How Important Is the Left?
By David Horowitz and Jacob Heilbrunn
Part 1: How
Important is the Left's Influence on American Politics?
By David Horowitz
and Jacob Heilbrunn
FrontPageMagazine.com
| May 6, 2005
This is the first of a
series of exchanges between Jacob Heilbrunn, an LA Times editorial writer and
author of a forthcoming book on neoconservatism, and David Horowitz to discuss
the themes of Horowitz’s book Unholy
Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left and DiscoverTheNetworks.org. -- The
Editors.
Dear David,
What prominent Washington think-tank head said this?
"Acquiring additional burdens by engaging in new wars of liberation is the
last thing the United States needs...The principal problem is the mistaken
belief that democracy is a talisman for all the world's ills, and that the
United States has a responsibility to promote democratic government wherever in
the world it is lacking." And what magazine editor just denounced the
neoconservatives for leading the U.S. into Iraq by deploring their
"bully-boy" tactics? The first quote is from Dimitri K. Simes, the
head of the Nixon Center; the second, from Rich Lowry, editor of the National
Review, in the new issue of the National Interest.
In your new book "Unholy Alliance," you do a
fabulous job of chronicling the nonsense emanating from certain precincts on
the American Left about the war on terror and the Bush administration. But you
radically inflate the importance of the Left and ignore the fact that the more
significant opposition to Bush administration policies may well be on the
traditional Right.
A stranger to the U.S. would receive the impression
that the Left has made substantial inroads into American society in recent
decades and that it is subverting the war on terror. According to Unholy
Alliance: "Why have American radicals actively obstructed the War on
Terror, thereby undermining the defense of the democracies of the West?"
You go on to devote a goodly amount of space to depicting and analyzing the
activities of historians like Howard Zinn, Eric Hobsbawm, Gerda Lerner and Eric
Foner, among others.
I very much doubt these names are familiar to most
Americans. The reason is that they have had almost no political impact. They
may enjoy high reputations in the academy, but their influence outside of it has
been nil. What government policies have any of these academics conceivably
shaped? Hobsbawm, as you note, still mourns the passing of the Soviet Union,
which is hardly a winning political program. The only one who has had a
scintilla of influence is Noam Chomsky, but only abroad in etiolated Leftist
circles. By contrast, academics like Victor Davis Hanson and Bernard Lewis, who
are close to vice-president Dick Cheney, clearly have. Conservatives, in many
ways, take fundamental principles and ideas more seriously than liberals.
Overlooked in all the denunciations of the alleged ignoramus George W. Bush is
that he takes beliefs and intellectual concepts more seriously than his
predecessor Bill Clinton.
Then there is the matter of Al Gore, who has morphed back
into a '60s liberal. You quite rightly note that Gore went into paroxysms over
the Iraq war, but your attempt to draw a link between the Left and the
Democratic Party is strained. Yes, Howard Dean and Moveon.org managed to
mobilize voters during the primary. But Gore is nowhere and Dean flamed out (in
his new incarnation as DNC head, he'll do everything he can to move to the
middle to curry favor with moderates for his next run). The party did not lurch
to the far Left in 2004; instead, it turned to its equivocator-in-chief John F.
Kerry to lead it back to the White House. Is Kerry a liberal? Absolutely. But a
hardened Leftist? No way. Kerry isn't interested in ideology, but in his
personal advancement.
Which brings us to back to the war on terror. You drub
Kerry for attacking the Patriot Act, but as today's Washington Post, among
other newspapers, points out, a Left-Right coalition is battling against
renewal of a number of its provisions. Indeed, as you state, on the eve of the
Iraq war "it took a Republican with unquestionable security credentials to
break the domestic silence and launch the first serious attack on the
administration's strategy"--Brent Scowcroft. Patrick J. Buchanan's
"American Conservative" has been coruscating in its criticism of the
Iraq war, featuring former neoconservatives like Owen Harries. Conservative
splits have also shown up at the venerable National Interest, where Francis
Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington have decamped to start their own magazine that
doesn't adhere as firmly to realist principles, which is to say they want a
fairly activist foreign policy as opposed to remaining aloof. Indeed, no one
regards Bush and his advisers with more horror than the realists in the GOP. In
short, if there is an unholy alliance, it's not on the Left with radical
Muslims. It's between the far Left and realist Right.
Best,
Jacob
***
Dear Jacob,
Thank you for agreeing to participate in this dialogue
and for launching it by asking the most important question that I knew
conservatives would have about my book and about its thesis that America is
threatened by an internal fifth column of Leftists who have formed a de
facto alliance with our radical Islamic enemies, who want this country to
lose the wars it is fighting with this enemy abroad, and who have exerted a
profound influence on the Democratic Party and.
Conservatives are generally so oblivious to (or
complacent in the face of) the actual threat posed by the political Left in
this country that they are willing to cede to Leftists the term “liberal.” This
greatly confuses the political discussion, including the one we are about to
have. So-called liberals, now include everyone who calls themselves
“progressive” (much the way my Communist parents habitually did) and even well
known communist hacks like Angela Davis and anti-American radicals like Tom
Hayden and Michael Moore. So-called liberals embrace the Old and Fellow
Traveling Lefts, – a political faction which included active supporters and
appeasers of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War and who with their credulous
fellow travelers in the Democratic Party – including Teddy Kennedy and John Kerry
-- mounted a massive nuclear freeze movement, which almost derailed the end of
the Cold War. This movement produced international demonstrations, which were
almost as big as the demonstrations against the war in Iraq, and were composed
of the same people and their descendants.
