Muddled Thoughts

Muddled Thoughts

The point is not that Horowitz thought badly twenty years ago. Nineteen hundred and sixty-nine was a bad year for political sense. I, for example, wrote a favorable review of Empire and Revolution in Ramparts, the New Left monthly of which Horowitz was an editor. Horowitz assigned me the book and published the review. But I won’t blame him for my errors.

My point is rather that the same style of thought that drove the Horowitz book of 1969 drives the juicier, jazzier, nastier Collier-Horowitz book of 1989. The style is fanatical, apocalyptic, harsh, Manichaean, frantic. There are enemies everywhere. “The socialist revolution” is on the march. The world divides niftily between the saved and the unsaved, the blind and the all-seeing. On one side, capitalism. On the other side, communism. Sign up. If you don’t, you’re fronting for the enemy.

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