What Americans Need to Learn about the Left

Below is a repost from July 18, 2022, that is important for our upcoming election. Most of my previous posts from 2017–22 have political themes and many are linked in the article below. I plan to repost another political essay in October and, again, on November 1. Note that links to my book Applying Principles are to a free, downloadable pdf.
 
 
A retired English professor from Emory University recently wrote: “Stop wasting your time yelling, ‘Hypocrisy!’ Don’t bother pointing out the contradiction. They don’t care. Consistency is not a liberal virtue. Only the outcomes matter.”
 
Instead of “liberal” virtue, a more correct designation would be “progressive,” as in “far left progressive” virtue. Liberals are still around who think of themselves as moderate (and honest) mixed economy Democrats.
 
The professor was talking to conservatives and others who still think the communist-fascist leftists in our midst pay attention to things like logic, consistency, and truth.
 
“Don’t be so naïve,” psychologist Edith Packer, who herself escaped the Nazis, would often say. If bad people are going to kill you, throw you in solitary confinement with no recourse to habeas corpus, remove you from your tenured professorship without just cause, etc., ad nauseam, they will find a way to get rid of you. They are not going to pay attention to logic, consistency, or truth. “You can’t reason with these people, can you?” Dr. Packer would add. The answer to her question was rather obvious.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned, say the leftists! It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters.*
 
There are three points many fail to understand about the left. (1) Today’s far left progressives are in fact advocates of communism or fascism or some combination. (2) The communist-fascist progressive leftists are convinced that they are the ones who are doing what is moral and everyone else is not. And (3) the campaign to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism, communism, or fascism has been going on in the United States for over a century (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).
 
Thus, it appears to us that  “they just don’t care.” And they don’t care—about anything that relates to capitalism, individualism, or egoism. We are evil and, consequently, they hate us. Tear down the statues of America’s founders. That’s moral in their view. Oppose teaching children that they are racist oppressors. That’s immoral.
 
Today’s leftists are following Marx’s premise of the inevitability of socialism and the necessity of capitalism’s eradication. The sooner capitalism collapses—literally through physical destruction, preferably turned to ashes—the better.
 
To attempt a logical argument with the communist-fascist left is futile because Marx gave us that theory of many logics called polylogism (Applying Principles, pp. 309-310). We subscribe to bourgeois (updated to white racist) logic and socialists to proletarian (updated to victim) logic. The two groups—us and them—cannot talk to each other. The “logics” are contradictory.
 
Sound familiar? “Your truth versus my truth”?? Postmodern epistemology is not so new!
 
Let me now elaborate point three above with a historical sketch of the left’s attempt to take over the United States in the last 120-30 years.
 
As I have written before (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), the first progressives, from the 1880s to the early twentieth century, were educated in Germany by democratic socialists. They brought those ideas back to the United States to replace the move toward classical liberalism with a more “moderate” or “compassionate” social liberalism (Applying Principles, pp. 36-39; see also 1, 2). This gave us, among other increases in government power, the Pendleton Act of 1883, unelected “expert” and difficult-to-fire bureaucrats, and regulatory agencies to “regulate” businesses to make them more “compassionate.”
 
By the 1920s and ‘30s, with the latter called the “red decade,” communism and fascism were openly recognized and admired replacements for what was understood to be American capitalism. Communists and fascists at the time were bosom buddies until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. Thereafter, the communists started calling anyone who disagrees with them a fascist. They continue to do so.
 
Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about Joseph Stalin in 1956 shook the American communist world such that the likes of David Horowitz’s parents (card-carrying communists) stopped calling themselves communists and resorted to progressivism as their preferred political moniker.
 
Horowitz himself became cofounder of the New Left, editor of Ramparts magazine, and participant throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s with such communist organizations as the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Indeed, Horowitz, who has now become conservative, asserts that the turmoil and riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago enabled the left to take over the Party, which, he says, it still controls.**
 
In the years since, progressives have only become stronger and stronger, and more and more irrational, moving their cause further and further left, with seemingly little rational or articulate opposition from the right. Early Party leaders had to moderate their views and intentions. In 2011, however, Barack Obama talked explicitly about “fundamentally transforming” the United States. To what? To socialism, following the lead of one of his influencers, Saul Alinsky, community activist and organizer who advocated open confrontation.
 
Though attributed to a member of SDS, the following could be the motto of Alinsky: The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. Which means, as Alinsky clearly acknowledges: the end justifies the means. As in: logic, consistency, and truth be damned, and physically destroy capitalism in order to rebuild a society of socialism.
 
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of the left and their panic at the thought of losing the political war, especially to an unintellectual businessman who represented the American sense of life and catered to that sense of life in his constituents.
 
The 1960s erupted all over again, only worse. Putsch (German for coup) is the word Ayn Rand used to describe the “revolution” the 1960s leftists wanted to achieve. Putsch is the correct description of today’s mob terrorism. Its purpose, as Rand says, is to establish tyranny.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned.
 
It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters. As the communist-fascist progressive leftists say, “We are the ones who are doing good. You capitalists are evil and need to be destroyed by any means that works.”
 
 
 
* Many links in this post are references to previous posts where I have touched on the topics discussed. The purpose of the present blog is to give a more historical perspective on progressivism and its rise in the United States.
 
** Horowitz is not the only person to turn away from the socialist Garden of Eden. Max Eastman, a prolific writer and editor on the left in the early twentieth century admired Lenin and visited Russia in 1922 and ‘23. Over twenty years or so, he gradually abandoned socialism and started writing free-market articles, many in The Freeman, publication of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). During the years he was affiliated with FEE, he came to know Ludwig von Mises.

