The Dream and the Nightmare
Topic: Liberal Fascism
In the anthology Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey, David Horowitz made an interesting point about the contemporary Left that may explain such peculiarities as the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, the cult worship of stone killers like Castro and Che, etc.
Horowitz asserts that the Left has lost its optimism. In the past, hatred of the existing capitalist order—which boiled down to hatred of America—was matched by faith in the socialist ideal. Supposedly, the path to the radiant future was marked out by the Soviet Union, the European People’s Republics, Communist China and the revolutionary regimes of the Third World. Even when Stalinism somewhat tarnished the Soviet brand, Western progressives comforted themselves that the “gains of October”—the superior socialist economic model—pointed the way forward. East Germany, for example, was much touted as a successful socialist economy.
Then came 1989.
The swift collapse of the Soviet Union and its European puppet regimes exposed the squalid failure of the socialist economic model. Far from making society wealthier, more just and more equal, socialist economics had institutionalized poverty and inequality. Gone, therefore, was the alibi for communist oppression. Stalin’s tyranny had not, after all, transformed backward Russia into an economic powerhouse. East Germany had not, after all, developed a modern high-tech economy. The optimism was gone. What remained was the hatred.
As Horowitz notes, progressives no longer possess a coherent vision of the just society, nor do they propose any plan or program for bringing such a society into being. But though the dream is dead, the nightmare continues. In the writings of such leading leftists as Cornel West and Noam Chomsky, in the pages of such magazines as the Nation and The Progressive, at Occupy Wall Street rallies and antiwar protests, the hymn of hate resounds. If there’s nothing to be built, then at least America can be destroyed.
From this poisonous root spring such diverse expressions of anti-Americanism as Michael Moore’s goofball documentaries, the demented ranting of Cindy Sheehan and the Constitution-bashing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. So much for what the late Christopher Hitchens once called “the moral grandeur of the Left"!
Posted by tmg110
at 12:38 PM EDT