Just to bore the list some more on Horowitz, here is an excerpt from his long winded diatribe against himself in another time and place:
But Bill Clinton is not like those who worship him, corrupting himself and others for a higher cause. Unlike them, he betrays principles because he has none. He will even betray his country, but without the slightest need to betray it for something else-for an idea, a party, or a cause.* He is a narcissist who sacrifices principle for power because his vision is so filled with himself that he cannot tell the difference.
But the idealists who serve him-the Stephanopoulos's, the Ickes's, the feminists, the progressives and Hillary Clinton-can tell the difference. Their cynicism flows from the very perception they have of right and wrong. They do it for higher ends. They do it for the progressive faith. They do it because they see themselves as having the power to redeem the world from evil. It is that terrifyingly exalted ambition that fuels their spiritual arrogance and justifies their sordid and, if necessary, criminal means.
And that is why they hate conservatives. They hate you because you are killers of their dream. Because you are defenders of a Constitution that thwarts their cause. They hate you because your "reactionary" commitment to individual rights, to a single standard and to a neutral and limited state obstructs their progressive designs. They hate you because you are believers in property and its rights as the cornerstones of prosperity and human freedom; because you do not see the market economy as a mere instrument for acquiring personal wealth and political war chests, to be overcome in the end by bureaucratic schemes.
Conservatives who think progressives are misinformed idealists will forever be blind-sided by the malice of the left-by the cynicism of those who pride themselves on principle, by the viciousness of those who champion sensitivity, by the intolerance of those who call themselves liberal, and by the ruthless disregard for the well-being of the downtrodden by those who preen themselves as social saints.
Conservatives are caught by surprise because they see progressives as merely misguided, when in fact they are fundamentally misdirected. They are the messianists of a religious faith. But it is a false faith and a self-serving religion. Since the redeemed future that justifies their existence and rationalizes their hypocrisy can never be realized, what really motivates progressives is a modern idolatry: their limitless passion for the continuance of Them.
(from Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left, David Horowitz)
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Takes one to know one, huh, Dave?
I quoted this at length for a reason. What you should be able to recognize is something along the lines of what Jacques Derrida called the Apocalyptic Tone.
Doug posted (NYT?) something on the 4th from Podhoretz under the thread of Poddy Patriot, and Carl Remick just posted a WSJ review of the same book.
You know, fuck these guys. Who cares? Still ...something has to be said.
What I think is interesting is the strangely twisted reversal of political positions accomplished through identical moral argument. In other words Horowitz in his autobiography makes the same kind of argument in support of his commie parents (Stalinism), as he does later against them. Of course he always gives himself the best position (that of moral virgin), no matter which side he happens to take.
Horowitz's reversals are closely related to Nynt Gingrich's rhetorical technique where he used to accuse Liberals of his own cynical manipulations and misinterpretations, then castigate them for it---in advance of their argument against his position along identical lines.
I think of this technique as the childish ploy of cutting a silent stinker in class, and then demanding to know who farted. There must be a latin phrase that goes along with this style of argument.
There is some really inside-out logic going on in these diatribes and that is what makes them interesting.
Everything seems to make sense as long as you accept apriori the completely reversed polarity of the universe. This is the fascinating part. How do you do that?
My theory is that you begin all argument within a moral framework (the apocalyptic tone), eschewing the moral ambiguity of empiricism, and give yourself the first move. This immediately forces the opposition to advance their choice as a negative reaction, instead of a positive assertion. So, then like tic tac toe, given the first move you can always advance to moral victory. It is the perfect form of propaganda, because it can not logically fail.
This idea of the centrality of moral argument and its socio-cultural expression as the rise of religious, political, and economic fundamentalisms, lead me to try and understand these through historical parallels in and around the time of Augustine and then taken up again, in and around the time of Machiavelli.
I didn't get very far in this project since that is a tremendous task and I couldn't narrow down what I was looking for. I went so far as to buy the collected and annotated Old Testament Pseudepigraphia (Charlesworth) and go through some sections of it. This was really nauseating reading and I left it. Many of these works were composed in a mixture of greco-roman and judeo-helenist traditions in Alexandria and Jerusalem and were potentially part of what Augustine and Jerome (and others before them) knowingly omitted--which makes them interesting in some abstract way--like why? These works indirectly explore the roots of Judaism and Christianity and form a variant of the moral universe of our own discourses. What I found in a rough way is that the works omitted all share a kind of moral ambiguity. That is the logical necessity of a moral conclusion is somehow flawed or confused, not well formed. Or alternately, the story line goes off in some errant direction and doesn't fit within a coherent epic. These seem sufficient reasons to drop them from both religious canons.
In a very crude form which really doesn't advance much beyond where I started, what the turn amounts to is the abandonment of a practical, rational, and empirical view of the world, and its submission to an ethico-religious view of the world---which is my interpretation of the apocalyptic turn. In its other manifestations it takes on really darker tones in a fervent nationalism and the insistent primacy of ethnicity and race. These latter aspects go to the threads last year on Heidegger, Hegel, Beethoven and german romanticism. All of these form in my mind a kind of aestheticization of political discourse--a wedding of the good with the true and therefore the beautiful and the righteous.
These are of course not particularly noteworthy conclusions and seem obvious in advance. Like, why bother? Well, I was hoping to find something, and didn't.
Chuck Grimes