Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion [Hardcover]

David Horowitz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 2012

Radical liberals want to make America a better place, but their utopian social engineering leads, ironically, to greater human suffering. So argues David Horowitz, bestselling author in his newest book Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion.

From Karl Marx to Barack Obama, Horowitz shows how the idealistic impulse to make the world “a better place” gives birth to the twin cultural pathologies of cynicism and nihilism, and is the chief source of human suffering. A former liberal himself, Horowitz recounts his own brushes with radicalism and offers unparalleled insight into the disjointed ideology of liberal elites through case studies of well-known radial leftists, including Christopher Hitchens, feminist Bettina Aptheker , leftist academic Cornel West, and more.

Exploring the origin and evolution of radical liberals and their progressive ideology, Radicals illustrates how liberalism is not only intellectually crippling for its adherents, but devastating to society.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

It is an irony of our human condition, writes David Horowitz, that the efforts by progressive radicals to make the world “a better place” have also been the chief source of human suffering from the beginning of time. Bestselling author David Horowitz, once a radical himself, has now written Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion—his ultimate reflection on radicalism and its inevitably tragic consequences, focusing his analysis not on abstract ideology but on the people who have embraced it.

Among those profiled in Radicals:

• The witty and brilliant, if self-destructive, Christopher Hitchens, a friend who had second thoughts but couldn’t break with his radical faith
  
• Bettina Aptheker, whose troubled life illustrates the totalitarian dimensions of radical feminism
  
• Cornel West, a celebrity academic whose preposterous success is a reflection on the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the liberal culture
  
• Saul Alinsky, the radical mentor of the most successful leftist politicians of our time, from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama
  

Incisive in its critique, and alternatively moving and devastating in its portraits of leading radicals, Horowitz’s book lays bare the roots of radicalism, how it is abetted by liberalism, and how liberals have utterly failed to learn from its repeated personal and political disasters.

From the Back Cover

Praise for David Horowitz:

“David Horowitz is one of America’s most important and interesting thinkers.”
—Bernard Goldberg, author of Bias

“The most brilliant political mind in America.”
—Dennis Miller, author of The Rant Zone

“David Horowitz is a national treasure.”
—Roger Kimball, author of The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America


Praise for David Horowitz’s previous book Point in Time:

“David Horowitz is so powerful a polemist that it is often forgotten how beautifully he writes.”
—Norman Podhoretz, author of Why Are Jews Liberals?

“I have admired David Horowitz for decades. He has taught me many important lessons. But never have I been so moved by his writing as I am by this brief and profound book.”
—Dennis Prager, author of Still the Best Hope

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Regnery Publishing (September 25, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596988126
• ISBN-13: 978-1596988125
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 0.9 x 9.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #112,934 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

78 of 83 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Superlative Horowitz Book! September 13, 2012

By Bernard Chapin VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

I just got this sent to me in the mail by Regnery and I'm very pleased. Few people on this earth know the political left as well as David Horowitz. He is a meticulous and revealing historian of radicalism and continues to be one in these pages. The writing here is the quality of "The Politics of Bad Faith" and I'm glad to see that he penned it without a coauthor. All Horowitz, all excellence! These chapters are thoroughly fleshed out portraits of leftist regressives who so dominate and paralyze our country at present. Probably the best known in this collection are Christopher Hitchens and Cornell West, but I found his examination of the two feminist figures to be most enlightening as they characterize perfectly the dysfunction and mental disturbance that is feminism. The finest chapter may be chapter six concerning Saul Alinsky titled, "A Radical Machiavelli." However, every paragraph is educational and of value. Radicals is a must read in this election year. I hope the majority of Americans are able to "wake up" this November and end our nation's dalliance with socialism. David Horowitz continues to be a first class author long after the passing of his 70th birthday. That's great news to every conservative. In my view, Mr. Horowitz is an American monument.

63 of 68 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Exposing the Destructive Ideals & Agenda of The Left September 27, 2012

By Paul Schnee

Format:Hardcover

"A map of the world that did not show Utopia", said Oscar Wilde, "would not be worth consulting." In this regard Wilde foreshadowed the preference of most of the characters described in "Radicals, Portraits Of A Destructive Passion" a new book by David Horowitz.

