The edited text of Peter Baldwin's talk on David Horowitz appears below. If you would like to add a comment scroll to the bottom - robust disputation welcome.
Please note you need to log in or register to comment .
This is the second of two talks on the theme of ‘Turncoats’ – people who radically change their ideological allegiance over the course of a lifetime. Keith Windschuttle, who shifted from Left to Right, addressed us at the last talk, an edited version of which is now available on this web site.
For reasons of symmetry we had planned to have someone who went in the opposite direction, a much less common trajectory. Robert Manne seemed the obvious choice. He actually did a double shuffle, reflected in the name of his blog:
Left, Right, Left. Unfortunately he is having a hip operation and is therefore unable to travel from Melbourne.
We could not come up with a suitable alternative, so I volunteered to talk about the former American radical turned Right-wing activist David Horowitz who, for reasons I will outline, is one of the most interesting Turncoats.
I should say at the outset that I will be agreeing with much of Horowitz’s indictment of the Left. Indeed certain features of what passes for the Left nowadays I find positively repugnant. People familiar with my background as a Labor Left parliamentarian may be a bit surprised by this. I assure you that my criticisms of the Left will be made from what, to my mind, is an impeccably Left perspective. I might be accused, as the Maoists used to say, of ‘waving the red flag to oppose the red flag’.
More importantly, you may be reassured to hear that I do not reach the same ultimate conclusion as Horowitz. He wrote a response to an article titled
Can there be a Decent Left? by the American social-democratic thinker
Michael Walser in which he reaches the negative conclusion. Not only do I think there can be a decent Left, but that a decent Left is essential if there is to be a decent future – but for that hope to be realized, certain ideological toxins, including the ones that repelled Horowitz, need to be purged.
How allegiances form - and change
The term ‘Turncoat’ connotes something negative, suggesting betrayal, and is a synonym for ‘renegade’. This is definitely one of the downsides of changing one’s political ideology – the fracturing of old friendships, social networks, and often career opportunities. Lenin wrote a pamphlet titled
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky about someone who defected from revolutionary socialism to social democracy. In a similar vein, the subject of today’s talk had an article appear in the Village Voice titled
The Intellectual Life and the Renegade Horowitz. A risky business, becoming a Turncoat.
What motivates people to make this kind of transition? And who is virtuous – the person who sticks by their beliefs through thick and thin, or the person who is prepared to change? I suspect most people’s reaction depends on the end point of the transition. Someone who comes to your point of view has ‘finally come to his/her senses’. If not, motives might be impugned. Sometimes the abuse heaped on Turncoats could get quite colourful. I recall that when a young activist defected to the Right many years ago a Scottish Stalinist member of the Balmain Labor Party branch – yes there were such people – wanted to ‘send him little dog’s turds in match boxes’.
Motivations vary, of course. There are undoubtedly people who do it as a career choice. I can nominate about a dozen people off the top of my head who switched from Left to Right in the Labor Party for this reason. To be fair, some of these would argue along the lines ‘I really want to do something about housing (or some other policy – fill in the blank) and the best way to do that is to work with the people who have the power’. And sometimes ‘we don’t really take this Socialism stuff all that seriously do we?’ Being honest, these were quite powerful arguments, not easy to refute. Career opportunism can work the other way, of course, depending on context. It would be a brave academic seeking tenure who expressed open agreement with what Keith Windschuttle says about aboriginal history.
That said, all but the most bone-headed ideologues will concede that some people do actually change their mind, for carefully thought out reasons, or in response to accumulating evidence about the workability or consequences of political programs, or in response to experiences that cause them to see the world in a new way. As John Maynard Keynes
pithily put it when challenged for an alleged inconsistency: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do Sir?’
So if we drop the premise that being a Turncoat is necessarily a bad thing, motivated by base self-interest, we can turn to the interesting task of examining the factors that can motivate an ideological switch. A problem is that few Turncoats take the trouble to lay out in any detail their reasons. The subject of today’s talk is a notable exception.
But before turning to that it is worth spending a few moments reflecting on how ideological allegiances are formed in the first instance.
