figures, Michael Walzer and Hendrik Hertzberg. Regrettably, neither one responded to these overtures, a not uncommon occurrence. The nature of the left is also the subject of the three essays on “Neo-Communism,” which were written after the onset of the Iraq War—an American intervention vigorously opposed by almost the entire progressive spectrum, with notable but rare exceptions such as Hitchens and Paul Berman. (The latter was steadily moving from his earlier positions and was no longer an antagonist of mine.) That war proved to be a defining political crossroads, and I used the occasion to articulate my understanding of what the “post-Communist” left shared with its Communist precursors. The continuities of the left by now had become a central theme of my work.
“Neo-Communism,” a term I chose to characterize the left, failed to catch on, as I had suspected it would. This was a credit to leftists’ success in embargoing attempts to link them to their Communist predecessors by associating their critics with problematic figures like Senator Joseph McCarthy. The very use of the word “communist” is taken to be evidence of “McCarthyism.” But the effect of accepting the preferred euphemisms, such as “progressive” and “liberal” (a term applied by The New York Times even to card-carrying Communists like Angela Davis) has had the dual effect of obscuring their agendas and burying the lessons of their past. The second volume of this series, Progressives, returns to these issues.
The chapter “Discover The Networks” is the defense of an online encyclopedia of the left I created by that name, and a further attempt of mine to provide a taxonomy of the species.77 “Keeping an Eye on the Domestic Threat” is a further explication of this database, and thus another inquiry into the nature of the faith.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/
Part III
The essays in this section, “Slander as a Political Discourse,” address several attempts to distort the facts of my life in order to discredit my ideas and neutralize my criticisms of the left and its deeds. It includes an exchange provoked by Sidney Blumenthal’s libel suit against Matt Drudge, which throws light on the techniques leftists employ to defame and then quarantine critics, and reflects the particularly low state of political discourse at the time. I knew John Judis, the author of one of these attacks, when he was an editor of Socialist Revolution. Later he became an editor of The New Republic, and was able to write a fairly objective biography of William F. Buckley. The fact that he would advocate a boycott of the magazine Peter and I published is just one indication of the determination of progressives to create a wall of silence around our work and prevent us from reaching the next generation with what we had learned.
Part IV
This volume concludes with the texts of two talks I gave on autobiographical themes. The first was given over the fierce objections of my leftwing classmates to my 50th class reunion at Columbia College. In it I attempted to weigh the changes that had taken place over the course of the half-century since we had graduated, and explain the conservative viewpoint to an audience that remained steeped in the presumptions of a progressive culture. The second is a speech I gave at the annual dinner of the Zionist Organization of America, which provided me an opportunity to reflect on my identity as a Jew, my attitudes towards Israel and America, and to the war against them.
1See my autobiography, Radical Son (1997). Several shorter autobiographical testimonies that can be found in other books I have written: Destructive Generation (1989), The Politics of Bad Faith (1998), The End of Time (2005), A Cracking of the Heart (2009) and A Point in Time (2011).
2My reasons for concluding this are laid out in Radical Son, pp. 221–250.
3Cf. Stanley Kurtz, Radical-in-Chief
4This is a prominent theme of the essays contained in Volume 5 of this series, 9/11 and the “War on Terror.”
5 http://discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511
6See “Defending Christopher” and note, Volume 2; also “The Two Christophers” in David Horowitz, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion.
7 http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/
For most of my adult and professional life, I regarded myself as a man of the left. The identification was stronger than just politics. Ever since marching in my first May Day parade down New York’s Eighth Avenue 30 years ago, I had looked on myself as a soldier in an international class-struggle that would one day liberate all humanity from poverty, oppression, racism and war. It was a romantic conception to be sure, but then revolution as conceived in the Marxist and socialist canons is a romantic conception; it promises the fulfillment of hopes that are as old as mankind; it posits a break with the whole burdened progress of human history—freedom from the chains that have bound master and slave, lord and peasant, capitalist and proletariat from time immemorial.
Not long after the end of the Vietnam War, I found myself unable to maintain any longer the necessary belief in the Marxist promise. Along with many other veterans of the 1960s struggles, I ceased to be politically active. It was a characteristic and somewhat unique feature of our radical generation, as distinct from previous ones, that we did not then join the conservative forces of the status quo. Instead, politics itself became suspect. We turned inward—not, I would say, out of narcissism but out of a recognition in some ways threatening to our radical ideas that failure (like success) is never a matter merely of “the objective circumstances” but has a root in the acting self.
Few of us, I think, felt at ease with the political limbo in which we found ourselves. It was as though the radicalism we shared was in some deep, perhaps unanalyzable sense a matter of character rather than of commitment. It was as though giving up the vision of fundamental change meant giving up the better part of oneself. So we continued to feel a connection to the left that was something more than sentimental, while our sense of loss led to conflicts whose appearance was sometimes less than fraternal. Such feelings, I believe, were an unspoken but significant element in the controversy over Joan Baez’s open letter to the Vietnamese, and in the Ronald Radosh-Sol Stern article on the Rosenbergs in The New Republic.11
Baez had written an “Appeal to the Conscience of North Vietnam” to protest the post-peace repression in Vietnam. Even though the ad blamed the United States for its role in the war, she was denounced as a CIA agent by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda for her efforts (Radical Son pp. 302–3). Later I appeared on a television talk-show with Baez to discuss the Vietnam War. During the discussion she peremptorily dismissed my views, saying, “I don’t trust someone who’s had second thoughts.” Stern and Radosh had published an article, based on FBI files released under the Freedom of Information Act, suggesting that Julius Rosenberg was indeed a Soviet spy. There was an uproar in the left and the two of them came under vitriolic attack from their (now) ex-friends. My role in the genesis of this article and the subsequent book by Radosh and Joyce Milton (The Rosenberg File) is described in Radical Son, pp. 300–302.
Antonio Gramsci once described the revolutionary temperament as a pessimism of the intellect and an optimism of the will. For the veterans