Romance, Fantasy, Arrogance, Blindness: An Inside Look at the Communist New Left

David Horowitz’s 1997 autobiography Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey has just come out in a second edition. The book provides many insights not just into the thinking of both his Old Left parents and Horowitz himself and his New Left colleagues, but also into who and what is influencing us today. Here is Horowitz’s summary of the communist dream:

Marxism was about a new creation that would begin with a “new man” and “new woman.” It was about remaking the world. About going back to Eden and beginning again. It was the romance to end all romances (p. 112).

Romance, fantasy, arrogance, blindness—these are words used by Horowitz to describe the delusions he and his comrades suffered when worshiping the “revolutionary fantasy” of communism during the 1960s and ‘70s. “Like all radicals,” says Horowitz, “we were intoxicated by our own virtue” (p. 299)

Horowitz was a founding member of the New Left while a graduate student from 1960-62 at the University of California, Berkeley. For many years he was an editor of the New Left’s flagship Ramparts magazine* and as a result knew all the players in the New Left. By the 1980s he developed “second thoughts,” as he calls his move away from the Left. Today he is an outspoken conservative.

Horowitz’s parents were unapologetic members of the American Communist Party, that is, until 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech about the crimes of Stalin leaked to the West.** Up to that point, Party members had blinded themselves to the rumors of Stalin’s purges, show trials, and executions. Horowitz’s parents, after Khruschev’s revelations, left the Party, thereafter calling themselves Progressives. About two-thirds of the Party’s members also left, losing decades old friendships, as Horowitz points out, and becoming “non-existent” to the remaining members.

The New Left, says Horowitz, was a movement of Marxist revolutionaries founded to save communism from Stalin. Fidel Castro was one of their heroes who was doing communism “the right way.” John F. Kennedy, invader of Cuba and agent of the “imperialistic” ruling class, was not a hero, though a new leftist years later rewrote history to claim they all loved JFK.*** The New Left throughout the 1960s was opposed to the Vietnam war and viewed the Black Panther Party as “vanguard of the revolution” and “America’s Vietcong.”

The new leftist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), spearheaded by Tom Hayden, came into prominence in the 1960s, eventually morphing in the ‘70s into the Weather Underground. A founding SDS statement coined the words “participatory democracy” as code for “soviet democracy.” In my undergraduate days, the former was promoted as a fuzzy form of direct democracy. In fact, a soviet was an elected, usually local, organization in the USSR, thus making communism another form of democracy! SDS’ers believed in and meant communism.

Hayden died in 2016 but in his SDS days was instrumental in causing the Newark riots of 1967 and organized the violent protests at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago (pp. 184-88). The 1968 riots, according to Horowitz, are what succeeded in allowing the Left to take over the Democratic Party, which it today still controls. In Hayden’s post-SDS life he became a California state politician and husband of actress Jane Fonda.

The Weather Underground made revolution explicit with many bombings of banks and government buildings, including the US Capitol in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were two early leaders. Both are now retired, Ayers from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Dohrn from Northwestern University Law School. Ayers, Horowitz said in a recent article, ghost wrote Barack Obama’s autobiography and “mentored the insurrectionary founders of Black Lives Matter.”

Though Marx thought capitalism would eventually collapse on its own, later revolutionaries, starting probably with Lenin, sought to help the collapse along. Hence, the remorseless bombings of the Weather Underground and today’s deliberately blind eyes to the ravaging of civilization by such violent organizations as Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

The Black Panther Party in the 1960s was founded by street thugs, led by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver, but to the new leftists, including Horowitz, Panthers were the oppressed minority who dared to rise up and fight (in some cases with guns) with an “in your face” activism.****

Horowitz in the early ‘70s collaborated with the Panthers to found a school in the slums of Oakland, California, and recommended a white woman, Betty Van Patter, who had worked for Ramparts magazine, to do the school’s books. Unfortunate for Van Patter, she asked too many questions about the Panther’s finances and ended up in San Francisco Bay. The Oakland District Attorney's Office could not prove who committed the murder, but suspected a Panther named Flores Forbes.