The term “liberal” under any reasonable definition
should be used to describe people who are tolerant and fair-minded and, who
believe in free market institutions and individual as opposed to group rights,
and who presumably would understand that America is not the root cause of
problems in the Arab Muslim world or elsewhere. There are liberals who would
fit this description in the Democratic Party leadership, Joe Lieberman
obviously comes to mind, but they are few and far between, and growing weaker
by the day. John Kerry is definitely an opportunist but then the anti-American
Left is capable of creating political opportunities that John Kerry has been
known to seize. When he returned to America after abandoning and then turning on
his comrades in Vietnam he joined the campaigns of the rabidly anti-American
Left and betrayed his country as surely as Jane Fonda did.
Even The New Republic, for years the chief
intellectual promoter of Al Gore, has sounded the alarm bell about the dominance
of “Wallacites” in the Democratic Party. This term refers to the Democratic
Party Leftists who defected to the Progressive Party in the 1948 election with
the agenda of defeating Harry Truman and his cold war policy of opposing
Stalin’s conquest of Eastern Europe. The analog to the opposition to George
Bush’s latter-day reincarnation of the Truman Doctrine is self-evident. The
Progressive Party of Henry Wallace was created and controlled by the Communist
Party. Wallace was himself no more a Communist than is John Kerry. He was an
opportunist, influenced by the Leftist culture and over his intellectual head.
Kerry is no different, except his moral character is a lot more defective.
The New Republic identifies MoveOn.org as a center of this Wallacite movement.
Moveon.org is a central element in the constellation of organizations funded by
George Soros, which is led by Clinton political operatives Harold Ickes and
John Podesta. Its media operation during the election, which coordinated the
major media of the anti-Bush campaign was headed by Bill Zimmerman and a man
who ran all Tom Hayden’s electoral campaigns. The get-out-the-vote apparatus of
the Democratic Party is controlled by Left-wing unions whose leaders are New
Left veterans and who have received hundreds of millions of dollars deployed
for the purpose. In other words, the Moveon.org/Soros/union nexus, which is
staffed and operated by the political Left, has achieved a lock on the main
funding sources and principal get-out-the-vote campaign of any national
candidate of the Democratic Party. (An extended description of this Shadow
Party, including all its organizations, funding, and personnel can be found
here at www.discoverthenetwork.org.)
Through his wife’s multimillion-dollar support for radical organizations (See
Ben Johnson’s “57 Varieties of Radical Causes at DiscoverTheNetwork.org) John
Kerry is himself embedded in this culture. But granting that his ambitions for
John Kerry are his greatest political mission, his opportunism – far from
causing him to move away from the magnetic field of the political Left will
draw him towards it.
One of the most depressing moments of my own political
life came when I was given a Ph.D. thesis to read whose subject was the
intellectual influences on American policy makers. In 1979, when the Sandinista
Marxists staged a coup against the democratic members of Nicaragua’s
revolutionary “junta” and established a pro-Soviet, Marxist dictatorship in
that country, Robert Pastor was the Latin American staff person to then
National Security Adviser Zbignew Brzezinski whose task it was to devise a
policy towards this new threat. Pastor advised Brzezinski and Brzezinksi
advised President Jimmy Carter not to intervene to save Nicaraguan democracy.
The result was a series of guerrilla wars in Central America as Cuban and
Nicaraguan supported Communist attempted to seize power.
Robert Porter told his interviewer that one of the
books that influenced him to advise his government not to intervene was
a book I myself had written called, The Free World Colossus. I had
written this book, which was published in 1965, as a 25-year old novice with no
formal historical training but with a rich background in the Communist and fellow-traveling
literature of writers who would be even more obscure to Jacob Heilbrunn than
Eric Hobsbawm and Gerda Lerner (e.g., Carl Marzani and D.F. Fleming). Of
course, in order to persuade others, outside the Left, I also employed the
writings of such well-known Left-liberals as Walter Lippmann. This gave my
analysis credibility. John Gerassi, a pro-Castro Marxist who was a book editor
at Newsweek, gave my anti-American tract a rave review. While my text blamed
America for the Cold War, and created the litany of America’s imperialist
crimes – Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam etc. – which became a standard trope in
thousands of Left-wing texts that followed, I was careful to criticize the
Soviet Union and thus distinguish myself from my Communist and pro-Communist
sources, and disarm potential critics of what I had written. I even posed as an
American patriot (of course I believed the pose) writing at the end of the book
that America should live up to its ideals. It would never have occurred me that
in opposing Communism America was in fact living up to its ideals.
I don’t flatter myself that my brilliance as foreign
policy auto-didact was so great that it shaped a crucial (and costly) foreign
policy decision more than a decade later. The power of my writing lay in the
power of a Left-wing culture, which is vastly underestimated by conservatives,
as Heilbrunn’s comments make clear (and Jacob Heilbrunn is one of the most
intelligent conservatives writing today). It is true, as Heilbrunn writes, that
conservatives take principles and intellectual arguments more seriously than do
their counterparts on the Left. That why they can be misled into thinking that
intellectual nonsense is self-evident to others and therefore destined for the
political dustbin. Those who think this way should re-read Mein Kampf
and consider how much trouble intellectual nonsense can cause in the political
world.
By Left-wing culture I mean a history of false
memories and ideologically scripted images and facts that can shape political
perspectives. This Left-wing culture was powerful enough to influence a
Roosevelt vice president, who was not a Communist to join forces with the
Communist Party to oppose a Cold War against the most monstrous regime in
history. It was powerful enough to shape the political thinking of Roosevelt’s
chief adviser Harry Hopkins (also no Communist), to subvert his country’s
security interests; his chief adviser at Yalta and in setting the up the UN,
Alger Hiss, who was a Soviet spy; his deputy secretary of the Treasury (itself
an important foreign policy post), Harry Dexter White; and top figures in the
State Department (Lauchlin Currie, John Stewart Service) who helped
the Chinese Communists to power.
