David Horowitz and Fellow Conservative Intellectuals Were Conned by Trump

President Trump’s ascension to the White House represented a shift in party ideals for many conservatives. While many Republicans have denounced Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and increasingly totalitarian regime, others have latched on to Trump and his administration as the proud future of the conservative movement.

In a new piece for The Daily Beast, conservative writer Sol Stern examines how some conservative intellectuals have become fervent Trump supporters by focusing on his friend David Horowitz.

Horowitz, Stern writes, the “one-time stalwart of the 1960’s New Left,” is “raising his hand to retroactively claim credit as a founding father of the Trump revolution” in his new book, “Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America.”

Stern explains:

Among [the book’s] singular contributions to our current political culture is that a prominent conservative intellectual now proposes Republicans take lessons in electoral strategy from Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a game plan until you punch them in the mouth.” From this bon mot Horowitz concludes that in order to win the struggle for America’s future, “conservatives must begin every confrontation by punching progressives in the mouth.” Elsewhere in the book, Horowitz writes: “Republicans must adhere to a strategy that begins with a punch in the mouth.”

Stern quickly acknowledges that Horowitz is “a gentle soul, a man of the mind without any personal lust for violence,” but whose “fighting words serve his overall narrative.”

But how did Horowitz get to this point? Stern delves into his own history writing for a student New-Left magazine, Root and Branch, and later Ramparts Magazine (alongside Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer.)

“The emergence of Donald Trump has given this political lesson from the 20th century an altogether contemporary dimension,” Stern summarizes. “In Horowitz’s blind celebration of all things Trump, a gifted writer has been led to produce a truly deplorable book, a mélange of agitprop and false accusations against both Democrats and moderate, conscientious Republicans.”

Horowitz serves as an example of how a faction of conservative intellectuals have been conned by Trump and his totalitarian rhetoric, Stern concludes:

In his 1953 anti-totalitarian classic, The Captive Mind, the Czech writer Czeslaw Milosz described how European intellectuals betrayed their commitment to thought and truth for the illusion that their utopian hopes for change might be satisfied by real communism in power. In the early days of the New Left, Horowitz recognized that this age-old dream of a better world could easily be corrupted when it was attached to state power and a demagogic party leader using the big lie technique. A half century later, in the strange case of Donald Trump, Horowitz has fallen for the same illusion he once warned against.

I am convinced this will end badly for our country, but it’s almost as disturbing that it will end badly for the once idealistic conservative movement in America.

Read the entire piece here.

—Posted by Emma Niles

Related Entries

• January 11, 2006 Site Preferences
• February 25, 2017 Donald Trump’s Top Five Hypocrisies This Week