One of the more banal findings of research is that most people inherit the political and religious beliefs of their parents, or immediate family, or early mentors. Often these views are modified as people join a different social milieu, as when they go to university. Such viewpoints may be strongly or lightly held. Commitments may last a lifetime, or may be discarded as soon as someone moves out of one context and into another – from university to workplace, for example. The type of case we are mainly interested in for these talks is where strong commitments are formed but later rejected in favour of a contrary view held with equal conviction.
There may be a genetic component to this. The Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker draws attention in his book
The Blank Slate to studies of identical twins separated at birth and raised in different households. There seems to be a significant correlation in views about politics and religion between such twins, and next to no correlation between the attitudes of non-biologically related adoptive siblings raised in the same household.
I am not sure how much weight to attach to this research. But I suspect that, if it applies to anything, it applies to basic attitudes people hold toward equality and hierarchy, core value premises that undergird where people tend to place themselves on the ideological spectrum.
Amartya Sen argues we can define the ideological spectrum by how people or movements view equality. Sen has an interesting formulation in which all plausible political ideologies must favour equality in some space, the key issue being the choice of space – outcomes on the Left, formal rights on the Right, opportunities somewhere in between. On the Right,
Robert Nozick argues that if people have equal legal rights then any distributional outcome that arises from voluntary market transactions is inherently just – obviating concerns about distributional justice.
To people whose Leftism arises from an innate aversion to inequality – let’s call them Primordial Leftists – making a case for unequal outcomes based on the kind of theorizing Nozick does seems repugnant. It reminds me of a talk we have coming up about Kant’s view that any moral judgement based on sentiment
has no weight. I take the opposite view, that an innate revulsion for gross inequality, steep social hierarchies, people being expected to show deference to their ‘betters’, trumps abstract theorizing. The sort of reaction George Orwell expressed in
The Road to Wigan Pier. I feel an aversion to even genuine meritocracies, so I guess that makes me a Primordial Leftist.
That leaves huge room for argument about how to reconcile radically egalitarian impulses with inconvenient aspects of the real world, such as the fact that people vary greatly in their capacities, and the need for market signals and incentives that inexorably lead to inequality if an economy is to function efficiently. A great deal of Left wing thinking has centred on how to deal with these dilemmas – John Rawls’
difference principle that inequality is only justified if it gives the greatest benefit to the least well off, Michael Walser’s idea that inequality should be prevented from flowing from
one sphere, such as the marketplace to another such as political realm, that inequality should be quarantined.
Then there is the problem that policies that aim to reduce inequality might have the opposite effect, which takes us from the world of primordial values to empirical arguments about what works and what does not. Deliberating about this sort of issue honestly might land a Primordial Leftist on the ‘Right’ on some policy debate. Provided of course such a Leftist follows Keynes in thinking evidence trumps ideological conformity.
Primordial Leftist are criticized as ‘utopian’ by Marxists, who decry this concern about inequality as unscientific moralizing. The late distinguished Marxist theorist Gerard Cohen, and partial Turncoat, summed it up in this account of a discussion between his young self and his Communist Uncle Norman:
In response to Norman’s 'Don’t talk to me about morals', I said: 'But, Uncle Norman, you’re a life-long Communist. Surely your political activity reflects a strong moral commitment?' 'It’s nothing to do with morals,' he replied, his voice now rising in volume. 'I am fighting for my class!'
In his depreciation of morality, Uncle Norman was expressing, in vernacular form, a venerable, deep, and disastrously illuded Marxist self-conception. There were several reasons why questions of moral principle were brushed aside in the Marxist tradition… The most distinctive reason was that Marxism presented itself to itself from its inception as the consciousness of a struggle within the world, rather than as a set of ideals proposed to which the world was required to adjust itself. The consciousness of the world’s struggle would induce the world to consummate its struggle.