And this was in an era when the Left’s institutional
base in American society was miniscule compared to what it is today. Communists
and fellow traveling Leftists on university faculties and in newspaper
editorial offices were few and far between. Today, people under the spell of
this culture dominate university faculties in key areas affecting national
policy and in developing the nation’s editors and journalists. On American
university faculties, there are tens of thousands of followers of Noam Chomsky,
Gerda, Lerner, Howard Zinn, Todd Gitlin, and even Michael Moore, whose
anti-American films have become college “texts,” along with many others who
share their culture of adversarial distrust and hatred towards the United
States and its purposes. From their positions in the political science
departments, history departments, journalism departments and other faculties
they are training the staffers of the Democratic Party and our national
security agencies, as well as occupants of the nation’s leading editorial and
media boardrooms.
Why do conservatives think that Jimmy Carter chose as
his National Security Adviser, Anthony Lake a New Leftist who regarded the
Khmer Rouge as benign reformers in Cambodia (much as Soviet apologist and State
Department adviser Owen Lattimore had once described Mao’s Communist followers
on the verge of seizing power in mainland China)? Why do they think Clinton
chose first Lake and then Sandy Berger, also a veteran of the anti-Vietnam War
Left to be his national security advisers and another Sixties fellow
traveler, Les Aspin, to be Secretary of Defense? Where do they think Clinton
energy secretary Hazel O’Leary who declassified 11 million pages of documents
on America’s nuclear tests with the statement that she wanted to “end the bomb
culture” got her nonsensical and dangerous and politically consequential views?
And where do conservatives think Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame and others
like them who surfaced to sabotage the President’s war for freedom in Iraq and
then became willing heroes of The Nation Left got their ideas?
The central section of my book Unholy Alliance,
to which Heilbrunn refers, is called “The Mind of the American Left.” This was
meant as an essay on a general mindset and I picked hugely influential
intellectual figures to demonstrate it, not intellectual who functioned as
direct advisers to political figures. It was not meant to show that Eric
Hobsbawm or Gerda Lerner or Noam Chomsky were actually advisers to Democratic
Party leaders. It was designed to describe the core views of the culture
of the Left that condemns America in its corporate essence, and therefore
counsels weakness, capitulation and retreat before America’s adversaries. It is
this culture that influences the political process.
What I showed in Unholy Alliance was that the
“critique” of America and the passions of disgust towards America, and the
“analysis” of the corporate and imperial motives of America are shared across
the Left-wing spectrum even by “moderates” like Todd Gitlin and are therefore
reflected in the politics of, for example, Howard Dean who is now the chairman
of the Democratic Party and opportunists – Left-wing opportunists I would say –
like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. I did not even mention Michael Moore, for
that matter, who as we all remember was honored by Jimmy Carter at the
Democratic Party convention, and whose film opening of Fahrenheit 9/11,
reflecting these views, was attended by Terry McAuliffe, Hillary Clinton and
other leaders of the Democratic Party. Sidney Blumenthal who came out of and
has never Left this culture of the “progressive” Left was in fact a close
Clinton political adviser, just as veteran Leftist Rob Borosage is close
political associate and ally of John Podesta and Harold Ickes.
In other words, while it may be true that Victor Davis
Hanson’s books are read by Vice President Cheney, you can be one hundred
percent sure that the Democratic Party establishment is thoroughly immersed in
the culture of Left-wing blame-and-distrust towards America, and seek-to-understand-and-sympathize-with-her-enemies
that Hobsbawm, Chomsky and Gitlin share. If this culture is not transmitted
directly in texts by them (and it is probably not) then it is transmitted in
texts by the thousands of popularizers of the ideas of the Left who write books
like The Free World Colossus, as I did, and make palatable to “liberals”
these corrosive and subversive ideas. The same ideas are taken to Democratic
Party institutions and to Washington by students trained in those ideas and
false historical memories at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Yale and the many
other Left-wing institutions, which are effectively think tanks of the Left.
Once it is understood that I am not referring to the
influence of particular individuals like Eric Hobsbawm, but to a Left-wing culture
of which he is representative and that dominates our university and media
culture, then the answer to Heilbrunn’s question is clear. Heilbrunn asks:
“What government policies have any of these academics conceivably shaped?” My
reply is what policies have they not shaped? It is this very culture that is
the source of the unprecedented divisions in American political life – the
so-called culture war, which is a war initiative by the Left through its
aggressions on the American judiciary, the American school system, and the
values of traditional American communities particularly in the Bible Belt and
rural America. Is there a civil rights issue, an abortion issue, a judicial
issue, an environmental issue, a health, education or welfare issue that has
not been shaped by the Left-wing rights, environmental and education
coalitions, universally misnamed “liberal special interest” groups? Has not the
entire post-Vietnam foreign policy of the United States leading up to and
including the war in Iraq been dramatically (and negatively) affected by
growing power of the Left euphemistically called the McGovern Democrats?
McGovern of course cut his eyeteeth in the Wallace campaign and really can’t be
said to have learned anything since.
An essay I wrote “How The
Left Undermined American Security Before 9/11,” whose details have been
repeated in a dozen other books, documents the assault on America’s national
intelligence apparatus, and military defenses by the Democratic Party under the
pressure of anti-military, anti-American radicals deeply entrenched in the
Party’s Left. John Kerry, Ted Kennedy and other leaders of this faction,
directly influenced by the culture I have described, played leading roles in
crippling America’s ability to defend itself before the World Trade Center
Attacks. The same Left, through its influence on the Howard Dean campaign led
to the most disturbing event in American history when a Democratic leadership
turned its back on a war it had supported and in the midst of the war conducted
a scorched earth campaign against a sitting commander-in-chief.