Van Patter’s death in 1974, along with suspicions Horowitz was beginning to have about the Panthers, was the turning point for him to leave the Left. He had been cautious in conversations with Newton, but did not suspect the worst. Van Patter’s daughter at the time, as well as many years later, could not believe at the time and years later that such an “idealistic” group of people would do such a thing.

Horowitz in the new Preface to Radical Son suspects that Forbes was the murderer, or knows who committed the crime, and that Newton likely ordered it. An internal group of enforcers to torture and murder anyone who did not toe the Panther Party line are believed to be guilty of at least a dozen murders. The enforcers were called, interestingly for today’s times, The Squad. Forbes was its head.

Today Flores Forbes is Associate Vice President of Strategic Planning and Program Implementation at Columbia University.

After much questioning about communism and socialism, especially about how the “noble ideal” in practice always seems to end up with millions of dead people, Horowitz concluded that the ideal itself was flawed. The aim of communism and socialism was to abolish private property and make everyone equal. But, Horowitz identified:

The abolition of property was really the abolition of private association and civil society, and of the bourgeois rights they underpinned. Socialist unity could only be achieved as a totalitarian solution (p. 308).

And everyone is not equal in nature. Who is to decide how everyone is to be made equal, asks Horowitz? A “ruling caste,” he concludes, seems always to arise.

Horowitz near the end of his book even cites Austrian economists F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises who demonstrated the impossibility of socialism ever working, especially in the determination of prices independently of the market.

To use Hayek’s words, though Horowitz does not, the leaders of the “noble ideal” have always suffered a fatal conceit to think they had a god’s-eye view and a god’s omniscience to plan an entire social and economic system.

The “revolutionary fantasy” of socialism does not work. It only destroys.


* When Ramparts closed in 1975, several editors, though not Horowitz, went on to found Mother Jones.

** Horowitz’s father in 1935 on a trip for the Party wrote to his soon-to-be wife about the people of Colorado. He said that he felt like he was in a foreign land and that “most of us [Party members] aren’t really ‘patriotic,’ I mean at bottom deeply fond of the country and the people” (pp. 30-31).

*** “We were Marxist revolutionaries when we began the New Left and would have scorned anyone who supported Kennedy in the way [Todd] Gitlin suggests” (p. 115, Horowitz’s emphasis). Todd Gitlin today is professor of journalism and sociology and head of the doctoral program in communications at Columbia University.

**** The Left’s association with African Americans goes back at least to the 1930s. See this article about African American Manning Johnson who from 1930-39 was a member of the American Communist Party but left it because he saw that the communists “were using black Americans as pawns in their hope that a ‘bloody racial conflict would split America.’” The notion of  “systemic racism” is a concept of the Left and goes back to that time.
 

Condescension, Intelligence Defense Values—and the DeplorablesAnd Oh Yes. The Putsch Mentality

Okay. Several times I have said, “Politics is a bore” (Applying Principles, pp. 36-39, 62-65, 113-117), but since November 8, 2016, I have to admit that politics has been anything but that.

My entertainment has come from the calamitous meltdown, panic-stricken hostility, and intellectual bankruptcy of our current president’s opponents, the Marxist Progressive Left. New ideas, they do not have.

Not that our current president has any new or particularly good ideas. He won by tapping into the American sense of life—the one that says, “you can’t push me around, fella” and “my money’s as good as yours!” The deplorables of middle America finally found someone who did not condescend to them. Condescension of the bi-coastal elites, most of whom have never been to, let alone lived in, middle America is what won the election for our current president.

Denigration and ridicule of anyone who lives in or comes from the hinterlands are all too frequent. “Fly-over country” is just the most generic dismissal. As a small-towner from Kansas, I still hear this gem of intellectual inquiry: “Do you know Dorothy?” followed by a belly laugh. My reply that my mother’s name was Dorothy usually produces another belly laugh, albeit this time, though not always, showing a touch of embarrassment for asking a stupid question.

The source of the Left’s condescension is their anti-capitalist theory of human nature and consequent intelligence defense-value.

