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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 320.513097309049
EAN num: 9780684856797
ISBN number: 0684856794
Label: Free Press
Manufacturer: Free Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 224
Printing Date: March 03, 2000
Publishing house: Free Press
Sale Popularity Level: 475015
Studio: Free Press
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Product Description:
In this intellectual companion piece to his acclaimed autobiography, Radical Son, David Horowitz argues that, even in this supposedly post-ideological, post-Cold War era, the historic themes of that conflict still drive our politics and animate our cultural debates. With keen political insight and a masterly grasp of history, he examines how the political Left, including those who describe themselves as liberals, has refused to learn from the past -- particularly from the checkered records of progressive movements for social justice.
This important work is a cohesive and searing document for all who refuse to bury their heads in the sand while American institutions and beliefs are corrupted by the politics of bad faith masquerading under the guise of social justice.
Amazon.com Review:
The author of Radical Son returns with a vigorous polemic against the American Left. Showing that liberals and conservatives have sharply contrasting views on the ideas of freedom and equality--and defining these differences in forceful prose--Horowitz goes on to blame the Left for many of what he believes to be America's ills, including multiculturalism, feminism, and economic socialism. 'We speak reflexively of leftists as 'progressives,' even though their doctrines are rooted in nineteenth-century prejudice and have been refuted by a historical record of unprecedented bloodshed and oppression,' writes Horowitz, an ex-Marxist who is now a staunch right-winger. In an especially controversial chapter, he charges gay-rights activists with creating a political environment that made it almost impossible for the public health community to react effectively to the AIDS crisis. Like the man himself, this book will attract lovers and loathers, depending on their political creed. For conservative readers, he performs the helpful task of clarifying their own convictions; for left-of-center ones, he provides a penetrating glimpse into the conservative mindset. --John J. Miller
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Rated by buyers 
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This volume contains thought-provoking articles, letters and essays from the 1990s. In the prescient introductory chapter: the Left After Communism, Horowitz argues convincingly that the fall of the Berlin Wall did not mean the abandonment of the utopian idea. Dissecting the work of Eric Hobsbawm, Cornel West and Richard Rorty amongst others, he concludes that their ideas are rooted in nihilism. The leftists, unable to face the disastrous consequences of their utopianism, took up different masks with names like "progressive", "populist" or "liberal." They have succeeded in taking almost complete control of the liberal arts in academia and are also very prevalent in the mass media, justice system and Democratic Party.
In practice, collectivist ideologies always bring about suffering and misery, as demonstrated by the bloody 20th century history of China, the Soviet Union, national socialist Germany, Cambodia, Cuba and Vietnam. But like the brainwashed members of mind-control cults, leftists remain in denial about these evil fruits. Horowitz makes a good case for leftism as a cult, a depraved secular religion based on toxic guilt. Its repeated attempts to destroy prosperity and freedom are fueled by the desire to force a sadistic type of penance on society. For further information, I recommend The Death of Right and Wrong by Tammy Bruce.
The third chapter explores the religious roots of radicalism, shining a light on the psychosis that drives the leftist mindset. Words like "equality" and "social justice" disguise real emotions of envy and the urge to steal. The subsequent chapter looks at the meaning of Left and Right and how leftists use labels like "liberal" to hide their influence and real beliefs while still striving for socialism. The radical "studies programs" infesting academia, for example Queer, Feminist and Racial theory, are rooted in Marxism but claim to transcend it by means of the postmodernist abuse of language. See also Explaining Postmodernism by Stephen Hicks for further elaboration, as well as The Professors and Indoctrination U by Horowitz for examples.
The chapter titled Radical Holocaust investigates the disastrous consequences of the involvement of gay elites in response to the AIDS epidemic, an involvement that led to a massive death toll that could have been averted. Moral relativism, group collectivism and the multiculti cult are issues of the contemporary left under a "liberal" guise. It assails America's constitutional framework by distorting language, for example employing terms like "living constitution" in pursuit of equality of outcome. "Deconstruction' is not just some literary device but a real endeavor to destroy the foundations of Western society.
Horowitz argues that the terms Left and Right are still valid since Conservatives and Libertarians share a belief in property as the basis of individual liberty and an understanding of the inherent conflict between liberty and equality. This puts them in opposition to the Left. The tie between today's Liberals and Leftists also arise from a shared belief structure: liberals believe that radical goals are "noble" although they may disapprove of the means.
Perhaps a better term for all collectivists, including Radical Islamists, is Sinisterism - see book by Bruce Walker. The historian Victor Davis Hanson has observed what he calls a "worldwide moronic convergence" of the fringe Paleo Right, the Left and increasingly, mainstream Liberals. Besides a paranoid style, they all have in common an accelerating Antisemitism, as revealed by Bernard Harrison, Nick Cohen and Andrew Anthony in their recent books. They show how radical ideas have metastasized and are infecting the liberal mainstream in Europe and the USA.
In the final chapter, Horowitz articulates a broad philosophical framework for a freedom coalition that would be more stable and inclusive than the one of the last two decades, a framework based on the values of classical liberalism. Unparalleled in its trenchant expose' of the deception and depravity of a bankrupt ideological cult, the book also stuns the reader with its power, passion and elegance of language and style. It includes notes and acknowledgments and concludes with an index.
And still the evil is spreading. The philosopher Andre Glucksmann has stated that the concept of a contagion of hatred must be taken literally as a mental disorder that invades minds, bodies and society. Such an outbreak inoculates itself against those who oppose it and is immune to reason. In the book Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, Horowitz shows how these two cults are embracing one another in their shared hatred of the West in general, and America and Israel in particular. I highly recommend it.
