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Conservatives in the New Left
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15229 |
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BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1989 |
1,515 Words |
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Paul Gottfried
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Collier and Horowitz's latest book is can unexpectedly compelling critical analysis of sixties radicalism by two former radicals who have had "second thoughts." I say unexpectedly because of what I thought I would find on the basis of some of Horowitz's speeches and the contexts in which they were given. As a frequent speaker at gatherings of Cold War liberals, Horowitz makes a practice of flailing former McGovernites to the ecstatic applause of Scoop Jackson Democrats. Though must of what he says about foreign policy is correct, he conveniently blurs the lines of continuity as he also does in Destructive Generation between liberal and New Left statist egalitarianism. I also wish that Horowitz would stop making implausible claims in his speeches to having served the KGB as a New Left activist. Certainly the Soviets could have found more promising agents than an unkempt adolescent proclaiming himself an anti-American Marxist revolutionary.
But the discussion of the sixties generation offered in Collier and Horowitz's newest book impresses by its sincerity and plausibility. I for one am profoundly disturbed by the believable pictures of old New Left activists Hayden, Chomsky, and Gitlin appealing to "radical innocence" after the brutality of the communist regimes they supported had become apparent to everyone else. With an unfailing sense of verisimilitude, Collier and Horowitz evoke radical types I too encountered as a young professor in the late sixties. I knew the same irritation each time an apologist for communist murderers was described with admiration as an "idealist."
Horowitz provides in chapter 9 an unforgettable self-portrait. His life as a "red-diaper baby" growing up among Russian Jewish communists on Long Island is told in lean but carefully wrought prose. I was particularly moved by the irony that his father, who had long raged against an Irish Catholic funeral home as an unlikely symbol of ancestral persecution, was buried by workers from the same hated mortuary.
It was Horowitz's parents' identification of Western Christian society with anti-Semitism that allowed them to make bizarre but internally consistent assumptions. By destroying everyone's religion, including their own, and by turning the world over to "scientific" despots, one could abolish all persecution, which had its origin in superstition. Out of such thinking, Horowitz's parents and countless others took leaps of faith more reckless than those of the most daring religious mystics. They also came to worship persecutors infinitely more vicious than those who had driven their ancestors from czarist Russia. While Stanley Rothman, in The Roots of American Radicalism, treats the same subject with analytical thoroughness, Horowitz brings to it both pathos and descriptive freshness. The ancient rabbis command children to honor even those parents who make fools of themselves. Horowitz does exactly this. Love and respect for his parents show even through his rage.
On one point, however, I am forced to differ with him and his colleague. Through the 1960s did produce a destructive generation, it seems unfair to tar the entire New Left with the same brush. I say that certainly not as an apologist for that movement, but as someone astonished by its pervasive impact on American politics and culture. It will not do for the two authors to disassociate entirely the civil rights cause of Martin Luther King, Jr., from American radicalism. Though some leftists in the sixties spoke cynically about King, it was Old Leftists who
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