Government control of person and property—by nationalization and expropriation as the socialist variant and by heavy regulation and some expropriation as the fascist version—assumes the people, in the US’s case, the deplorables, are too weak, stupid, and ignorant to make decisions for themselves. Why else, my wife asked recently, would they insist on government controlled education? And many other things dished out at the point of a gun.*

The deplorables, say these Leftists, must listen to and follow us, the intellectually blessed elites who possess a near-God’s-eye omniscience to regulate and control our country, not to mention the deplorables’ lives. The intelligence defense-value follows from this. In a nutshell it says, “We’re smarter than you, so that gives us the right to tell you what to do. After all, it is for your own good.”

Defense-values (chapters 3 and 10)  are a pseudo-self-esteem that attempts to assuage insecurities. Boasters and compulsive talkers are other examples. Defense-values, however, do not work and they sometimes lead to a conceit—a fatal one, as Hayek put it—to claim that God’s-eye view of the world to control whole societies. Because control and regulation only lead to destruction, we are left with what we have today, a “planned chaos” of rent-seeking, government-by-lobby, and in some cases, collapsing mixed economies.

Marxism, of course, is and has always been the intellectual foundation of anti-capitalist hysteria. The problem for Marxists is that most of the deplorables are the workers of the world who were supposed to throw off their capitalist chains in exchange for the communist paradise. They are, however, doing just fine under capitalism and do not have much use for the Marxist Left.

As a result, the post-modern, anti-modernity Marxists (Applying Principles, pp. 33-36) have had to find new oppressed classes to exploit, or rather, to defend. Those “classes” are African Americans, women, and LGBTQ’s, even though a little digging into the past 60 or 70 years will show that all of them, both politically and economically, are better off today under our severely hampered capitalism than they were back then.

The final straw (and last gasp, one can hope) of the Marxist Progressive Left is their attempt to destroy the distinction between speech and action. This is the ultimate consequence of political correctness. Because certain classes, so the argument goes, are more powerful than others, and because speech is “socially constructed”—i.e., not individual and not in our control or even in our awareness—anything coming out of our mouths or from our pens is coercion, meaning coercion of the weaker classes.**

The oppressors are no longer the bourgeoisie, as in the days of Marx and Lenin, but whites, males, and straights. Once speech is interpreted as a weapon, as the post-modern Left interprets it, censorship is justified, and all forms of coercion become justified.

Thus, we had the massive demonstrations last fall that vociferously expressed desires to reject the results of the November election, demonstrations that at another time, perhaps in our future, could, with the presence of a charismatic, fist-pumping orator, turn into a frenzied putsch attempt.***

Violence is already being used to silence speakers (1, 2). It does not matter that most of the demonstrators are “peaceful.” Their leaders are ecstatic when speeches are canceled. Censorship is their goal.

Indeed, a spectacular fire where one of these speeches was canceled evoked an unpleasant image in my mind. I fully expected the blackshirts (1, 2) who caused the damage to throw a few books into the flames. Causing the speech to be cancelled was equivalent.

And actors and other demonstration preachifiers who beat their breasts and screech about “my America,” which means not the America of our current president or of anyone who did not vote for their candidate, are one step away from declaring speech and books they disagree with “un-American.”


The Nazis in 1933 moralized about “my Germany” and burned books that were “un-German.”

Is this where we are headed? I’m counting on the bankrupt Left to continue down its self-dug hole and the American sense of life of initiative and achievement to reject attempts to rescue any part of Marxist Progressivism.

The deplorables are decent people, but their sense of life needs to be articulated and made explicit . . . soon.


* On the left/right political continuum—right being minimal government, left being total government—fascism is on the right side of the left, because it is a form of socialism. After Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941, fascism became a pejorative promoted by the communists who equated capitalism with fascism. Soon after, they began calling anyone they disagreed with a fascist. The Left continues this tradition today. See Mises, Planned Chaos, chapters 6 and 7.