Heilbrunn points out that there are also many
distinguished conservatives who are critical of the war and wary of the
neo-conservatives enthusiasm for promoting reform in the Arab Muslim Middle
East. A few prominent conservatives have also joined the Left’s assault on the
Patriot Act. Heilbrunn wonders if this isn’t a more dangerous Unholy Alliance.
To the first I would say the difference between the
Brent Scowcroft and Dimitri Simes conservative critics and the critics on the
Left is that the conservatives are self-evidently patriots who confined their
dissent to the terms appropriate for a loyal opposition. Once the congressional
authorization was passed by a bi-partisan majority, Scowcroft confined his
comments to behind-the-scenes advice, while those conservatives who continued
to express themselves in public did so in a restrained manner that respected
the danger the nation was in and the fact that the President had gone through
the appropriate democratic process to get his policy authorized.
By contrast the Left showed no such restraint. Leaders
of the Democratic Party denounced the Bush as a man who deliberately lied to
get American soldiers killed, who “betrayed” the American people, and who
committed such impeachable crimes in behalf of a war that was “a fraud…
concocted in Texas” for the economic benefit of his cronies. This is not the
rhetoric of criticism. It is the rhetoric of political war, and in the midst of
a shooting war it was an effort to sabotage that effort -- an act of actual
betrayal unprecedented in American history. Colluding in this effort were the
major metropolitan newspapers led by the New York Times, which magnified
every American cost and setback and effectively conducted a psychological
warfare campaign against our own troops. In the battle for freedom in Iraq, the
American Left – and I include here the leadership of the Democratic Party and
the principal national media – contributed nothing to its success and did more
than can be easily forgiven in the hope that Operation Iraqi Liberation would
fail. The questions raised by conservative critics of the President’s policies
are important, but they fundamentally different from the criticisms raised by
the Left. Americans concerned about the future of their country will wish The
New Republic and Al From and Joe Lieberman success in trimming the sails of
the Party’s anti-military Left.
Similar points can be made in response to Heilbrunn’s
comments about the movement against the Patriot Act. One of whose founders of
the anti-Patriot coalition, it should be mentioned, was Palestinian terrorist
and former University of South Florida Professor, Sami al-Arian. The Left’s
agenda – set by al-Arian and his Committee for the Protection of Political
Freedom -- is to remove the Patriot Act’s designation of “material support for
terrorism” as a crime, on the grounds that to make it a crime infringes free
speech. It also wants to re-establish the wall between the FBI and the Central
Intelligence Agency that prevented the two agencies from communicating to
defend the country against terrorist threats. The actual agenda of these
Left-wing legal is to protect the hundreds of radical organizations in America
that are currently providing moral and material support to our terrorist
enemies. (These groups are documented and detailed on
www.discoverthenetwork.org)
A handful of conservatives have joined forces with
these Leftists – Bob Barr and Grover Norquist are two – to oppose aspects of
the Patriot Act, which are unrelated to these two clauses. I think the decision
of these conservatives to join a coalition which includes longtime Communist and
anti-American organizations like the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for
Constitutional Rights, as well as terrorist front groups like the Council on
American Islamic Relations (whose own executives have been arrested for
terrorist activities) is misguided and naïve. But the specific anti-Patriot Act
objections of conservatives also represent a very different line of criticism
from the agendas of the Left. I have also written extensively about this in Unholy
Alliance. The anti-Patriot Act Groups of the Left are identified and
described here in www.discoverthenetwork.org.
In sum, this coalition, which includes the willingness
of some conservatives, like Paul Craig Roberts and Lew Rockwell, to voice their
antiwar views in anti-American, pro-terrorist venues like Counterpunch.org and
antiwar.com can certainly be viewed as an Unholy Alliance. But at present this
is a marginal faction of the Right, whereas the Unholy Alliance of
anti-American Leftists and radical Islamists is already a force at the center
of the Democratic Party.
Best,
David Horowitz
Part 2: How Left is the Left, and How Important?
By David Horowitz
and Jacob Heilbrunn
FrontPageMagazine.com
| May 9, 2005
This is the
second of a series of exchanges between Jacob Heilbrunn, an LA Times editorial
writer and author of a forthcoming book on neoconservatism, and David Horowitz
to discuss the themes of Horowitz’s book Unholy Alliance: Radical
Islam and the American Left and DiscoverTheNetworks.org. -- The
Editors. (For the first exchange
in the series Click Here.)
Dear David,
You’re right: the Democratic
Party’s weakness on foreign policy has dogged it since the late 1960s. But to
liken its state today to the Henry Wallace challenge in 1948, as you do, is
rather overdrawn. Take a second look at Dwight MacDonald's classic work on
Wallace and it will remind you of what “Wallace-land” was all about. Wallace
really would have been pro-Soviet had he been elected, whereas a Dean presidency
would not have actively tried to treat with al-Qaeda. What's more, the
illusions that bedeviled western intellectuals about the “Soviet experiment”
simply do not exist when it comes to the Muslim world. At best, the defenders
of some of the more loathsome Arab regimes, or terrorist movements, can retreat
to moral relativism, blaming their ways on Western oppression. But this is a
rather different cup of tea from hailing Muslim fundamentalism as offering a
superior model to the western one, which is what the fellow-travelers, you
included, once did in the 1960s when it came to communism.