This hints at a different reason why people might be drawn to ideological Leftism: intellectual infatuation with the kind of theorizing that provides, or purports to provide, a comprehensive world view. Horowitz repeatedly asserts that Leftism is a religion. I agree with him to this extent: certain forms of Leftism can serve as a religion substitute, giving life meaning and purpose. In the
book I just quoted Cohen gives an extraordinarily clear and elegant account of why Marxism was such a powerful and seductive theory – and of what is wrong with it, especially of how its view of morality helped to rationalize some of the worst crimes in human history. Cohen, it should be noted, turned his back on Marxism and other forms of theorized Leftism while retaining a strong commitment to egalitarianism.
Someone might be drawn to a theorized Leftism without being a Primordial Leftist at all. Indeed, I have known a number of ‘Leftists’ with little in the way of concern for the underdog, for whom brutality in the pursuit of radical ends is something they find a bit thrilling. I suspect this is not unrelated to the weird infatuation of some in Left wing academia for Nietzsche, for whom Primordial Leftism would no doubt count as a form of ‘slave morality’.
It seems that, once strong ideological attachments are formed for whatever reason, people tend to stick to them with great tenacity and are highly resistant to contrary evidence. This phenomenon more pronounced, according to
some recent research among those with the best analytical skills who you might expect to be the most rational.
So what, having formed a strong ideological allegiance, might cause someone to break ranks? This brings me to Horowitz.
Red Diaper Baby to Rightist
David Horowitz was born in 1939 to parents who were activists in the American Communist Party, making him what the Americans term a ‘red diaper baby’. His own activism started at age nine when he participated in his first May Day rally. He even received praise for his agitation work among school children. After arriving at Berkeley in 1959, he was involved in putting out one of the first New Left magazines. He moved to London in 1963, where he joined the staff of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, which launched the
international tribunal that investigated alleged American war crimes in Vietnam.
He got involved with key figures in the British Left like Marxist theorist
Ralph Miliband and Trotsky biographer
Isaac Deutscher. He participated in some of the same intra-Marxist debates that Keith Windschuttle talked about at the last forum, and wrote
The Free World Colossus, a critique of American foreign policy during the Cold War. He seems to have made quite an impact: Miliband described Horowitz’s defection as ‘one of the two tragedies of the New Left’ and said his apostasy had inflicted an ‘emotional wound’.
Incidentally, among these other distinctions he shared a house for six months in 1964 with Lloyd Reinhardt on our own forum organizing committee. Lloyd recalls defending mainstream American liberalism against Horowitz’s revolutionary Marxism.
In 1968 Horowitz returned to the United States where he co-edited
Ramparts magazine along with Peter Collier, who also defected from the Left. Those who were around Left politics in the Vietnam War era will remember Ramparts. It was easily the most impressive of the radical journals of the time, had excellent production values and a huge circulation for a publication of this type in the US and worldwide. Horowitz also enjoyed considerable success as an author, with several biographies near the top of the New York Times best seller list. Things were going swimmingly.
So what happened? Horowitz has written about this at great length. He is currently working on a ten-volume compendium of material he has written over the years titled
The Black Book of the American Left, the first two volumes of which came out recently. Horowitz describes it as:
the work of someone born into the Left and condemned Ahab-like to pursue it in an attempt to comprehend it. Yet this is not so much a project of monomania, as my adversaries will undoubtedly suggest, but of discovery; an attempt not only to understand a movement, but to explore its roots in individual lives, including my own.
In the early 1970s Horowitz got involved with Black Panther Party figure
Huey P. Newton. The Panthers were operating a school for children of party members and, on Horowitz’s recommendation, hired a bookkeeper by the name of
Betty Van Patter. She went missing on 13 December 1974. Several weeks later her body was found, showing evidence of a severe beating.
Horowitz was convinced that Van Patter was murdered by the Panthers, though no-one was ever charged. Some years later Horowitz named the individual he thought mainly responsible. The impact on his life, and his view of politics, was profound:
The tragedy threw me into a personal crisis, creating an ideological turmoil that was compounded five months later by the bloodbath in Southeast Asia following the Communist victory in Vietnam. The state of distress into which I was thrown by these events was such that for more than a decade I did not engage in any political activities. During this period I took time to reflect on the beliefs that had guided me and then betrayed me, and I tried to figure out how I was going to function without them.