** Whites, we are told, suffer “unconscious racism,” which means we are not even aware of it. We should therefore just shut up and obey the dictates of the caring, humanitarian Left. Our daughter not too long ago was silenced in a discussion because she is white. And participants at academic conferences have been told that scholarly discussion with them was not possible because they belonged to one of the privileged classes! This is polylogism at work.

*** Writing about the New Left “revolutionaries” of the 1960s, many of whom today are the tenured radicals promoting relativism and authoritarianism, Ayn Rand said: “The New Left does not portend a revolution, as its press agents claim, but a Putsch. . . . A Putsch is a minority’s seizure of power. The goal of a revolution is to overthrow tyranny; the goal of a Putsch is to establish it.”

The Communist Era and Capitalism vs. Democracy

Sidney Hook’s 600-page autobiography Out of Step provides a wealth of information about New York intellectual life in the twentieth century, especially the communist era from the 1930s to 1960s.

It also indicates that the main debate today is not, or should not be, capitalism vs. socialism, but capitalism vs. democracy.

As Marxist scholar, communist fellow traveler, anti-Stalinist, pro-Cold Warrior, anti-New Leftist, and adamant defender of democracy, Hook knew or was acquainted with nearly all of the players of the communist era.

The difference between Hook and his Communist Party colleagues is that he actually read and thoroughly understood Karl Marx, so if he had been a professor in a USSR university in the 1920s and ‘30s, he, like others before him, certainly would have been purged.

The names of many of these players should be familiar to anyone who has read about or lived through any portion of the communist era, for example, playwright Bertolt Brecht, who was worshipped by my 1960s New Left professors, and journalist Whittaker Chambers. Hook has stories about all of them.

Brecht, one day in Hook’s apartment in 1935, made a casual remark about a Stalin-assigned assassination: “The more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.” Hook showed Brecht the door and never saw him again.

Chambers was a Stalinist spy in the 1930s who, when he came in from the cold, was immediately hired by Time magazine. Chambers later testified against Alger Hiss, accusing the high-level State Department official of also being a former spy. Hiss was subsequently convicted of perjury and went to his death denying it all. Hook concluded the evidence was against him.*

Never a card-carrying Party member, Hook became anti-communist after the Moscow Show Trial revelations of 1936-38. He supported US entry into World War II against the Nazis while Party members, who took their orders from the Kremlin, opposed any support for the evil capitalist regime of the United States.

During the Cold War, when communist apologists were advocating unilateral disarmament on the part of the US and saying it was better to be red than dead, Hook supported a strong defense and pushed the slogan “better free than slave.”

His chapter on the New Left’s spring 1969 uprising at New York University, that is, its occupation and disruption of academic life, is detailed and alarming. His description of the corresponding spinelessness of the school’s administration is equally detailed and alarming.

Not a friend of the New Left in the 1960s, Hook declared its campaigners “anti-intellectual” and “barbarians of virtue.”

And to set the record straight on whether or not, in earlier years, Communist Party members had infiltrated US educational institutions—the New Left had rewritten history to say otherwise—Hook cites Communist Party instructions to its members to teach Marxist-Leninism in every class without being caught or exposed. This confirms what I once heard Ayn Rand say, this time in Hook’s words: the duty of card-carrying communists was “to deceive and to cheat.”

The main political debate throughout Hook’s life, especially as stated by him, was democracy vs. totalitarianism. Nazism, fascism, and Soviet communism represented the latter, but as a lifelong socialist—on moral, not economic, grounds—the former meant democratic socialism.
   
For Hook and his socialist colleagues, socialism is the ultimate end of Jeffersonian democracy and the Bill of Rights. This is sometimes called social democracy, though more often in the US its close cousin is social or progressive—as opposed to classical—liberalism. Social liberalism is an alleged improvement on the classical type.

At the end of his life (and book), Hook acknowledged that collective ownership of the means of production—the socialist state as giant post office, to use Lenin’s metaphor—does not work. Thus, he describes himself as “an unreconstructed believer in the welfare state and in a steeply progressive income tax.” Interventionism, in other words, with a strong leftward bias.