New Republic editor Peter Beinart, in the article
you mention, acknowledged that the parallel between Soviet communism and
fundamentalism is not exact, but I suspect, for dramatic purposes, he, like
you, somewhat exaggerates the power of Moveon.org and the like. It’s also not
clear to me how the organization would be purged from the Democrats, as Beinart
suggests. In any case, the
So where does this leave the
Democrats? Far from actively challenging the Bush presidency on foreign policy,
the Democrats simply seem adrift. Sure they may try to pick off a few
nominations such as John Bolton's, but where's the sustained and coherent
foreign policy alternative to Bush?
The surprising thing might be
how little opposition there has been to Bush. Unlike
No doubt the left briefly
flourished in the
Yet your apprehensions about
the left almost make it seem as though you believe the
Best,
Jacob
***
Dear Jacob,
The Wallacites were the
leftwing of the Democratic Party whose agendas (Communist-inspired anti-Cold
War politics) were driven by a radical ideology and whose purposes were at odds
with the
Every revolutionary cause
embraces the destruction of the status quo order along with a vision or -- in
the case of anti-capitalist revolutioinaries -- a fantasy of what would replace
it. Fifty years ago, the publication of the Khrushchev Report, a pronouncement
from the Communist Vatican itself revealed that the leader of the world
revolution was one of the greatest monsters in human history and socialism a
grim fiasco (though the Report itself did not draw the latter conclusion). When
the Report was leaked to the world by an Israeli spy, the Communist movement
began a rapid disintegration in the Western World and a “new left” based on the
same destructive assumptions was born.) But nothing has since replaced orthodox
Marxism or Communism as a coherent ideology and program for “progressives.”
What unites the global left today is the negative program and destructive
anti-capitalist and anti-Western themes of its utopian aspiration. (The
aspiration itself is psychologically indispensable to every leftist as the
testimonies I examine in Unholy Alliance
make clear.)
It is the negative program of
the Communist agenda that energizes and guides the contemporary left in its
mission to cripple – or in the case of moderate leftists like Howard Dean – to
diminish American power. “Progressives” see this power as a “root cause” of the
problems that beset the rest of the world and as the immediate cause of the
hostility of those actors in the world who oppose us. The negative program of
the left includes – sabotage of the globalization process; deconstruction of
the idea of American nationality and of the sense of national loyalty that
accompanies it; undermining of America’s borders; undermining of America’s
national security apparatus and military defenses; sabotaging of America’s
wars; rewriting of America’s Constitution to reflect its passions for group
rights and redistributionist agendas; politicizing and undermining America’s
independent judiciary system in order to carry out its social engineering
projects; politicizing of American education to make it an instrument of
anti-American doctrines; and in general measures that would weaken America in the
face of the terrorist threat, which it radically discounts or with which it
actively sympathizes.
It is for this reason that
the fact that “the illusions that bedeviled western intellectuals about the
‘Soviet experiment’ simply do not exist when it comes to the Muslim world,” is
only marginally relevant in understanding the threat from the left. The same is
true about the perception that American radicals don’t always hail “Muslim
fundamentalism as offering a superior model to the western one” (in their
solidarity with the Palestinian cause they seem to do just that).
The parallel that connects
the agendas of leftist secular radicals to those of the Islamic jihadists is that they both regard
America as the Great Satan (and Israel as the little Satan), namely, the root
cause of “social injustice” in the world. Depending on the degree of their
radicalism, therefore, they are intent on putting their weight in the political
scales (and thus in the war on terror) in the balance against us. Fellow travelers
like Howard Dean are just as likely to want to weaken American sovereignty in
favor of the United Nations, the World Court, or open borders; to weaken
America’s defenses or the military operation in Iraq which keeps the enemy off
balance; to weaken key anti-terror provisions of the Patriot Act, which has
criminalized material support for terror and strengthened domestic surveillance
programs; or to deny this nation an anti-missile defense system in favor of
mythical “arms control” arrangements. So while the parallel with the Wallacites
is not precise, it is a serviceable (and historically instructive and accurate)
model for understanding the internal threat to the American future from
America’s domestic fifth column.
In fact, a very large segment
of the American left, as noted in passing, does indeed support the actual
agendas of Islamic radicalism in the fifty-year Arab war against the State of
Israel. The PLO – broadly supported by American leftists, particularly in the
universities – is a radical Islamic organization, which has been the chief ally
of the Saddam regime, embraces terror as a political weapon and in 2000
rejected the offer of a Palestinian state and 97% of the West Bank and Gaza in
favor of an Islamic war of martyrdom against the infidel presence. The Second
Intifada was led by the al-Aqsa, Martyrs’ Brigade (created specifically by
Arafat for the occasion). Its agenda, like that of Hamas, now the most
important party in the Palestinian territories, is an Islamic republic
stretching from the Jordan to the sea.
In supporting the genocidal
program of the Palestinian cause, including the “Right of Return” which would
effectively obliterate the Jewish state, American radicals are quite
comfortable acting in solidarity with an Islamic terror movement,
notwithstanding the the apparent “contradiction” between their secularist
progressive agendas and the Islamo-fascist realities of the Arafat regime and
its heirs apparent (viz., Hamas). The Protestant churches in
Misunderstanding the agendas
of the left is half the story. Misunderstanding their influence is the other.
