Friday, January 10, 2014

Judging itself by its best intentions

Are good people prepared to ignore evil in the name of ideology? David Horowitz learned the hard way that they were.
“I had believed in the left because of the good it had promised. Now I learned to judge it by the evil it had done.”

Barbara Kay reviews David Horowitz’s “The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life And Times,”
Conservativism is “rooted in an attitude about the past rather than in expectations of the future.” Ideology is about the future. And herein lies the unbridgeable chasm between the two. “Since ideologues of the left are committed to an imagined future, one that re-establishes the Eden of our mythic beginnings, to question them is to provoke a moral rather than an empirical response: Are you for or against the equality of human beings? To dissent from the progressive viewpoint is not a failure to assess relevant facts but to an unwillingness to embrace a liberated future. It is, therefore, to will the imperfections and injustices of the present order.”

“A key to understanding the mentality of the left is that it judges itself by its best intentions, while judging its opponents – America chief among them – by their worst deeds.”

Conservatism is not a religion, though most religious Americans are conservative. But since leftism is so fixated on a future utopia, it is a kind of religion, whose god is “social justice,” in pursuit of which all is permitted.

Horowitz’s writings reveal that today many of America’s political and academic elites, including the president of the United States, are similarly blind to the moral treachery of those close to them, associates who in the past have committed terrible crimes or who dream of committing them in the future, yet they choose to honor and protect them.

Has Obama awakened conservatives?

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