There we have it. The radical son of American Communists, a leading figure of the New Left, at age 35 rocked by a shocking event that causes him to question his entire political outlook, who drops out of political activism for a decade, then re-emerges as a supporter of Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s. A long life of political activism divided roughly equally between Left and Right.
I mentioned earlier that people tend to cling tenaciously to their fundamental beliefs and that, when challenged with new evidence, sharpen their arguments rather than re-evaluate them and that in this respect people with high-grade analytical skills are the worst offenders. Here we have someone who was so disturbed by a single incident, albeit a very nasty one, that it provoked a re-evaluation of his whole political position and ultimately defection to the opposite ideological pole. His intellectual artillery, his undoubted skills at analysis and advocacy, were turned around and trained on erstwhile colleagues.
On the face of it, this seems like a gross overreaction. Was it?
In terms of emotional impact, it is clear that Horowitz felt a degree of personal responsibility for bringing Betty Van Patter into the Panther’s orbit – indeed some on the Left tried to blame him on just that ground. But the Panthers are hardly representative of the Left as a whole. So why ditch the entire ideological position? Part of his answer was the way the Left reacted to the incident:
In retrospect, it is clear to me that the failure of the political culture and major media to take note of the Panthers’ crimes and be horrified by them, indeed the support the perpetrators received from the progressive ranks, was a small but ominous sign of the profound change that the Sixties Left had worked on the American political landscape.
He is pointing to a real pathology here, in my view. In those days the Panthers for a time acquired a fashionable aura and were
feted at soirees by the likes of composer Leonard Bernstein. Hob-knobbing with such types was a way to be daringly transgressive. Opposition to the established order and being ostensibly for the oppressed was sufficient to show the virtue of a movement or individuals. Vile, criminal behaviour could be overlooked, rationalized or justified.
This is not a new feature of the Left. During the 1930s there was no shortage of apologists for Stalin’s regime in the West. In addition to Communist Party members and obvious fellow-travellers, the ranks of Soviet apologists included celebrities like H.G. Wells and Sydney and Beatrice Webb. The latter wrote an appalling apologia for the regime titled
Soviet Communism – a New Civilization? the second edition of which, released in 1937 at the height of the great purges, omitted the question mark.
This tendency is a key part of Horowitz’s indictment of the Left. He maintains it is embedded in the Left’s DNA, persisting from old-style Communism to the New Left to contemporary progressivism. He broke with his parents’ Communist beliefs quite early, vowing not to repeat their mistake and become an apologist for tyranny. The New Left was supposed to represent a clean break from this sort of thing. Horowitz’s experience convinced him otherwise, that the New Left were willing to go along with a new set of villains, and as anti-anti-Communists to look benignly on the old one. Horowitz claims the collapse of Communism was actually a boon to the Western Left, removing the need to account for the obvious failures of the bureaucratic socialist model.
On this count, I agree with much of Horowitz’s indictment, for reasons I will now elaborate, using a number of examples drawn from around the English-speaking world.
Velvet Totalitarians
Let’s bring things up to date, starting with the contemporary Left’s odd choice of priorities. One of its singular obsessions nowadays, especially in academia, is the Israel/Palestine question. This is an important and complex issue, and I do not intend here to get into the debate about the historical rights and wrongs or the form an ultimate solution, if there is one, might take. I do note that there is something grotesquely disproportionate, bordering on derangement, about the level of attention the Left globally gives to the real or imagined misdeeds of the Israelis, giving little or no attention to far worse human rights abuses in other countries in the region and beyond – not least in the Palestinian territories.
I recently came across a
video on YouTube that exemplifies this pathology that features the American “postmodernist colossus” and progressive icon,
Judith Butler. The video has since been made 'private'.
In American humanities faculties some academics achieve a status that results in them being labelled academic ‘superstars’, enjoying huge prestige and correspondingly large salaries. Butler is one of the biggest superstars, and a very high profile promoter of the progressive agenda. She is renowned for her contributions to
Queer Theory and her impenetrable language, winning a satirical
Bad Writing Award for the latter. She is also one of the most prominent academic supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.