Rated by buyers -
David Horowitz is justifiably among the most influential conservatives writing today. No one believes like a convert, so the saying goes, and Horowitz, a former member of the radical far left, is an example in action. He does not just write from the ivory tower on high. He gets down in the thick of things and fights.
Of all of Horowitz's books, this is probably my favorite. THE POLITICS OF BAD FAITH is not about a distinct and concrete subject, as are some of his other writings, but is broader in scope. In it, Horowitz describes the radical mentality of the left and the near unquenchable impulse that it has to remake the world in its own vision despite years of breathtaking failure and disastrous human costs. The very first two chapters of this book, in fact, are probably the single best works I have ever read on the subject.
Horowitz demonstrates how the left, far from rethinking its positions after the political collapse of its ideals, simply mutated into different forms to try again while disguising its true agenda from those who would appropriately reject it in disgust if it were recognized for what it is. In a particularly chilling example, at the very beginning of the book, Horowitz mentions that 47 Democrats in the House of Representatives of the 104th Congress had a voting record to the left of Rep. Bernie Sanders, who alone openly identifies as a socialist. By working through one of the two mainstream political parties of the United States, ideas that should long ago have died continue to live on.
Often after laying the intellectual groundwork, a book of this type would proceed to get to the meat and potatoes of whatever subject matter it was examining. The brilliance of THE POLITICS OF BAD FAITH is that the radical mentality itself IS the subject. Horowitz treats the reader (and it is a treat) to further examination of the radical mentality from various perspectives, including, in a chapter entitled as such, "The Religious Roots of Radicalism." Although the specific manifestation of this mentality, this impulse, are discussed, they serve to illuminate the psychological issues raised without overshadowing the focus of the book.
The exception to this is in the penultimate chapter, in which Horowitz describes how the ideological agenda of the left significantly exacerbated the AIDS crisis. The disease ran head into the ideology of queer theory and gay liberation and was stampeded into the ground. It is a chilling example of the power of ideology to trump even the human lives at stake, even when the specific human lives are those that the radicals claim to speak for.
Horowitz has an incredible grasp of the psychology and mentality of the radical left. It would be easy to say that he should, given his past. Yet there are many people, including those that may have broken from the left themselves, that do not show the degree of insight that they ought. Horowitz does and, as THE POLITICS OF BAD FAITH demonstrates, we are all enriched for it.
Also recommended: The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Thomas Sowell
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Excellent read. I recommend it to conservatives who need a review of how and why the Left's Socialist ideas repeatedly fail. I especially enjoyed the last chapter.
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In POLITICS AND BAD FAITH, David Horowitz considers the current plight of the liberal Left of the United States and concludes that it has failed to learn the inevitable lesson that socialism is a defunct system that has never worked at any time or in any place in recorded history. The "Bad Faith" of his title suggests that for the current crop of socialists to insist that the failure of socialism was due more to a betrayal of its guiding principles than to its inner value clearly posits a misplaced historical astigmatism that is bad faith personified.
In Chapter One ("The Left After Communism"), Horowitz identifies Eric Hobsbawm's AGE OF EXTREMES as typical of the left's turning a blind eye toward the source of the suffering and deaths of millions of those who endured the failings of a political theory in each country that chose to live under its blue banner. When Horowitz sums up Hobsbawm's central thesis that even when socialist leaders were wrong, they were still right, he zeroes in on the Left's inner blind spot, namely that "the response of the Left to the disasters that its political ideas have produced is the response of nihilism and bad faith." (Page 31) Horowitz then shifts to the pervasiveness of Marxist ideology in America's colleges and universities. It was with no small sorrow that he lists the required readings for Columbia's Contemporary Civilization course that include only Marxist or socialist writers (with Max Weber and Charles Darwin as the only exceptions). Where, asks Horowitz, are the leading non-socialist thinkers of the last two centuries? The answer is that they have been relegated to the unwanted dustbins of history and in their place are legions of second-raters, has-beens, and never-wases.
In Chapter Two ("The Fate of the Marxist Idea"), Horowitz directly addresses what ought to have been adroit foresight in 1872 when he quotes Mikhail Bakunin, Marx's rival in the First International, who sets forth what to him was the inevitable future of Russia under socialism: "the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones." (Page 109) One might think that this eloquent warning coupled with the ubiquitous failures of every socialist state since 1872 might give the lie to the claims of Hobsbawm and others of his ilk. The tragedy, of course, is that it does not and this is why David Horowitz has written THE POLITICS OF BAD FAITH.
Rated by buyers -
Immediately when i began this book, I realized that my thoughts about communism, liberalism, and honesty in life were at a crossroads and I was never to look back. This book reads like a provocative, telling, convincing memoir that should be appreciated. Horowitz bears his soul about his family life, his past, and where it has led him today. I was addicted. I'm enthralled that there was such an expose on the roots of radicalism, and it has convincing power to state boldly that, yes, the theory and practice of "social justice" is indeed a religion. It is an unholy religion and unworthy of the potential of humankind. This book was the beginning for me in my self-education with subjects that i know I will not be taught in school. Now that I have gone back, I feel more empowered, confident, and humbled in the knowlegde that the great Horowitz pours out to anybody who will carefully look at it. Remember, the TEXT, along with the subject matter should be critiqued, not devalued BECAUSE of the subject matter. David makes his case clear and powerful, challenging all his readers to rethink matters and causes that have stormed through our history and prevail today. If the bath house portion of the book was "homophobia" as one reviewer put it, why did those who resisted shutting them down acknowledge the pandemic and epidemic which would kill many of them and laugh and spit in the face of it? Therin lies the carelessness and the apathy towards them. Therein lies true homophobia, which has killed tens of thousands more than any homophobic lynching, unless we're talking about the Muslim extremists. But we're not. We're talking about America. I would urge anybody to carefully examine this book!
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