> But hey, Michael, according to your logic, there would be nothing wrong
> with Corn and Cooper joining a website run by the KKK and National
> Alliance. Nothing wrong with people arguing with each other, right?
>
Oh for Bakunin's sake, I draw a "line of demarcation" to cite Comrade Lenin, between debating conservatives and explicit Fascists. If you were a Third Period CPUSA member though or one during the Stalin-Hitler Pact you on this absurd logic would as the CPUSA did call Socialist A. Phillip Randolph a Fascist like they did in 1940. Sad to see an anarchist mirroring Stalinoid demogogy.
Horowitz was never a liberal. A red-diaper baby, as you know, then by '62 an anti-Stalinist New Left writer. Ever looked at a copy of his book, "Student, " if memory serves from '62? Oh those pieces he wrote for Ramparts and edited classic pices like the one that exposed the National Student Association CIA subsidies. Sounds like a radical exposing cold war corporate liberalism. That he moved from Left to Right, skipping over left-liberalism or social democracy , after his friend Betty Patter was killed by the Black Panther Party, I'll decline to defend, except to wonder at another example of how the kwazier aspects of the US Left subculture drive some from Left to Right, an old story.
If there has been one constant obsessional bug a boo I have here, it is opposition to the Fascists like the KK and Stalinists at ANSWER, something that you, Nathan, Cooper and 95% of the list share. Arguing with Charles Johnson et. al. instead of ignoring him and his audience, will shift some of their audience leftwards. Ah, but, much better to continue preaching to the already ultra-left, eh? Ignore the liberals and mainstream conservatives who you conflate, abjure any attempt at fighting and winning an ideological and organizational war of position. Liberals and conservatives the same? Huh, tell that to any member of Progressive Democrats of America or MoveOn, or a regular reader of Daily Kos, who rips the Right-Wing 24/7.
Neither was Hitchens, ever a liberal (as in liberal Democrat) though, I'd think in his early Trotskyist and radical era before 9-11, he wouldn't like a good marxist trash the liberal Enlightenment or "bourgeois liberal" rights (won by the working class with socialists and communists and anarchists and liberals, really, in the main).
My definition of the Left, is much broader than yours. Liberals are left of center. The main accomplishments of the US Left, civil rights, the CIO, ending the Vietnam War, etc. were accomplishments of a broad alliance of communists, socialists, social democrats and liberals mobilizing "the masses" and splitting off a ;iberal/moderate sector of the ruling class from it's Right-Wing.
-- Michael Pugliese