The YouTube video shows a Q and A session at Berkeley where she responds to a question about Hamas and Hezbollah in these terms:
Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements. It doesn’t stop those of us who are interested in non-violent politics from raising the question of whether there are other options besides violence.
Turn that over in your minds for a moment. Hamas, Hezbollah are progressive, on the Left. Both are known for their terrorist acts and their unshakeable commitment to the destruction of Israel. Forget about any two state solutions. In 1988 Hamas adopted a
Charter, which it has refused to rescind despite repeated calls to do so. You should take a look at this repulsive document – but make sure you have a sick bag ready to hand. Needless to say it calls for Israel’s destruction. But it is far worse than that. Article Seven invokes a Hadith that looks forward to the day when Muslims will fight the Jews, killing them all.
Embarrassed by the reaction to this Butler replied that she did not advocate supporting these organisations, but
continued to insist they be seen as part of the Left and therefore, presumably, deserving to be respected as such and engaged with by right-minded progressives. What would they have to do to make it into the Right, I wonder, beyond advocating genocide, killing of homosexuals and apostates, subjugation of women and strict imposition of Sharia law? Sheer insanity.
In any decent Left, or decent anything, this person’s credibility would be zero after that. But her superstar status is undimmed. In Germany she was recently offered the prestigious
Adorno Prize.
So organisations with genocidal intent get a pass into the Left on the strength of their opposition to “colonialism” and “imperialism”. But for this authority on Queer Studies among others, acceptance of gays is just a clever propaganda ploy – at least if the accepting party is the state of Israel. Butler spoke last year at a conference at the City University of New York on the subject of
Homonationalism and Pinkwashing. It seems the cunning Israelis are promoting their gay-friendly country, one of the top destinations in the world according to a survey of gay travelers, to confuse progressives about their oppression of the Palestinians. A number of gay activists wanted to present an alternative view but were excluded from the conference on specious grounds. The organizer of the conference
wrote to one:
You submitted a proposal to the conference that is contrary to the content of the conference. We will be talking about how a nationalistic apparatus uses “gay rights” to enforce racial dominance, globally. Your proposal claims that this does not happen in Israel. Therefore this is not the right conference for you.
So much for diversity of opinion and open debate of contending viewpoints. Voltaire eat your heart out. This, it seems, is the one form of diversity that is not to be tolerated. And when speakers visit campuses to challenge the politically correct canon their meetings are disrupted, blockaded, denied venues, they are shouted down and threatened.
Meanwhile in downtown Teheran homosexuals are
publicly lynched, raised slowly from cranes rather than hung in the normal manner to prolong their suffering. No conferences about that – but then I guess the Iranians might be considered part of the progressive Left. After all they are against colonialism, imperialism and Israel aren't they?
Contrast the treatment of Butler with that of Brendan Eich, the Mozilla CEO recently
hounded from office by a Twittermob after being exposed as having made a small private donation to a group opposed to gay marriage back in 2008. There was no suggestion from anyone that Eich pushed his views in the workplace, discriminated against or was unfriendly to gays in any way. A private gesture was enough to render Eich, who found gay marriage contrary to his Roman Catholic principles, unfit for employment.
You don’t have to agree with Eich – and I certainly don’t – to respect his right to support his side of the argument. Are we seeing a new McCarthyism?
My impression is that the Left has gotten much worse in this respect. I recall an analogous case back in the 1970s when, at a meeting of the NSW Labor Party Left faction, then Deputy State Premier Jack Ferguson, stalwart Leftist but a Roman Catholic, dissented from the faction’s pro-abortion position. He has voted down, but there was not the slightest suggestion he be drummed out of the group, or sanctioned in any way. It seems the old Communist-tinged Labor Left was more tolerant of heterodox opinions than its modern variant, in which everyone is expected to fall into lock-step on every issue.
I find this perplexing and deeply disconcerting. The Left seems incoherent, to the point of being schizoid, in how it tries to reconcile the ideas and values of the Radical Enlightenment, from which it sprung, with the new imperatives of multiculturalism and identity. In every ‘clash of correctnesses’ respect for culture and identity trumps other priorities - including free speech and the rights of women and gays. One of the most sinister aspects is the conflation of racism with criticism of cultures or religions. Within parts of the Left we even see alliances with radical Islamism.