The problem presented by Moveon.org,
for example, is that it is an integral part of a Shadow Party (described
on DiscoverTheNetworks.org) which
includes the principal funding sources and get-out-the-vote organizations of
the Democratic Party. The Shadow Party integrates the radical left into the
heart of the Democrats’ political apparatus, and has recently elected Howard
Dean its Party Chair. It controls the machinery that nominates and elects
Democratic presidential candidates. The leftists of my generation who are
integrated into the leadership of this Shadow Party – among them Andrew
Stern (head of the SEIU),
Wade
Rathke (head of ACORN
and Gina
Glantz (co-founder of America
Coming Together) to name three – may have stock portfolios, but they are
even more intently focused on power than they ever were in the Sixties, and
their agendas are precisely those I described above.
The fact that the Democrats
don’t have a “sustained coherent foreign policy alternative to Bush” is a
direct consequence of the influence of a left whose agendas, as I have already
explained, are negative. Put in the mildest terms, they are unsupportive of
American purposes as defined by the system of free market capitalism and the
philosophy of individual rights.
The claim that there is
“little opposition” to Bush and that “the universities are not filled with
protests and
As for the universities, far
from being free of leftist politics, they are the principal base of support for
Islamic radicalism and Islamic terrorism in this country. (See Campus Support for Terrorism
at DiscoverTheNetworks.org) The recent
presidents of the Middle Eastern Studies Association which speaks for
academic specialists in the Middle East have been a series of Marxists and
apologists for Islamic terror. Hundreds of so-called
“Peace Studies” programs indoctrinate American students in the view
that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” and that America is
a racist, militarist, imperialist and terrorist state itself. The reality is
just the opposite of the claim that the left in America barely exists. The
hardened leftist culture that has existed in Europe for more than a hundred
years, has established a firm foothold in the American mainstream, and in
particular in the university culture for the first time in history. (And for
the first time, these facts are available for all to see at DiscoverTheNetworks.org)
In the first part
of this dialogue I showed how one book I wrote as a 25-year old leftist and a
complete novice in the field of foreign policy affected a crucial White House
decision. This decision allowed the Sandinista communists to seize power in
Nicaragua and set off a chain of Communist guerilla offensives in Central
America that occupied American foreign policy for the entire decade and may be
said to be the precursors of a trend of anti-American, Marxist regimes in the
hemisphere (Brazil and Venezuela are the two largest) whose potential threat to
American security is already so great they collectively are referred to as “the
Southern Front.” This does not support the view that American leftists, even
obscure ones as I was when I wrote The
Free World Colossus are “irrelevant.”
As I tried to explain in part
one of this dialogue, even the fact that Eric Hobsbawm an unregenerate
Communist is one of the most revered figures in the American historical
profession pales into insignificance beside the fact that the general view of
20th Century history that Hobsbawm represents is the absolutely
dominant view the curricula of American universities, the view in which
America’s next elite generation is being trained. How can this be
inconsequential? (BTW Hobsbawm is a reactionary, but so are all leftists, still
operating on the basis of long-discredited 19th Century doctrines
and 18th Century agendas. Being reactionary does not make one
irrelevant or “ridiculous” politically. Hitler and Saddam were intellectually
ridiculous. What difference did that make to their political fortunes?)
The left is not “reeling” or
insignificant as you describe it. (I suggest you take a long look at the
sections of DiscoverTheNetworks.org
called “Groups,”
The Shadow Party
and Academia before
writing again about the left. The left came within 120,000 votes in the state
of
Best,
David
Part 3: How
Significant is the Left? What is Legitimate Dissent?
By David Horowitz
and Jacob Heilbrunn
FrontPageMagazine.com
| May 10, 2005
This is the
third and final part of a series of exchanges between Jacob Heilbrunn, an
LA Times editorial writer and author of a forthcoming book on neoconservatism,
and David Horowitz to discuss the themes of Horowitz’s book Unholy
Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left and DiscoverTheNetworks.org. -- The Editors. (To see Part I Click here, for Part II Click here.)
Dear David,
Imagine this scenario: U.S.
universities declare that they will no longer host exchanges with Israeli
professors. It’s actually happening, but not here. As you might have seen, the
Brits, who have refined social anti-Semitism to a high art over the centuries,
are refusing to accept Israeli professors as guests. Now that, it seems to me,
is evidence of a hardened, despicable Left. If something like that were to
happen in the U.S., there would be an uproar. To me, it seems unthinkable, but
in Britain, it apparently isn't.
Another example: Gunter
Grass, in an op-ed that ran Sunday in the New York Times, declares that it's
imperative to struggle against the last form of totalitarianism. What does he
instance? No, not Islamic fascism, but, rather, those old leftist bugaboos,
globalism, and capitalism. The closest type of writer that the U.S. has to
Grass might be Norman Mailer, but he isn't seen as the moral conscience of the
nation, as Grass is in Germany. I mention these two cases simply because I am
firmly convinced that they highlight the differences, not the similarities,
between the U.S. and Europe when it comes to the left. The American left
consists of pipsqueaks compared to the bruisers of the European left. I bet one
reason for this is that the U.S. has never had a real socialist party on the
lines of Germany, France, or England. Sure, you can argue that those elite
European leftist influences have seeped into American academia, but not to the
extent you maintain. The fact that Dissent would publish the piece by
Markovits shows that at least one slice of the Left is not as wacky as you
complain. I'm sure that Markovits' analysis is on the mark, but I'd be amazed
if he believed that there is a significant left movement in the U.S., let alone
one steeped in nihilism.
Perhaps the reason I'm
skeptical of your thesis is because I got a good whiff of the left, student and
academic, when attending Oberlin College. As far as I could tell, they were
wallowing in nostalgia, but, ultimately, their own worst enemies. They were
completely ineffectual once off the college campus, where they did dominate.
But it is your generation that keeps this nonsense alive, particularly at elite
colleges, and I'm not convinced that there will be a horde of younger
professors gobbling up the ancient delusions propagated by their elders.
