"The Poisoned Well of the Radical Heart:" Second Thoughts on the Sixties

I missed a lot of good books in the 80s and 90s while being preoccupied with Ron Sider's socialism lite" and how the mission of the Church would be enhanced if only Jesus had ordered us to attend consciousness raising sessions instead of prayer meetings. One of them was Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, which has been reprinted in paper by Encounter Books in 2006 with a new Preface. The Washington Times calls it "a classic of psychology and culture" and this is a fair description insofar as the book probes into the mindset of the authors and their peers in the New Left of the 60s.

Collier and Horowitz are apostates from Marxism who both were involved in the 60s leftist scene up to their eyeballs and then broke with Marxism to vote for Ronald Reagan in 1980. Horowitz has gone on to found the David Horowitz Freedom Center and NewsReal Blog. He now considers himself to be a liberal in the classical 19th century sense of the term and he is a big supporter of Israel and Western civilization. Horowitz differs from most conservatives in that he spends most of his time on offense instead of defense. He regularly goes after radical feminism, Islamic jihadists, Marxism, and leftist tyranny in the universities and he takes his lumps from time to time in doing so. But he understands that the major danger of Marxism today is its campaign to destroy the family, liberal principles and freedom, not a literal socialist state complete with nationalized industry and centrally-produced five year plans.

Destructive Generation tells the story of the 60s in a series of personal encounters and snapshots rather than in a large scale overview. It is not a history but an exploration of the mindset that generated revolutionary acts and violence. For example, the opening chapter is a recounting of the life of Fay Stender, the crusading left-wing lawyer who defended and became the lover of Black Panther George Jackson. She left her husband and tried to create a new life as a Feminist and Lesbian, but was shot five times by one of Jackson's thuggish followers and ended up committing suicide while living in isolation in Sweden. The chapter attempts to get inside her mind and understand what drove her. What emerges is the tragedy of a utopian radical:

"But Fay's romanticism was political as well as personal, coloring the case she built, the alliances she forged, and finally the cause into which she poured all the considerable force of her personality. It was the flaw in the radical world-view: the belief that the facts of experience were inferior to its hidden "truth" - the readiness to reshape reality to make the world correspond to an idea."

This idea that tragedy - both personal and social - flows from the leftist faith in ideas over concrete experience of the real world is the main theme of the book. The two authors each write a "personal journey" chapter in the third section of the book and in Horowitz' chapter entitled "Letters to a Political Friend" he writes:

The rich are not on the same side as the rest of us. They exploit. The radical truth (which is your truth still) is that class war of the social apocalypse, the war that divides humanity into the "Haves" who exploit and the "Have Nots" who are oppressed, into those who are paid well for their efforts and those who are denied, into the Unjust and the Just, into their side and ours. The radical truth is the permanent war that observes no truce and respects no law, whose aim is to destroy the only world we know.

This is the "compassionate" cause that makes radicals superior to ordinary humanity and transforms the rest of us into "class enemies" and unpersons and objects of contempt.

Take a careful look at what you still believe, becasue it is a mirror of the dark center of the radical heart: not compassion but resentment - the envious whine of have not and want; not the longing for justice but the desire for revenge; not a quest for peace but a call to arms. It is war that feeds the true radical passions, which are not altruism and love by nihilism and hate. . .

This is the poisoned well of the radical heart: the displacement of real emotions into political fantasies; the rejection of present communities for a future illusion; the denial of flesh-and-blood human beings for an Idea of humanity that is more important than humanity itself.

The legacy of the 60s is, for Collier and Horowitz, finally, the legitimization of resentment as noble and justifiable. This is the poison in the well of the radical heart.