The Only Way To Defeat The Left
I’ve been following the Newsreal debate between Phyllis Chesler and Jamie Glazov on the one hand and Naomi Wolf, who thinks America, the most “liberated†country on the face of the earth by any — any— progressive standard (treatment of minorities, of women, of the poor, freedom of the individual), is a prot0-fascist state and needs a revolution, while the Islamo-fascist enemy, the greatest oppressor of women and minorities ever, needs a wrist slap. Wolf’s moral blindness is just a one minor instance of the general moral vacuity of progressives which for a hundred years has put them on the side of the totalitarian enemies of freedom and inspired their assault against the West.
This led Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs and former chief of Israel’s Defense Forces, to describe the left as a “virus.†Actually, as Aaron Shuster pointed out in an email which I am about to cite, one could also say the left is in the grips of a virus — a virus that attacks its brain cells and makes it incapable of ingesting real world facts and consequently of arriving at reasonable judgments.
Radical feminism is one form of the virus. It is an ideology grown out of Marxism whose enemy is the freedom of the individual from collective control, and the freedom of society from the totalitarian state. That is why radical feminists are incapable of seeing the anti-feminist monster in Islam: because Islam is now the center of the revolt against the feminists’ real enemy, which is us.
The progressive virus is a religious virus. Political radicalism is an expression of the inability of human beings to live without meaning; it is the replacement of the hope for a divine redemption in a redemption by political activists, which inevitably leads to a totalitarian state.
The consequences of infection by the virus are described in my email from Shuster:
“The virus totally blocks the person from the ability to access, let alone comprehend, any facts and evidence that contradict his or her beliefs. Mountains of data have zero effect on already established views, simply because the person flatly rejects considering reading anything that would go against their ‘truth’. The person is terrified to look beyond his established viewpoint. They behave like the Church at the times of Galileo. They refuse to look through the telescope. For instance, during the past eight years, on numerous occasions, I have recommended to my left-wing friends several books on Islam by Ibn Warraq, Ibn Ishaq, Robert Spencer and others. Many borrowed the books, but they were never read. The power of the virus was stronger. The results of my eight-year effort were meager. Two people have read Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali.â€
The strength of the virus derives from the meaning it supplies to meaningless lives, and the consequent good feelings — intoxicated feelings of virtue and self-righteousness — experienced by the devoted. Here Shuster quotes Melanie Phillips:
“A vital part of leftist thinking is the assumption that to be on the left is the only sensible/decent/principled position to hold and therefore cannot ever be wrong; and that is because to differ from the left is to be of ‘the right’, and the right is irredeemably evil. (The idea that to be opposed to the left is not necessarily to be on ‘the right’ or indeed to take any position other than to oppose ideology and its brutal effects is something that the left simply cannot get its head round). And so the true nightmare is that if ‘the right’ turns out to be actually right on anything and the left to be wrong, by accepting this fact the left-winger will by his own definition turn into an evil right-winger. His entire moral and political identity will crumble and he will grow horns and a tail. So to prevent any possibility of this catastrophe occurring, the opponent has to be eliminated.â€
This is why the only argument that leftists have in their public encounters with others is not an argument at all but an indictment: racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe. In the religion of leftists — in the fevered universe of the virus — the world is an endless plain of battle in which forces of Good (leftists) are ranged against the forces of Evil (the rest of us). At stake is the redemption of the world — or as the environmental totalitarians like to put it, the survival of the planet. No wonder they are deaf to any fact or argument that would bring them back to earth.
The only way to defeat the left — and I have failed in twenty years of arguing this to persuade conservatives — is to turn the table around and attack their moral self-image. Leftists are in fact the enemies and oppressors of women, children, gays, minorities and the poor, and conservatives should never confront them without reminding them of this fact. If Naomi Wolf and her radical friends had their way, America would be disarmed and radical Islam would be triumphant and women would be back in the Middle Ages, and the rest of us along with them.
It is true that leftists rely on indictments instead of arguments. To try to debate a hardened leftist is to be bludgeoned ad hominem upside the head with insults like “pitiyanqui” (Chavez’s favorite.) They storm the moral high ground early because that’s all they got. They are afraid of debate because they are completely ignorant about why their opponents believe what they believe. Who introduced them to the works of Smith, Mises, Hayek, Hazlitt, et al? Not their university professors, that’s for sure.