(Agreed: many Middle Eastern departments appear, at least on the face of it, to
adhere to myths and delusions about the Middle East, but that may be
romanticism about the Middle East than plain leftism, though I'm sure there is
a nasty admixture of the two.)
What I cannot understand is
why you are so exercised about the left. If there were an economic crash and
Iraq really went sour, then, and only then, would the left have a chance,
however slim, at power (remember that during Vietnam, the left was never even
popular in most of the country. But so far, conservatives are dominant: George
W. Bush is totally upending U.S. foreign policy, even denouncing the Yalta
agreement, going Ronald Reagan one better. This is astonishing stuff.
Indeed, the real story since
the 1960s is of how the right marched through the institutions of government
and influenced policy, while the left wasted its time in the universities.
There has been a real backlash, as you know, against the excesses of the 1960s,
but you seem to view the left as being as vibrant today as it was then.
I know that remnants of a
leftist culture exist in California, but they've gone by the wayside in the
rest of the country. Ohio's 120,000 votes? Give me a break. That sounds like
those Democrats parsing the numbers to show how Kerry really came close to
winning. No, he didn't. Bush crushed him.
Sure, there's will always be
a struggle in the Democrats between the purists who want to go left, and the
mainstream ones who want more palatable candidates. But moving hard left would
be a disaster for the Democrats. The left is a historical curiosity, a quaint
artifact, a relic, a dinosaur.
Who's the mad political
scientist who's going to take over this Jurassic Park and revive it?
Best,
Jacob
***
Dear Jacob,
After two rounds of this
conversation, with constant references to the massive data assembled at www.discoverthenetworks.org, which shows the left to be
the spearhead of the anti-Iraq war movement outside and inside the Democratic
Party; the Open Borders Lobby; the coalition against the Patriot Act (and other
anti-terror defenses); the leader of the principal academic professional
organizations and the controller of an academic curriculum which now
(predominantly) reflects its
anti-military, anti-capitalist, anti-globalist animus and even its sympathies
for Islamic radicalism (particularly in the West Bank and Gaza); the vanguard
of the redistributionist, rewrite-the-constitution-lobby in the areas of civil
liberties and civil rights; the recipient of the massive funding available
through university programs and the philanthropic institutions of the American
establishment (Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Tides, MacArthur, Pew, etc.); and
the moving force in the Shadow Party – a coalition of Soros-funded entities,
grassroots political organizations with a foothold in local communities across
the nation and the support of giant government unions controlled by Sixties
radicals – which selected and almost elected the Democratic Party candidate for
president in 2004, you write, “The left is a historical curiosity, a quaint
artifact, a relic, a dinosaur.”
What is really a curiosity is
this statement. Have you spent time actually reading the information available
at www.discoverthenetworks.org?
Here’s a corrective to your conservative complacency: Consider that forty-five
years ago the President of the United States was a Democrat hailed by liberals,
like Arthur Schlesinger, who was a hawk on defense, a militant anti-Communist,
the promoter of a capital gains tax cut and a balanced budget, who appointed
Republicans to his three top cabinet posts (State, Treasury, and Defense).
Today Democratic Party “liberals” (Schlesinger included) are rabid opponents of
a war that has freed thirty million Iraqis and that their leaders (Clinton and
Berger) called for and their legislators authorized by a majority vote. Far
from being a relic the political left acting in 2004 through the Dean campaign
has been able to transform the Democratic Party into it a party of opposition
to American “imperialism” that it can embrace. Domestically, the situation is
parallel: Forty years ago a Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey stood on
the floor of the Senate and swore he would eat the affirmative action bill if
it led to racial preferences. Today Democrats equate opposition to racial preferences with racism itself.
Forty-five years ago the New York Times refused to print
information it had acquired about the impending invasion of Castro’s Cuba,
which Kennedy was planning with the intention of thwarting a Communist
dictatorship on the island. The Times
withheld the information about Kennedy’s planned attack on the grounds of its
concern for national security. Just this week, by contrast, in the midst of a
war on terror in which America itself has been attacked and of continuing war
of liberation in Iraq (which the current Times
editors refer to as “unjustified”) the New
York Times printed the following above-the-fold news story: “The
concentration of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan limits the Pentagon’s
ability to deal with other potential armed conflicts, the military’s highest ranking
officer reported to Congress on Monday.” (New
York Times, Tuesday, May 3, 2005)
Why, you might ask, would the
military’s highest ranking officer want to inform potential enemies or
adversarial powers like North Korea, Russia, China, -- to take three obvious
examples – that America’s military forces might have difficulty dealing with
challenges in other parts of the world, say the straits of Taiwan, to pick an
obvious case? In fact, the military’s highest-ranking official had no intention
of informing other nations of our current predicament. The report he provided
to select members Congress was classified.
Here is how the Times described on its front page the
way in which this classified report came into the hands of its editors who then
decided to report it to the world: “After a half dozen Pentagon civilian and
military officials discussed the outlines of the report on Monday, as it was
delivered officially to Congress, one government official provided a copy to
the New York Times. The officials who
discussed the assessment demanded anonymity because it is a classified
document.”
In case you were wondering,
it is a violation of the Espionage Act -- and tantamount to treason -- for a
“government official” to provide newspaper reporters with copies of classified
government documents. It is a betrayal of national security (and a violation of
national security laws) for the New York
Times to put this information on its front pages (or on any of its pages).
