The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America's Future - Hardcover

Horowitz, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684850230 ISBN 13: 9780684850238

Publisher: The Free Press, 1998

Synopsis

"The Politics of Bad Faith" brings into the open the refusal of the political Left -- including those who describe themselves as liberals -- to learn from the past, specifically from the checkered history of progressive movements for social justice and equal outcomes. This refusal shapes agendas that Horowitz describes as part of a new "cold war" against America -- a culture war that pits "progressives" and "multi-culturalists" against America's founding principles and ideas. Horowitz traces the radical project from its origins in 19th-century socialism to the disastrous excesses of such current "progressive" causes as political correctness, radical feminism, racial preferences, and what he describes as the nihilistic campaign to "deconstruct" the American idea itself.

About this title

Review:

Theodore B. Olson The American Spectator An exegesis on the metamorphosis of Marxist thought into modern leftism, and an explanation for why the Democratic Party has little left to say.

Stephen Schwartz Los Angeles Times Book Review [Horowitz] remains, at heart, a man with a mission.

Francis Fukuyama author of The Great Disruption, The End of History and the Last Man, and Trust David Horowitz has written a passionate and insightful book that moves seamlessly between incisive critiques of the cultural Left and his own personal experiences as part of the movement.

From the Author:

A Strongly-Worded Moral Indictment
I appreciate the opportunity offered by Amazon.com to comment on my book The Politics of Bad Faith. I am especially grateful for this opportunity because my book, though largely analytical, is also a strongly worded moral indictment of an intellectual generation guilty of complicity in the crime of socialism, and therefore of some of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century. It is further guilty of "bad faith" in not acknowledging its complicity.

Its intellectual bad faith also extends to the covert attacks on the work of critics of the left in the guise of "objective" commentaries. I have in mind reviews whose purpose is ostensibly to provide politically netural previews of books for libraries and bookstores...The suggestion that The Politics of Bad Faith is either incoherent and thrown together or that its arguments are not presented in a manner open to counter-arguments is itself a form of bad faith, since even the most casual reader of the book would be aware that both these canards are false.

I wrote The Politics of Bad Faith because of the remarkable fact that the intellectuals who call themselves "liberal" and "progressive," and who now dominate our university culture and magazines of opinion, by and large supported the socialist experiments of the 20th Century that resulted in 100 million deaths and spread poverty throughout the former Sino-Soviet empire. Without so much as pausing to examine their responsibility for these tragedies they have continued to promote the destructive intellectual paradigms and political agendas associated with the socialist tradition. Thus it is a striking fact that the dominant intellectual influences in the academy today are those of marxists, communists, fascists and proto-fascists -- Marx, Nietzsche, Gramsci, Foucault and Heidegger. Moreover, the conservative, anti-Marxist tradition of writers like Hayek, Von Mises, Aron, and others is systematically excluded from the academic canon. Of course America is hardly on the verge of a totalitarian temptation. To show how destructive these ideas can be, even in a democratic context, I have included a chapter called "A Radical Holocaust" which explores the complicity of the left in the spread of the AIDS epidemic in America.

Why is the intellectual left impervious to the actual fate of its political utopias? Because it is in thrall to a "bad faith" in the religious sense as well. In a chapter called "The Religious Roots of Radicalism," I have explored the origi ns of the modern left in Jewish mysticism, and particularly in the idea of a "tikkun olam" - a repair of the world - a term progressives use to describe their task, which is that of self-appointed agents of a human redemption. It is in this delusion that we can find the source of the incomparable destructiveness of socialist achievements.

I have also included in The Politics of Bad Faith two lengthy letters to radical friends which provide an intellectual history of my exodus from the left an d - I hope - a comprehensive explanation of why the left is so wrong-headed and politically reactionary.

Finally, I conclude the book with an outline of what I believe the philosophical foundations of a modern American conservatism should be.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Free Press
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0684850230
• ISBN 13: 9780684850238
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 214