David Horowitz's Long March (Page 6)

Finally, Horowitz argues that the Republican Party must, through a massive legislative push for school vouchers, reposition itself as "champions of working Americans and minorities," the "party of the underdog." The Art of Political War appears to be having an impact: A recent letter from the head of the Missouri Republican Party reported that Horowitz's suggestions proved decisive in a recent Congressional election in the state's 32nd District: "We prevailed," she wrote, "by implementing 'political war' a la Horowitz."

Horowitz's other current project is rather more controversial. No longer content to hammer away at the usual suspects, he has trained his sights on a new target: Afro-America. Hating Whitey's thesis is that contemporary black leaders--ranging from Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton to Jesse Jackson and Julian Bond--have "squandered" the moral legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. by their "restructuring of the civil rights agenda as a radical cause" with policies like affirmative action and multiculturalism. "Whereas the civil rights movement under Martin Luther King's leadership," he writes, "achieved its aims with the support of 90 percent majorities in both houses of Congress, a majority of Americans--roughly 70 percent--oppose the current civil rights agenda that embraces racial preferences." The "moral abdication" of black civil rights leaders can be explained, he insists, by "their close association with a radical left whose anti-white hatred is a by-product of its anti-Americanism." Consequently, "ideological hatred of whites is now an expanding industry not only in the African-American community, but among white 'liberals' in elite educational institutions as well."

Hating Whitey is filled with assaults on leading black thinkers (Harvard Professor Cornel West is dismissed as "an intellectual of modest talents whose skin color has catapulted him into academic stardom with a six-figure income") and giddy celebrations of the American past: "The establishment of America by Protestant Christians...was historically essential to the development of institutions that today afford greater privileges and protections to all minorities than those of any society extant."

The book is littered with inaccuracies large and small. Writing about the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, Horowitz says he saw Nation columnist Christopher Hitchens, who was "showing his parents around the event." (Hitchens's parents are deceased.) More troubling is the way Horowitz wields statistics. "In 1994," he writes, "there were twenty thousand rapes of white women by black men, but only one hundred rapes of black women by white men"--a statistic he lifted from Dinesh D'Souza's book The End of Racism. D'Souza's assertion, however, is based on a gross misreading of Justice Department figures.

Hating Whitey was rejected by Horowitz's regular publisher, the Free Press, who told him they would never publish a book with that title. Spence Publishing, a tiny outfit in Dallas, was pressed into service. To propel sales, the author purchased more than 100 advertisements, but sinister forces derailed the campaign. In October the Center for the Study of Popular Culture issued a press release titled horowitz book on race hits roadblock despite public demand, which proclaimed that some bookstores were reluctant to stock it, while others mistakenly listed the book as Hating Whitney. His media appearances have been turbulent. In a debate with Michael Eric Dyson on Black Entertainment Television, Horowitz seemed overwhelmed by Dyson's rhetorical finesse, and by his repeated insistence that, given escalating levels of intermarriage, "black folks are loving whitey!"

Hating Whitey and The Art of Political War offer sharply divergent strategies on how to wage political combat. The latter insists that the Republican Party "can only win" by linking its agendas to the downtrodden, and it laments the GOP's unwillingness to "reach out to African Americans." In Hating Whitey, however, Horowitz whips up a frenzy about a multitude of black rapists. Is that the way to entice black voters into the Republican Party? "Sometimes my tactical agendas conflict," Horowitz shrugs.

As a young man, Horowitz was enamored of socialist revolution and the Black Panthers. His leftism has vanished; but the fervor remains. In that sense, he is not so different from the ex-Communists whom Horowitz's mentor, Isaac Deutscher, dissected in his famous 1950 review of the anthology The God That Failed. The apostate from Communism, Deutscher wrote, "continues to see the world in white and black, but now the colors are differently distributed." The most dignified attitude for the ex-Communist, Deutscher believed, was "critical sense and intellectual detachment." But many apostates found that an impossible road to follow, and, in Deutscher's phrase, ended up doing "the most vicious things."

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