Horowitz has written over 20 books, numerous articles and has appeared on countless television programs. It is fair to say that he possesses a keen perception and an unusually incisive mind. As a radical during the 1960s, whose parents were staunch members of the Communist Party, he was the editor of Ramparts magazine and was involved in almost every cause dear to the heart of the Left. In his new book he reveals the tune the Devil is whistling and does so with a precision that comes from whistling it so long and so well himself.

The second paragraph of his introduction gives a hint of what is to come: "The desire to make things better is an impulse essential to our humanity. But taken beyond the limits of what is humanly possible, the same hope is transformed into a destructive passion until it becomes a desire to annihilate whatever stands in the way of the beautiful idea. Nihilism is thus the practical extreme of the radical project. Consequently, the fantasy of a redeemed future has repeatedly led to catastrophic results as progressive radicals pursue their impossible schemes."

To illustrate this Horowitz describes his dealings with, and knowledge of, a cast of characters some of whom had "second thoughts" but could never quite discard the squalid sort of romantic idealism that so often led to evil confirming Benjamin Franklin's observation that "inclination is too strong for reason."

Front and center on stage is Christopher Hitchens the brilliant and engaging public intellectual who had started out as a Trotskyite at Oxford University but whose second thoughts moved him closer to the center and then, after 9/11, to the right on some issues much to the chagrin of his old comrades. He is followed by Bettina Aptheker the intellectually confused feminist, Marxist, and eventual devotee of the Dalai Lama. Cornel West, a man who never met a paranoid racial fantasy unworthy of his time or energy and whose intellectual flatulence and undeserved success, comes next. Horowitz not only skewers West's imposture as a genuine intellectual sustained by his own delusions and the left-wing, liberal glitterati but also describes West's admiration for hate-mongers like Louis Farrakhan. The criminals, pardoned criminals, subversives and traitors like Linda Evans, Kathy Boudin, Bill Ayres, Bernardine Dohrn, Susan Rosenberg and Angela Davis are described in gruesome detail but what is most disturbing is how these vicious scum are able to be forgiven and even awarded celebrity status by a morally derelict academia as well as some of society's elites who have come to see things not in terms of right and wrong but through the clouded and perverted prism of victim and oppressor. Horowitz's tale about his old comrade-in-arms at Ramparts magazine, Susan Lydon, is a sad but an affectionate retrospective on a woman who according to the Guardian was "a feminist writer who launched the debate on the female orgasm". Lydon's intellect was acute but she led a chaotic and checkered life which led to serious drug addiction but according to Horowitz she eventually achieved a "modest liberation" through "honesty, accountability and caring for others." The last radical to appear in Horowitz's cross hairs is Saul Alinsky, a morally bankrupt, clever, corrupt, power-hungry and ruthless revolutionary who in his career of public mischief viewed people as mere utensils of his will and whose acolytes include Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Amongst the dramatis personae Horowitz reveals a real admiration for his friend Christopher Hitchens whose moral compass is far more finely tuned than any of his fellow travelers but then you could say the same thing about your mailman.

Some resentments in life spring from a yearning for fairness but this book goes far beyond the yearning experienced by so many young idealistic radicals, who exist in a state of idiotic bliss, to describe the crass falsifications, the calcified cynicism and the eternal crusade for power of the radical left-wing. It is an essential primer on how radicals think, the utopian schemes which animate them, the ugly destruction, violence and murder to which these schemes so often lead and the void of moral relativism where the truth has been outlawed and where the end always justifies the means. Their advertising appears seductive but in the end they really have nothing to sell unlike David Horowitz whose books are worth twice the price.

***************************************************************

44 of 51 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Penetrating analyses of key Leftists/Radicals September 21, 2012

By Carl Pearlston

Format:Hardcover

This is another in a series of excellent books by David Horowitz on the destructive effects of Leftist/Radical politics by those who call themselves Progressives, but who are in truth Socialists/Communists, in eternal, but hopeless, search for the promised Communist Utopia or Promised Land. Horowitz offers compelling portraits of key figures in the Progressive pantheorn, such as Christopher Hitchens, Cornel West, Saul Alinsky, Bettina Aptheker, along with other lesser known radical actors like the bombers Linda Evans and Kathy Boudin, all discussed with penetrating, incisive insights into their motivations, rationalizations, and writings. It is a thoroughly engrossing book, hard to put down, and one of Horowitz's best in showing that the inevitable result of the Leftist revolutionaly aspiration is chaos, which leads inexorably to a totalitarian state.