Yet no one in the rest of the media (or nation) seems to have noticed, and no
one seems to have cared. The government for its part, long ago learned the
political costs of attempting to defend national security interests against the
claims of institutions like the New York
Times for “freedom of the press.” In a media culture dominated by the left,
better to let the information go. That’s one reason why no one has been charged
in the United States with treason since Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose. That is a
raw measure of how profoundly the political left – which has assaulted the very
notion of national security for decades – has transformed political culture of
this nation. That is how a man who had falsely accused his comrades-in-arms and
his own government of systematic war crimes “at the highest levels” and had
spent twenty years in the Senate voting to cut military and intelligence
budgets was able to be nominated by his party as a presidential candidate and
go on to receive 59 million votes.
Yes British academics are
more brazenly anti-Semitic than their American counterparts, but then Jews in
America are far more numerous and influential than Jews in Britain and they are
supported by an even more powerful ally in the Christian right, which doesn’t
exist in England or the rest of Europe having been relegated to political
insignificance along with religion as such. On the other hand the virus of
anti-Semitism is more virulent on the faculties of elite American universities
than it has ever been; the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion can now be taught as fact at universities like UCLA and
protected by the current tenets of “academic freedom.” Where Jewish students
can be harassed at will (Columbia) and attacked as “McCarthyites” if they
complain. Groups in solidarity with terrorists in the West Bank and Gaza can
openly organize recruitment conferences with university support (as they have
at Berkeley, Michigan, Ohio State and Duke and will next year at the University
of Wisconsin).
Yes it is true we have no
Gunter Grass, but we have raving leftists like Barbara Kingsolver, E.L.
Doctorow, Jane Smiley and others who also find George Bush and American
democracy more threatening than Islamofascism and who reach a comparable
audience of credulous intellects. We have leftists in Hollywood who can launch
a summer epic on the Crusades in which the Christians are the bad guys and the
Muslims, whose holy book instructs the faithful to kill unbelievers, in
contrast to the holy book of any other religion. (Yes I know there are peaceful
Muslims, but Saladin and his armies weren’t among them.)
Your reference to the
European socialist tradition shows you haven’t understood the nature of the
left in its post-Communist incarnation. You’re still worried about a crash,
which would allow socialists to advance their economic agendas, as though this
were the 1930s and Stalin was still alive. The left is not defined any longer
by a socialist plan. Its agenda is negative and nihilistic: bring the Great
Satan down. Its agendas are to cripple the economy with environmental regulations;
hogtie the intelligence services with unrealistic constraints; undermine the
military with constant lies; and tie the hands of the President in responding
to threats. The left sees itself as an abettor of anti-American forces
everywhere: in Europe, in the Muslim world, in the West Bank and Fallujah, and
also among old style Marxists in Venezuela and Brazil. The left is an “anti”
force, and what it is anti- is everything that makes this country strong and
secure.
You misunderstand the power
of the intellectual left as well. The fact that one writer in a magazine whose
circulation is less than ten thousand regrets what the western left has become,
pales into insignificance in comparison to the thousands of university faculty
who share the views of Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill that America is the Nazi
state revived and who impose them on their students; who show the films of
Michael Moore to prove that America is the villain in the “non-existent” war on
terror, and who recruit students to the agendas that follow from these myths.
Contrary to your assertions,
the left is in fact more vibrant and more powerful than it has ever been. How
else did it manage to put a million activists in the streets to prevent the
United States from taking down a monstrous regime and liberating millions of
Third World people, and did so (unlike Vietnam) in the absence of a draft?
One of the great triumphs of
the left by the way is the ability to make people like yourself think that when
it comes to attacking America in the middle of a war anything goes, and that
any attempt to identify “critics” who actually hate us is an attempt to stifle
dissent itself. Thus it’s okay in time of war when Americans are in harm’s way
to lie by denouncing the President for deceiving the American people into
fighting an unjust war of “occupation,” even though John Kerry and other
leaders of the opposition had access to the same intelligence reports as did
George Bush and voted to authorize the use of force. It’s okay to demoralize
America’s troops in the field with such lies, and encourage America’s enemies
on the field of battle. I don’t buy it Jacob. I don’t know of any nation in the
history of nations that has.
One of the principal leaders
of the civil liberties coalition against the Patriot Act and its predecessor,
the 1996 Clinton Anti-Terrorism Act, was at the same time a leader of one of
the world’s most lethal terrorist organizations and an American university
professor as well. For eight years after his terrorist activities were exposed
by the Miami Herald and others in
1995, and while he continued to conduct them, Sami al-Arian was supported and
defended by what is erroneously called the “liberal” side of the political
spectrum: The Nation, Salon.com, the American Civil Liberties
Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Association of
University Professors, the Middle Eastern Studies Association and similar
groups all worked with Sami al-Arian in attacking the Patriot Act and denounced
his critics for attempting to stifle legitimate dissent.
In fact Sami al-Arian was a
bloodthirsty killer of innocent men, women and children (mainly Jews). He was
eventually exposed on national TV on the O’Reilly Factor, when O’Reilly played
an FBI tape of one of his bloodthirsty speeches for all Americans to hear: “Let
us damn America. . . . Let us damn [her] allies until death.” Yet even after he
was exposed by O’Reilly, al-Arian continued to be supported by and a respected
colleague of politically sophisticated American “liberals” who of course didn’t
believe his right wing detractors (who were the “real” threat). Instead they defended him as a Muslim who
was being persecuted for his religious faith by forces who only wanted to repress
criticism and dissent.
In other words, my friend,
these distinctions are important. If you ignore them you will reap a whirlwind
of harm.
The line you ask for (when is dissent legitimate?) is this: if you show that you wish your country well, and you observe the restraints that are obvious and decent -- like not publishing damaging information that has been classified by a government that is democratically elected and is operating under democratic constraints -- then your criticism is actually a form of patriotism. If not, not.