David Horowitz reveals the ultimate tragic reading of the Left.
Daniel Greenfield | July 5, 2024
It was a cold winter day in Manhattan as my numbed fingers picked through the domino rows of colorful spines in the Strand’s dollar used book racks. While a dollar wasn’t much, I was a poor and hungry student and only a few of them made the difference between dinner and no dinner.
One of the books in that rack was The Kennedys: An American Drama co-written by David Horowitz and Peter Collier. I had never heard of David Horowitz back in those days, but I thumbed through it and, in a high form of approval for a hungry college student, picked it out.
These days my shelves have a lot of books by David Horowitz on them. And if you’re reading this, probably so do yours. Unlike The Kennedys, these no longer have reviews from The New York Times (“An irresistible epic”) and yet they innately are irresistible epics that tell a vital story.
That the blurbs on David Horowitz’s latest book America Betrayed: How A Christian Monk Created America & Why The Left Is Determined To Destroy Her may no longer come from the Times, Newsweek or Forbes, but from Dennis Prager and Eric Metaxas, is a measure of the moral and intellectual journey that its author has taken from the ‘Kennedy days’.
But it is also in some ways a measure of the national journey of the larger culture.
Like many of Horowitz’s books, America Betrayed is the story of a journey. Some, like the famed Radical Son, are personal journeys, while others like Destructive Generation were national journeys, a record of where we have gone as a nation and how we got there, and America Betrayed belongs in this category more than any other.
David Horowitz has always grappled with history, personal, political, national, often intertwining them together in a technique that made his old family histories like The Kennedys so compelling, but also enabled him to brilliantly personalize his own political journey and the national one, and ii is in America Betrayed that he takes on the wider lens of history to examine not only the damage that the Left has done to America, but exactly where leftists went wrong.
Since his exodus from the radical movement he was once part of, David Horowitz has frequently been caricatured by his former allies as a man who spends all of his time hating the Left. And while he has certainly (including in America Betrayed) offered no ambiguity about his conviction that it represents a great evil that must be fought, his rejection of its creed was rooted in optimism, not pessimism. To be a leftist is to be truly pessimistic, to be hostile to America, to believe that it is an immoral entity rooted in an evil that must be torn out of it by the very roots.
This hostile creed preached by Obama and Biden (“America’s original sin”) and so many other leftists offers a twisted theology of redemption through anti-Americanism. It is this twisted theology that Horowitz had so often confronted throughout his conservative career and that he confronts again now in his latest book. In defiance of historical revisionism like The 1619 Project, America Betrayed offers a very different and innately optimistic vision of America, revisiting both Horowitz’s childhood and adulthood, his personal journey through life, and the national journey undertaken by a country torn apart by competing impulses and currents.
Was America truly “born in sin”? Is our nation being “redeemed” or “damned” by the Left?
Immersing himself in Christian theology, American history and leftist ideology, Horowitz navigates a derecho of bad faith lies and arguments, and the fanatical conviction that America must be evil to justify its destruction, while wrestling with questions of goodness.
Using Martin Luther as a lens on American history, America Betrayed considers the nature of community and history. Leftists believe that they’re optimists when they’re actually destroyers, but optimism of a messianic and fanatical variety can be the only possible justification for their crimes.
“Whereas conservatives defend ideals they believe have led to present good, the ideals progressives defend belong to a future that is only imagined,” Horowitz writes. “The significant impact of progressive attitudes lies in the negative stance they take towards the present reality. To annihilate this present is the practical goal of utopian desires.”
There is a moment from The Kennedys that springs to mind here of the Ted Kennedy campaign telling black people that they were “worse off now than they’ve ever been in the history of this country.” To a critic who pointed out the obvious facts, the response came, “You’re right, but it always gets applause that way.”
And it still does. Including when Joe Biden claimed, “they’re gonna put y’all back in chains”.
There is a combination of cynicism and pessimism, the triumphant long march to power that is sustained by the conviction that America is evil by men who often know better. The faith of the Left lies in these malignant lies, in destroying the hope of a nation, and it is this that America Betrayed sets out to counter by offering a countervailing diagnosis of the crisis.
The balance of pessimism and idealism has to be weighed between believing in the promise of the real America or the “dream country”, as America Betrayed refers to it, of the fanatics.
To be loyal to one country, requires the betrayal of the other. To be loyal to the real America, requires betraying the dream country of the Left. And to be loyal to the Left requires betraying the real America. The political order then comes down to this staggering choice of betrayals.
Do we betray what is for what isn’t or betray what isn’t for what is? The genius of some of the best unifying conservative figures like Reagan was that they could eliminate the need for any perceived betrayal, offering a compelling conservative idealism grounded in hope. By refusing to cede the fertile ground of idealism to the Left, they defeated the enemy on its own terms.
But the Left has spent a very long time trying to destroy American idealism. And without that idealism, it becomes once again, as at the height of the counterculture, a choice of betrayals.
Whether it was in The Kennedys, Radical Son or in his many books since, right now down to America Betrayed, Horowitz has always displayed a knack for understanding the tragedy of the Left as few could, and here he offers what may be the ultimate tragic reading of the Left.
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