Let me illustrate with a few recent vignettes drawn from the US, UK and Australia.
- First to the US. A few weeks ago Brandeis University, one of the most prestigious and liberal universities in the country rescinded an invitation it had extended to Ayaan Hirsi Ali to receive an honorary doctorate and give the Commencement address scheduled for May 18 this year. It did this in response to complaints from Left-wing bloggers, Islamic organisations, part of the faculty, and the student body. Many of you would be aware of the basic facts about Hirsi Ali. She was born into a Muslim Somali family, subject to genital mutilation as a girl and fled to the Netherlands to escape a forced marriage. She abandoned Islam and became one of its strongest critics and a strong supporter of Enlightenment values. She also championed the rights of women being abused in Islamic cultures.
- Jump across the Pond to the London School of Economics. In October last year two students from the LSE Atheist Secularist and Humanist Society attended a Freshers’ Fair wearing T-shirts imprinted with caricatures of Jesus and Mohammed. Following a complaint from Muslim students, they were surrounded by Student Union representatives and security guards and told to cover up the T-shirts or they would have to leave. The ban was supported by the university administration, specifically its Orwellian-sounding Legal and Compliance Team. After a public uproar the university backed down and apologized to the students.
- Now to Australia. In May last year the ANU student newspaper, Woroni, published a series of satirical infographics about the world’s major religions. No controversy arose from the ones about Catholicism, Scientology, Mormonism, and Judaism. However when one about Islam appeared the university’s International Students Department protested. The university responded by hauling the editors before the Chancery and demanding an apology and official public retraction of the piece, as well as removal of the online PDF version, on pain of disciplinary action up to academic exclusion and withdrawal of funding for the paper. In justifying its action, the university administration referred to the risk the graphic might gain traction on social media and harm the interests of the university. It also mentioned the risk of violent protests.
As Australian residents you might be surprised you missed the last one. It got next to no media coverage other than a short article in the
Australian newspaper and a
blog by Andrew Bolt. How lamentable that only a Right-wing blogger saw fit to comment, the Left rendered mute by fear of being labelled 'Islamophobic'. Student activists, who in former years would have risen in arms over something like this, were nowhere to be seen. The Woroni editors complied, under protest. One wrote an
article in Crikey that accused the administration of Islamophobia for raising the possibility of violence. Talk about Stockholm syndrome. Probably the only virtue of the university’s statement was its honesty on that score.
The head of Civil Liberties Australia Tim Vine actually
defended the decision:
If it is defamatory, if it inspires hatred against a segment of the university community, Muslim students for example, or if it is racially vilifying a particular group then the university has a justification to intervene in this circumstance.
Notice how satire of a religion becomes ‘racial vilification’ in this extraordinarily muddle-headed statement. A religion is a belief system, not an intrinsic feature of a person like race, gender or sexual preference. This type of response, from people who are supposed to be the guardians of free speech, is stifling discussion about some of the key challenges facing Australia and the West as a whole.
I fear for the future of free speech. What we see is a systematic – and highly successful – effort to constrain and delegitimise and in some cases outlaw criticism of one particular religion. There is a two pronged aspect to this: the nagging worry about actual violence reinforced by what someone has called the ‘velvet totalitarianism’ of political correctness. Not so velvet, actually. A candidate for the European Parliament was
arrested and charged with an offence carrying a possible two-year prison sentence in London just recently for publicly quoting Winston Churchill's observations on Islam in his book
The River War. And it doesn't just apply to strident criticism or satire. Channel 4 in the UK cancelled the showing of a documentary about the history of Islam that challenged aspects of the Islamic historical narrative after the presenter was
threatened.
In all these cases the Left is missing in action, if it is not actually supporting the censorship. The people worst served by this are those within those communities, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who choose to embrace Enlightenment values. Such people are regarded as anomalies and are treated with condescension by left-liberal public intellectuals like Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash - read Paul Berman's
devastating expose of this phenomenon. They just don't fit the narrative. We have the spectacle of Germaine Greer
defending female genital mutilation out of respect for cultural identity. In the UK you have an acknowledged epidemic of such mutilation, but not a single prosecution until a few weeks ago. I should note that there are honorable exceptions to this record of feminist acquiescence, such as the women who set up the
Centre for Secular Space in the UK. But overall the record is pretty dismal.
