David Horowitz is an endlessly-fascinating subject. Here I analyze his attempt to blame the left for the terrorist attack of September 11.

David Horowitz is the founder of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, the editor of its online publication Frontpagemag.com, and the author of numerous books. The central organizing theme of Horowitz’s life and his work is a struggle against the political left in the United States. A former leftist who now belongs to the conservative movement, Horowitz blames leftism for many, if not most, of the evils afflicting the United States and the world. His writings and his political activism are aimed at attacking leftists and reducing their influence in politics and culture. In short, fighting the Left is the way Horowitz earns his living.

To Horowitz, leftists are advocates of an evil philosophy of collectivism. Not all leftists are communist totalitarians, but even the moderate leftists are dangerous because they prepare the way for totalitarianism, either by serving as useful idiots for real totalitarians or by deliberately using positions of influence to promote totalitarianism.

This worldview does not allow for much tolerance of people on the left. As far as Horowitz is concerned, leftists should be presumed to have bad faith until their good faith can be proven (which usually means that they support Horowitz on important issues). If a leftist can prove her good faith, Horowitz may be willing to concede that she is not evil, merely misguided.

Horowitz has acknowledged that there are bad ideas on the right as well as on the left. He has criticized certain rightists for hating gay people, for advocating censorship of the popular culture, and other offenses. My point is not that Horowitz never criticizes the right, but that his criticism of the right is different from his criticism of the left. Horowitz does not see the political right wing as inherently evil, which is how he sees the political left wing. His criticisms of the right are, in fact, criticisms of political allies.

This attitude governs Horowitz’s approach to party politics. Horowitz sees the Republican Party as the vehicle for correct politics, as defined by Horowitz. He has written advice for how the Republicans can win elections. Horowitz also attacks the Democrats, first for being inherently bad people, and second for being too tolerant of the left wing of their own party. When Democratic politicians flirt with Marxist radicals, Horowitz recounts this as an example of inherent Democratic corruption. When Republican politicians flirt with white supremacists, Horowitz may not endorse it, but he obviously sees it as merely a regrettable circumstance which doesn’t say anything about the inherent nature of Republicans.

Horowitz’s tendency to attribute everything evil to the left has led him to blame leftists for things which, for good or ill, are the responsibility of rightists. Consider a pamphlet and several speeches Horowitz issued recently in which he claimed that the left, more than the right, caused the country to be unprepared for the events of 9/11. Here’s how Horowitz summarizes part of a speech he gave during a university lecture tour: Horowitz “pointed out that nine of the World Trade Center terrorists were actually stopped by airport security on 9-11 because they had faulty I.D.s. But they had been allowed to board the planes anyway. I said that the Clinton Administration’s failure to institute adequate security measures prior to the attack was due in part to an ideological aversion to profiling Muslim terrorists” (the article where this paraphrase occurs is at http://www.frontpagemag.com/columnists/horowitz/2002/dh05-06-02.htm).

“The Clinton Administration’s failure to institute adequate security measures prior to the attack.” But I thought that Clinton had been out of office for almost eight months by September 11. Well, I guess what Horowitz *means* to say is that, even eight months into the Bush administration, the shadow of Clintonian neglect continued to fall across the land. I wonder: If airport security had detained and arrested the terrorists on 9/11 before they boarded the planes, would Horowitz have credited these arrests to “the Clinton administration’s successful security measures”? No, indeed!

Portraying leftists as uniquely non-vigilant requires portraying rightists as hard-nosed and security-minded. Horowitz would have us believe that the Republicans, unlike the Democrats, advocated allegedly realistic security measures before 9/11 and weren’t fooled by dangerous rhetoric about civil liberties. But look at the record. Bush was elected on a platform of increased vigilance against terrorism, yet he also spoke during the 2000 campaign against the “racial profiling” of Arab-Americans and praised a Congressional bill “to make sure that Arab-Americans are treated with respect,” probably a reference to a bill prohibiting secret evidence in immigration cases. It wasn’t until September 10 that Bush signed an order for beefing up the country’s defenses against terrorism. Can you imagine what Horowitz would have done with these facts if Bush had been a Democrat? “Bush was so concerned about racial profiling, and so eager not to alienate Arab-American voters, that he waited almost eight months to carry out his campaign promise to fight terrorism, and by the time he got around to doing anything about it, it was a day before the attack-too late, as it turned out. If only Bush had been as concerned about national security as he was about respect for Arab-Americans, etc.” In fact, since Bush is a Republican, Horowitz praised his September 10 order and has called for Americans to rally around the Chief Executive. This is not to say that suppressing civil liberties is a good thing, just that if a Democrat had expressed himself as supportive of civil liberties as Bush used to do, Horowitz would have called that Democrat soft on terrorism.

(Horowitz’s pamphlet about leftist softness on terrorism is at http://www.frontpagemag.com/horowitzsnotepad/2002/hn02-18-02.htm).

All this goes to show the Horowitz, with his single-minded focus on how bad leftists are, has developed a slanted view of reality. He is not an apostle of “no enemies on the right”-i. e., he acknowledges that people on the right can be wrong. But he reserves his energy and most of his attention for the Left-Wing Menace. There is a left-wing menace, of course, but there is also a right-wing menace and a middle-of-the-road menace, and Horowitz does not give as much attention to these latter as the circumstances require.