Left has outlived its defeats. A few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a leader of intellectual conservatism observed: "There is no 'after the Cold War' for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other." What Irving Kristol refers to in this passage as the "liberal ethos" is really not liberal, but the radical enterprise that now dresses itself up in "liberal" colors. Group collectivism, racial preferences, "substantive equality" and moral relativism -- these are the rallying themes of contemporary liberals. But they have little in common with the liberalism of the pre-Sixties era, or with its classical antecedents. In fact, they make up a radical creed.

Even so, many will contend that today no significant Left exists in America, outside the liberal arts faculties of universities or among the leadership of government unions. They will further claim that the "liberal ethos," to which Kristol refers, is indeed liberal in its agendas, that it aims at no more than a tempering of free-market individualism with social concerns. In this view, the domestic "cold war" is a political chimera, created by the Right to keep its (anti-Communist) faith alive.

It is the argument of this book that such conclusions are misguided. They confuse a momentary equilibrium in the political balance with the deeper forces that shape an epoch. It is true that the Left is rhetorically in retreat and for the moment has adopted more moderate self-descriptions. But that is hardly the same as surrendering its agendas or vacating the field of battle. It is more like adopting a political camouflage on entering a hostile terrain. In the era when Stalin was conquering Eastern Europe, American Communists were calling themselves "progressives" to avoid the taint that Stalinism had inflicted on them. But this was only a protective coloration. It did not involve the slightest change in their real commitments as Marxist radicals, or in their ultimate goals of overthrowing the American government and subverting its Constitution. Far from signaling the end of an anti-American radicalism, as the movements of the Sixties showed, this metamorphosis of Communists into progressives was just the beginning.

It is also true that many liberals, despite sharing a common political front with the Left, are not committed to radical agendas. They are pragmatic enough to tack in a conservative direction should the political wind shift. But by the same token, they are not anchored to any conservative principles that would hold them on course when the same wind shifts again.

Those who question the existence of a Left are influenced, in large part, by an optical illusion created by a culture that is instinctively protective of the Left and that reflects the long-standing dominion of socialist sentiments. In the present post-Communist moment, radicalism is so tainted by its complicity in recent crimes that merely to identify someone as a partisan of the Left would be a damaging accusation. Political bystanders, who may be vaguely sympathetic to leftist ideas or even neutral in the historical debate, will recoil instinctively from the left-wing label as from the stigma of an inquisition. No one wants to be perceived as a "McCarthyist." As a result, even self-avowed Communists like Angela Davis are regularly identified as "liberals" by the media, unless they themselves choose otherwise. The very idiom "to red-bait" shows how ingrained this universal reflex is. There is no comparable term to describe the hostile exposure of loyalties on the Right.

The same protective impulse is manifest in the standards used in public opinion surveys, which are calibrated on scales that range from "liberal" to "conservative" and "ultraconservative," but lack the balance of a "Left." Was the Clinton Administration's attempt to nationalize one-sixth of the economy inspired by socialist illusions? The question may or may not have an affirmative answer. But in the contemporary American culture it is ill-mannered to ask.

A recent report by Americans for Democratic Action shows that forty-seven Democratic House members in the 104th Congress voted to the left of Representative Bernie Sanders, who (alone among them) describes himself as a socialist. An even greater number of politicians who identify themselves as liberal, despite the demise of the socialist bloc, seem to think it unjust that some people earn more than others, a presumption that is the core of...