Although he spent many of his last years at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and was awarded the  Medal of Freedom in 1985 by President Reagan, Hook was no conservative. He was a secular humanist (and naturalist), which means he was a lifelong atheist and ardent supporter of science and scientific method.**

Democracy for Hook, however, was primary. He and nearly everyone else in the world today, including the Marxists and communists, seem to advocate democracy. So what does Hook mean by it?

In the absence of genus and differentia, he gives descriptions, such as “free discussion,” “freely given consent,” “voluntary [consent], not subject to coercion,” and, most importantly, the absence of economic obstructions to that consent and to the pursuit of education, jobs, and happiness.

Hook’s moral basis for being a socialist was, of course, his unexamined assumption that capitalism exploits workers. Socialists are more moral because they are “nicer” (meaning more altruistic, though Hook does not use the term) than the capitalists who are mean and selfish. Therefore, a crucial prerequisite of modern democracy is that economic power must be put under political control.

I say the main debate today is, or should be, capitalism vs. democracy, rather than vs. socialism, because of the near-universal endorsement of democracy and equally near-universal failure to define it. Hook’s somewhat muddled understanding is how most currently see it.

Socialism, to be sure, still needs to be refuted, though Ludwig von Mises did it thoroughly in 1922. And telling a naive voter that the government often abuses its legal monopoly on the use of physical force is likely to produce a “but we are the government and we can change it” response.

What percentage influence does a voter have in a typical US presidential election? Less than a millionth of a percent!

As I suggested in an earlier post, the vote is not unimportant in a free society, but it is neither primary nor fundamental. Hong Kong, after all, did quite well for decades with no general elections. What it did have was the English constitution and legal system.

This means that if democracy is a term to be endorsed at all, it must be defined as voting restrained by individual rights and those rights must be clearly distinguished from the collectivized versions of the social liberals. Individual rights are freedoms to take action, not entitlements to things, that is, to food, shelter, clothing, education, jobs, and happiness.

I’m tempted to say that democracy should be tossed entirely in defenses of the free society. If capitalism is understood as a social system, not just economic, it can be put where it belongs—in philosophy—and therefore cannot be dismissed as “just economic,” which most opponents and the ignorant alike do when the term comes up.

Discussions of social systems come from the fourth branch of philosophy called social (or political) philosophy. Social philosophy defines the nature and proper function of government, which brings rights and ethics into the discussion of capitalism, which means egoism should also be brought in, as well as a theory of human nature, and a theory of consciousness and universals, among other fundamental issues of epistemology and metaphysics.

Sidney Hook was a philosopher who knew about discussions of this sort, at the fundamental level, and used fundamentals to defend Marx and socialism. He was an advocate of Enlightenment values: reason, science, technology, freedom, and, of course, rights and democracy, as most socialists of his era were.

Defenders of the free society cannot just say they are advocates of the Enlightenment values of reason, science, technology, freedom, rights, and democracy . . . and expect to win arguments.

What is required today for a proper defense is the elevation—that is, the boosting, heightening, raising up—of discussion from our current concrete-bound, trivial, and disconnected mess to universal and fundamental principles.

Socialism was a moral ideal in the 1920s, ‘30s, and, according to Ayn Rand, until the end of World War II. As a practical ideal it died with the USSR collapse in 1991, yet its flotsam lingers in 2016 to obstruct passage to a genuinely free society.

It lingers by default because of the lack of principled opposition.

Sidney Hook was a significant member of the generation that sought to promote a moral ideal. His book provides lessons for anyone in 2016 who wishes to do the same, this time, one would hope, promoting the ideal of laissez-faire capitalism and all that it rests on.


* Chambers became a neoconservative and wrote the infamously sleazy review of Atlas Shrugged in William Buckley’s National Review. “From almost any page,” says Chambers, “a voice can be heard . . . commanding: ‘To a gas chamber–go!’” Chambers was posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1984 by President Reagan.

** F. A. Hayek, in “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” points out that conservatives are not averse to using coercion to achieve their goals and he even suggests that coercion is the common denominator uniting “repentant socialists” (like Whittaker Chambers) and conservatism. True (classical) liberalism, says Hayek, supports liberty over equality or democracy.