Horowitz’s main website has under its banner the words “Inside every liberal a totalitarian is screaming to get out”. Hyperbolic, of course, but I see what he is getting at.
What is the Left?
So having said all that I better move on to where I think Horowitz gets it wrong. Let’s start by asking what Horowitz means by ‘the Left’:
If one looks at almost any aspect of this movement—its acknowledged intellectual lineage, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Heidegger, Fanon, Gramsci, in sum, the totalitarian tradition—its analytic model for the democracies of the west, hierarchy and oppression—its redemptive agenda, social justice imposed by state-enforced leveling—and its enemy, imperialist America—one would be hard put to find a scintilla of difference from the Communist past.
Elsewhere he describes the Left as a kind of Gnostic religion:
Progressivism is fundamentally a religious faith, which meets the same eternal human needs traditional faiths do, and for that reason will be with us always. In the last analysis, the progressive faith is a Gnosticism that can only be held at bay, never finally beaten back to earth.
I suspect this way of thinking reflects his own beginnings as a revolutionary Marxist, steeped in arcane ideological debates. There is no doubt that ideologies can serve as a substitute religion for some people. Alisdair MacIntyre, the preeminent living Roman Catholic philosopher and a former Marxist – another Turncoat – wrote a book pointing to
structural parallels between Marxism and Christian eschatology.
However to taint the Left, in its entirety, with this kind of thinking is mistaken. Does it cover anyone who favours a somewhat larger public sector, more generous social welfare provisions, a more redistributive tax system, a more stimulatory fiscal policy, a more interventionist industry policy, universal health insurance cover? No doubt there are elements on the Left that meet Horowitz’s description – and as the examples I give earlier indicate a larger component in the often surreal world of modern academia. But to describe every left-liberal or social democrat in these terms, to imply that it is somehow embedded in the DNA of the Left, makes no sense.
Horowitz seems to reduce every position to an ‘ism’ so it fits in his mental template, including what he calls ‘Redistributionism’. To be a redistributionist – one who believes that greater equality should be an explicit goal of policy – is perfectly compatible with rejecting the totalitarian mindset of modern politically correct Leftism. Support of redistribution need not arise from any abstract theory but be based on a raw value judgement that extreme inequality is wrong backed by some reasonably persuasive empirical evidence that more equal societies on the whole go better. That is my view.
There have been more plausible attempts to characterize what separates Left from Right, starting with the debate between Edmund Bourke and Thomas Paine in the late eighteenth century. A recent attempt is Thomas Sowell’s book
A Conflict of Visions, where he tries to pick why it is that you find the same people lining up on the same side on a range of disparate, logically independent issues. Attempts like this generally point to a difference between an ‘open’ vision of social possibilities on the Left, and a ‘constrained’ one on the Right. The former is more favourable to grand schemes to re-order society; the latter is more respecting of evolved features of existing societies.
I don’t think this works either, nowadays. Most mainstream Leftists are what the Communists used to deride as ‘reformists’, who for the most part recognize the value of the existing legal-democratic order, the benefits of the market mechanism, the common law, and certainly don’t want to dump these features – but do want to make some adjustments. Even Edmund Bourke favoured that.
In his appraisal of the Left Horowitz commits an error endemic in ideologues of both Left and Right that I call ‘ideological packaging’. This is the phenomenon Thomas Sowell tries to understand whereby, by some process that after decades of involvement in politics I still find mysterious, policies on a variety of logically distinct issue areas – foreign policy, the economy, social policy, the environment, as well as overarching theories – are assembled into canonical packages that represent the Left or Right position.
Hence to be a proper Right-winger, you have to be a global warming sceptic, and to downplay environmental concerns. There is no logic to this – indeed given that the essence of conservatism is a respect for evolved structures, a healthy caution about messing with such a complex evolved structure as the earth’s climate should be a natural fit. Interestingly, one of the first public figures to
express concern about climate change was Margaret Thatcher who, whatever her other faults, was a trained scientist. For the Left to try and claim environmental concern as its exclusive property would be a huge mistake in my view.
