HEADING TOWARD THE ABYSS

In this bracing essay, David Horowitz calls out the Left for what it is–criminal, racist, and sometimes fascist. David argues that conservatives need to understand the utter bad faith with which the Left conducts itself, and stand up bravely to defend our country from the ravages of the Left.

By David Horowitz, POWERLINE

The crisis currently facing our nation is a crisis of faith – faith in the Constitution that has shaped our destiny, faith in the rule of law, and faith in the principle of equality before the law. The root cause of the lawlessness that is consuming our country is the monopoly of the executive power in Washington by a political party that has fallen under the control of the radical left. This left describes itself as “progressive,” but is focused on the goal of “re-imagining” American institutions and principles, in other words of dismantling the constitutional order that created the prosperity and freedoms that have shaped this country since its beginnings.

Having been born into this political left and then rejected it, I have acquired an intimate perspective on its nature, and the threat it poses to the American future, which is grave. I was raised by Communists who always referred to themselves as “progressives,” and were sworn enemies of America and its institutions, as was I. We saw ourselves as warriors for social justice, acting on the “right side” of history.

We could not have been more mistaken. The “moral arc” of history is not “bent towards justice,” as progressives like to say. If it were, the 20th Century would be the most enlightened instead of the scene of the greatest atrocities and oppressions on human record. Worse yet, for this progressive myth, these atrocities and oppressions were perpetrated by progressives in the name of “social justice.”

The practical achievement of the revolutionaries was the dismantling of whole societies, and their reconstruction as national prisons, and slave labor camps. Supported by progressives everywhere, Communists bankrupted whole continents while killing more than 100 million people – in peacetime – in order to realize their radical schemes. Their atrocities and failures continued until the day they saw their progressive future collapse under its own weight. This failure was entirely predictable because as every similar attempt to “re-imagine society” and change it by force has shown, it is simply beyond the power of human beings to create a “just” world.

Forty years ago, a series of tragic events that I have described in my autobiography, Radical Son, stopped me in my tracks, and caused me to re-evaluate what I had believed until then. These second thoughts turned me against the cause to which I had been devoted since my youth, and which I now saw as a threat to everything human beings hold dear. Most of my generation of radicals, however, chose to continue on their destructive course. Over the next decades I watched the radical movement I was born into infiltrate and then take control of the Democrat Party and the nation’s cultural institutions, until one of its own, Barack Obama, became President of the United States.

From the moment I joined the conservative right forty years ago, I was impressed – and also alarmed – by the disparity in political rhetoric used by the two sides fighting this fateful conflict. My radical comrades and I always viewed these battles as episodes in a war conducted by other means – even as our opponents did not. Our rhetoric proclaimed our goals to be “peace,” “equality” and “social justice.” But this was always a deception. We used terms that demonized our opponents as “racists,” and “oppressors” because we believed our goals could only be achieved by vanquishing our opponents and destroying America’s constitutional order.

The Constitution valorized political compromise and was built on the defense of individual rights – most prominently the right to own property. America’s founders regarded property ownership as the basis of individual freedom. As radicals, we regarded property as the root cause of the evils that oppressed us. Consequently, the principles we operated under were not the same as those we gave lip service to in order to win public support.

The Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky explained our attitude in a famous pamphlet called Their Morals and Ours1. “Their” morals, he denigrated as bourgeois morals. They were morals based on class values that served the oppressors. One can hear the same sophistry today in the left’s attacks on meritocracy and standards as “racist,” and in their demands for equal outcomes regardless of whether they are earned or not.

While “their morals” served a ruling class, “our morals” served the people, and therefore social justice. Because we believed these propositions, “our morals” were by default Machiavellian: The end justifies the means.

Trotsky’s pamphlet was, in fact, a desperate attempt to avoid admitting that there was anything amoral or immoral in this cynical outlook. He did so by denying the existence of moral principles, claiming instead that all morality was self-interested and designed to serve a class interest. “Whoever does not care to return to Moses, Christ or Mohammed,” i.e., to accept universal moral standards, Trotsky argued, “must acknowledge that morality is a product of social development; that there is nothing invariable about it; that it serves social interests; that these interests are contradictory; that morality more than any other form of ideology has a class character.”

CONTINUE