As a sort-of leftist (I am a radical environmentalist, voted for Nader, and ran for the US Green Party’s presidential nomination in 2004), I have nevertheless spent several decades ripping the American left apart, so I understand your rage. However, in your hyperbolic rant, you have chosen to vent rather than analyze and inform, and in so doing you have skirted the fundamental issues and therefore you end up preaching to the right wing choir rather than articulating and clarifying the issues that could in fact convert those in the middle and even some leftists. It isn’t enough to just say leftists are a bunch of idiots. That is always a matter of opinion. What isn’t arguable is the demonstrable evidence, starting in the 1930s, that the left – as well as the right and the neo-conservatives since the 1950s- has preferred to preach ideological purity rather than universal principles. The true Enlightenment thinker lets the chips fall where they may and has no blind loyalty to either bleeding heart liberalism or free market cant. Why you don’t mention people like Orwell and Hitchens, for example, is puzzling, especially Orwell, who had the courage and integrity to expose the deceit of the communists in the Spanish civil war. Today, it is not the right wing or conservative publications or leaders who defend civil liberties, secular democracy, the Enlightenment as they should be doing. Instead they mistakenly think that attacks on the left will bring them new allies. This is truly nonsense. I believe in free enterprise but that doesn’t mean I swallow every bit of propaganda or fiscal sleight of hand and theft that the free market fanatics allow to flourish. And equally, just because I share some of the social justice viewpoints of the left doesn’t mean I swallow their other beliefs or recommendations. In between the loose-cannon verbiage of people like Coulter (and Horowitz), and the political depravity of Noam Chomsky and Ramsey Clark, there are people who want to sort out the relevant and core ideas and issues without the condemnatory rhetoric that depicts the other side as completely evil. You and others on the right need to understand this: that much of the dumb rhetoric on your side about Obama and socialism and the fear-mongering about terrorist bombings have deprived your arguments of all credibility. You will never enlarge your influence or public unless you back off YOUR ideology, just as the left needs to do with its own. Do you care more about the issues and the truth, or just about dominating the debate and cultivating your own small garden?
Mr. Horowitz,
Right this second, I’m watching you on tonight’s Glenn Beck Show. Wow! What a wonderful interview you’re giving!
Of course, I expected the interview to be good, as I’ve seen you numerous times and have seen you in person twice as well.
But this interview is stunning.
Now, how do we get enough Americans to hear what you’re saying?
David Horowitz is correct. The right must go on the attack and attack the self-created “moral” image the left holds of themselves for it is false. They are indeed the oppressors of women, children, …of everyone. They take from each person the right to self-determination and insist on their absoption into the collective.
I watch most of the Interview of Mr Horowitz on Glenn Beck yesterday! I am so glad we have someone like David Horowitz, who understands the danger for this country of the Radical left and the “politburo” surrounding the President of the United States right now, as the “Anointed” one, that will help them destroy America. The American people should learn from the experience of Mr. Horowitz, he is so right.
This is a Worldwide movement that has been in the making for decades now. As one who has been in their sight for a long time, as they have unsucessfully tried to recruit me into their movement, I have watched, listened and met with a lot of them in my journey as a Freedom fighter, I know very well that their long time goal and dream is to destroy this country. I know their strength, I discovered their fears, and I can tell you we (the American people) have a fight in our hands for the next four years, as Obama’s politburo will do everything in their power to cripple or destroy our Way of Life in this country.
Their mentors are Vladimir Lenin and Saul Alinsky, and to quote Lenin: ” The way to crush Capitalism is to grind them between the millstones of Taxation and Inflation”. Exactly what the Obama administration is doing right now.
I have a lot more I could say, but as this will be a long and harduous fight, more to come later on… I stand shoulder to shoulder with my American brothers and sisters to fight for our Freedom, our Constitution, our Free Enterprise System and our Way of Life.
Thank you David Horowitz and Glenn Beck, Americans must be informed and every citizen of this great country on their guard. AMERICA IS IN GRAVE DANGER!
. . . but I do understand: once you start getting factual, people can actually fact-check you, which in your case, Mr. Horowitz, would be your undoing.
I see that my detailed comment was removed — too bad the Horowitz team chooses to censor comments that question their unhinged blather.
You were in violation of our commenting guidelines. If you had dissented in a manner in accordance with the guidelines then your comment would have stood. Commenting on our site is a privilege, not a right. And if you're going to violate our rules then you're not going to be around long. I delete plenty of nasty conservative comments too.
“there are people who want to sort out the relevant and core ideas and issues without the condemnatory rhetoric that depicts the other side as completely evil.”
Besides the very rare individual like yourself where are these people on the Left? From personal if limited experience reading commentary from both sides I’d say the Left is a hands down winner in depicting “the other side as completely evil.”
Have you heard? We are now Right Wing terrorists, potentially presenting a grave danger to the survival of this nation; at least according to Obama’s director of Homeland Security. And the views of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malikin, etc. border on sedition and in need of censorship. The President may be in grave danger!
You’re entitled to your views and so are we. We will likely always disagree on something but hopefully those disagreements will revolve around an intelligent assessment of the facts. You believe in free markets but then there are those “free market fanatics.” Is this not depicting the other side as evil? And who in your view are these “fanatics?”
Speaking of disagreements it is my belief that the radical environmental movement represents the ultimate feel good liberal cause that is largely to blame for a significant portion of the economic malaise we find ourselves in today and a major stumbling block in the way of energy independence and a return to economic prosperity. The goals are admirable but the myopic focus and militant tactics used by the modern environmental movement has put a stranglehold on domestic energy production and as an entrenched policy is an abomination and represents a blatant disregard for modern scientific and technological advancements. And all of this has been accomplished without the consent of the majority. Rule by the intellectual elite; how clever and how undemocratic.
How much further and better off we would be if this, as in all our areas of disagreement, could have been resolved on a cooperative rather than confrontational basis. Of course we’d be doing like the rest of the world, drilling for oil, natural gas, coal, etc. something we’ll likely never agree on but if you can refrain from labeling me a right wing kook perhaps we could discuss it.
“Do you care more about the issues and the truth, or just about dominating the debate and cultivating your own small garden?”