In a similar vein, to be a proper Left-winger, according to the ideological packagers, it is not sufficient to favour policies to enhance equality. You have to buy into the full deal of cultural and identity politics and a corresponding foreign policy agenda that sanctifies any movement that purports to favour the oppressed, no matter how odious it is in practice. And woe betide anyone who wants to accept a mixed package. You have to buy the whole McDonald’s Happy Meal, with no substitutions allowed.
Towards a Decent Left
One of the articles in Horowitz’s Black Book is titled ‘Can there be a Decent Left?’ This is based on an exchange he had with the American political philosopher and social-democratic thinker Michael Walser. Needless to say, he concludes in the negative. I take a different view. But given the pathologies described earlier the question deserves to be taken seriously.
What do I mean by a Decent Left? It is not exactly rocket science, but it does require flushing a lot of ideological garbage down the drain. I believe the quest for some sort of theoretical profundity whether grounded in Marxism or the post-modernist drivel of modern academia, hampers rather than assists efforts to articulate a defensible Left position. There is a role for theorizing of the kind carried out by
Amartya Sen,
John Rawls and
Michael Walser that tries to clarify our understanding of equality and its relation to other concerns such as economic efficiency. Sadly there is much more interest in the buffoonish Slovenian Marxist
Slavoj Zizek who wants to ‘retest the Communist hypothesis’ without having anything coherent to say about how it could work in practice or past disasters avoided.
In my view a Decent Left should follow these principles:
First, it should acknowledge where the Conservatives got it right. Recognize, for example, you cannot have a modern economy without efficiently functioning markets, while acknowledging that markets alone will not deliver socially optimal outcomes. Drop the nonsense about Socialism, which still persists in the Australian Labor Party platform. That Socialism, in the sense we used to mean it, is not viable is a settled question for all but a handful of ideological diehards.
A Decent Left will join with Conservatives in vigorously defending core features of Enlightenment civilization – the rule of law, individual rights, democracy and freedom of speech. Be in the front ranks in insisting that such freedom extend to frank and open debate about the tenets of religions and cultures – and especially defending, protecting – and honouring – people who insist on their rights as individuals to dissent from and reject the cultural milieu into which they were born. No more weaselly apologies for censorship of the type we saw in the ANU incident.
We tend to take these core civilizational features that, ought to be the common property of Left and Right, for granted – we regard them as safe and secure. I do not think they are secure. We are moving into a world of renascent autocratic great powers and totalitarian movements that are pressuring Enlightenment civilization from within and without.
The key area of differentiation between a Decent Left and the conservatives is on the matter of equality. In this respect, the Left follows what the distinguished historian of the Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel, calls the
Radical Enlightenment as distinct from its mainstream variant, in committing to the idea that people should be treated as equals. David Horowitz calls this 'redistributionism', inseparable from other aspects of the Left world-view that he finds odious. This, in my view, is the basic flaw in his case.
A Decent Left will recognize the limitations on the extent to which this ideal can be realized. The pursuit of equality should be tempered by recognition that there are other high-value priorities, such as liberty and economic efficiency. Compromises will need to be made. Policies to promote equality need to be subjected to constant scrutiny to ensure they are actually achieving their goals at an acceptable cost. Too many well-intentioned Left-inspired policies have yielded paltry results at inordinate cost or have actually been counterproductive.
Acknowledging all this, a Decent Left should press to get equality back on the social and political agenda. It should not accept what many regard as an inexorable process for inequality of income and wealth to increase as a result of structural features of the modern economy. That there has been such a tendency since the late 1980s is not in doubt. According to the recent analysis by French economist Thomas Piketty, this is no temporary trend but an
innate feature of capitalist economies. He claims the compression of inequalities in the Western world over the three decades that followed the Second World War was the anomaly. The rich get richer – and the very richest get most of all.
This is a dystopian future that a decent Left must be committed to prevent.