What Americans Need to Learn about the Left

A retired English professor from Emory University recently wrote: “Stop wasting your time yelling, ‘Hypocrisy!’ Don’t bother pointing out the contradiction. They don’t care. Consistency is not a liberal virtue. Only the outcomes matter.”
 
Instead of “liberal” virtue, a more correct designation would be “progressive,” as in “far left progressive” virtue. Liberals are still around who think of themselves as moderate (and honest) mixed economy Democrats.
 
The professor was talking to conservatives and others who still think the communist-fascist leftists in our midst pay attention to things like logic, consistency, and truth.
 
“Don’t be so naïve,” psychologist Edith Packer, who herself escaped the Nazis, would often say. If bad people are going to kill you, throw you in solitary confinement with no recourse to habeas corpus, remove you from your tenured professorship without just cause, etc., ad nauseam, they will find a way to get rid of you. They are not going to pay attention to logic, consistency, or truth. “You can’t reason with these people, can you?” Dr. Packer would add. The answer to her question was rather obvious.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned, say the leftists! It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters.*
 
There are three points many fail to understand about the left. (1) Today’s far left progressives are in fact advocates of communism or fascism or some combination. (2) The communist-fascist progressive leftists are convinced that they are the ones who are doing what is moral and everyone else is not. And (3) the campaign to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism, communism, or fascism has been going on in the United States for over a century (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).
 
Thus, it appears to us that  “they just don’t care.” And they don’t care—about anything that relates to capitalism, individualism, or egoism. We are evil and, consequently, they hate us. Tear down the statues of America’s founders. That’s moral in their view. Oppose teaching children that they are racist oppressors. That’s immoral.
 
Today’s leftists are following Marx’s premise of the inevitability of socialism and the necessity of capitalism’s eradication. The sooner capitalism collapses—literally through physical destruction, preferably turned to ashes—the better.
 
To attempt a logical argument with the communist-fascist left is futile because Marx gave us that theory of many logics called polylogism (Applying Principles, pp. 309-310). We subscribe to bourgeois (updated to white racist) logic and socialists to proletarian (updated to victim) logic. The two groups—us and them—cannot talk to each other. The “logics” are contradictory.
 
Sound familiar? “Your truth versus my truth”?? Postmodern epistemology is not so new!
 
Let me now elaborate point three above with a historical sketch of the left’s attempt to take over the United States in the last 120-30 years.
 
As I have written before (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), the first progressives, from the 1880s to the early twentieth century, were educated in Germany by democratic socialists. They brought those ideas back to the United States to replace the move toward classical liberalism with a more “moderate” or “compassionate” social liberalism (Applying Principles, pp. 36-39; see also 1, 2). This gave us, among other increases in government power, the Pendleton Act of 1883, unelected “expert” and difficult-to-fire bureaucrats, and regulatory agencies to “regulate” businesses to make them more “compassionate.”
 
By the 1920s and ‘30s, with the latter called the “red decade,” communism and fascism were openly recognized and admired replacements for what was understood to be American capitalism. Communists and fascists at the time were bosom buddies until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. Thereafter, the communists started calling anyone who disagrees with them a fascist. They continue to do so.
 
Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about Joseph Stalin in 1956 shook the American communist world such that the likes of David Horowitz’s parents (card-carrying communists) stopped calling themselves communists and resorted to progressivism as their preferred political moniker.
 
Horowitz himself became cofounder of the New Left, editor of Ramparts magazine, and participant throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s with such communist organizations as the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Indeed, Horowitz, who has now become conservative, asserts that the turmoil and riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago enabled the left to take over the Party, which, he says, it still controls.**
 
In the years since progressives have only become stronger and stronger, and more and more irrational, moving their cause further and further left, with seemingly little rational or articulate opposition from the right. Early Party leaders had to moderate their views and intentions. In 2011, however, Barak Obama talked explicitly about “fundamentally transforming” the United States. To what? To socialism, following the lead of one of his influencers, Saul Alinsky, community activist and organizer who advocated open confrontation.
 
Though attributed to a member of SDS, the following could be the motto of Alinsky: The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. Which means, as Alinsky clearly acknowledges: the end justifies the means. As in: logic, consistency, and truth be damned, and physically destroy capitalism in order to rebuild a society of socialism.
 
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of the left and their panic at the thought of losing the political war, especially to an unintellectual businessman who represented the American sense of life and catered to that sense of life in his constituents.
 
The 1960s erupted all over again, only worse. Putsch (German for coup) is the word Ayn Rand used to describe the “revolution” the 1960s leftists wanted to achieve. Putsch is the correct description of today’s mob terrorism. Its purpose, as Rand says, is to establish tyranny.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned.
 
It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters. As the communist-fascist progressive leftists say, “We are the ones who are doing good. You capitalists are evil and need to be destroyed by any means that works.”
 
 
 
* Many links in this post are references to previous posts where I have touched on the topics discussed. The purpose of the present blog is to give a more historical perspective on progressivism and its rise in the United States.
 
** Horowitz is not the only person to turn away from the socialist Garden of Eden. Max Eastman, a prolific writer and editor on the left in the early twentieth century admired Lenin and visited Russia in 1922 and ‘23. Over twenty years or so, he gradually abandoned socialism and started writing free-market articles, many in The Freeman, publication of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). During the years he was affiliated with FEE, he came to know Ludwig von Mises.

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.