The Black Book of the American Left: The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

by David Horowitz

Overview

David Horowitz spent the first part of his life in the world of the Communist-progressive left, a politics he inherited from his mother and father, and later in the New Left as one of its founders. When the wreckage he and his comrades had created became clear to him in the mid-1970s, he left. Three decades of second thoughts then made him this movement’s principal intellectual antagonist. “For better or worse,” as Horowitz writes in the preface, “I have been condemned to spend the rest of my days attempting to understand how the left pursues the agendas from which I have separated myself, and why.”

When Horowitz began his odyssey, the left had already escaped the political ghetto to which his parents’ generation and his own had been confined. Today, it has become the dominant force in America’s academic and media cultures, electing a president and achieving a position from which it can shape America’s future. How it achieved its present success and what that success portends are the overarching subjects of Horowitz’s conservative writings. Through the unflinching focus of one singularly engaged witness, the identity of a destructive movement that constantly morphs itself in order to conceal its identity and mission becomes disturbingly clear.

Horowitz reflects on the years he spent at war with his own country, collaborating with and confronting radical figures like Huey Newton, Tom Hayden and Billy Ayers, as he made his transition from what the writer Paul Berman described as the American left’s “most important theorist” to its most determined enemy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594036958
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	11/05/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	596 KB

About the Author

David Horowitz is the author of numerous books, including the New York Times bestseller Unholy Alliance, as well as The Professors, and his celebrated autobiography Radical Son. He is president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and founder of the online news magazine FrontPageMag.com.

Table of Contents

Preface to The Black Book of the American Left ix

Introduction to My Life and Times 1

Part I Reflections From My Life

1 Left Illusions 13

2 Why I Am No Longer a Leftist 23

3 Reality and Dream 31

4 My Conservatism 37

5 Black Murder Inc. 43

6 Treason of the Heart 71

7 A Political Romance 81

8 Reflections on the Road Taken and Not 91

9 Letter to the Past 95

10 Think Twice Before You Bring the War Home 103

11 The End of Time 107

12 Getting This Conservative Wrong 121

13 What My Daughter Taught Me About Compassion 131

14 Something We Did 135

15 Who I Am 141

16 Peter and Me 149

Part II Reflections on the Left

1 Goodbye to All That (with Peter Collier) 155

2 My Vietnam Lessons 161

3 Semper Fidel 175

4 A Decade Overrated and Unmourned (with Peter Collier) 185

5 Keepers of the Flame (with Peter Collier) 205

6 Carl Bernstein's Communist Problem @ Mine 213

7 Political Cross-Dresser 223

8 Still Lying After All These Years 243

9 Repressed Memory Syndrome 249

10 Fidel, Pinochet @ Me 259

11 Marginalizing Conservative Ideas 265

12 Can There Be a Decent Left! 271

13 The Left and the Constitution 279

14 Neo-Communism I 289

15 Neo-Communism II 295

16 Neo-Communism III 301

17 Discover the Networks 311

18 Keeping an Eye on the Domestic Threat 321

Part III Slander as Political Discourse

1 Paul Herman's Demented Lunacy 327

2 In Defense of Matt Drudge 331

3 Target of a Witch-Hunt 335

4 The Serial Distortions of Sid Vicious 349

5 The Surreal World of the Progressive Left 355

Part IV Two Talks on Autobiographical Themes

1 Plus Ca Change: Fifty Years Gone By 377

2 Reflections of a Diaspora few on Zionism, Israel and America 387