[Order David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed, HERE]
The crux of David Horowitz’s new book, America Betrayed: How a Christian Monk Created America & Why the Left is Determined to Destroy Her, lies in two short sentences that are both a discovery and a diagnosis—simultaneously. He writes:
In the real world of American democracy, social and economic divisions are between the Cans and the Can-Nots, the Dos and the Do-Nots, the Wills and the Will-Nots. The vast majority of wealthy Americans, as a matter of empirical fact, are first generation and have created and earned what they possess. (p. 127)
Those who seek to destroy America, the Progressive left, have cast our nation in a narrative that constructs it as one of Haves and Have-Nots. The latter have been condemned to such a status, in their minds, by an oppressive faction that utilizes systemically racist, sexist, and bigoted institutions to keep racial and sexual minorities outside the domain of the ethical and the pantheon of the human community. These progressives, found in the Democratic party, are utopian idealists and supremacists who manufacture a false reality to ideate, like wishful-thinking children, a perfect future devoid of imperfections. This we may call The Utopian Fantasy from Nowhere. Its central premises and tenets are not tethered to empirical reality. Theirs is a collective consciousness creating reality to ideate and justify cruel and immoral means to reach a utopian end abstracted from, and devoid of, any reference to the frailty and fallen nature of the human condition. This makes it impossible to achieve permanent earthly bliss here on earth.
This worldview made it possible for the slaughter of 100 million people under communism because of a single fundamental principle: Utopian idealists and fundamentalists suffer from an infantilism born of adult-like children unable to accept the messiness of the world as they find it. They believe that via social justice initiatives that human nature can be fundamentally changed and programmed to produce predictable desired ends: equity, universal justice, and the eradication of all man-made inequities by radically remaking humanity by manufacturing a new type of man.
Horowitz recognizes the folly behind this because an inherently fallen human nature will eternally reproduce the very maladies it seeks to permanently eliminate by human beings who believe that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, that progress is inevitable if human nature (which progressives believe is perfectible) can be twisted like a piece of putty to fit the evasions, the visions, and the will to power of any social justice warrior and idealist. Horowitz fleshes out this thesis by way of a discussion of black nationalist movements, the politics of Barack Obama, and socialist/communist revolutionary Saul Alinsky, among others.
The view that all attempts to construct a perfect world from a fallen nature can only end in successive disasters, and that conservatives can only protect inalienable rights, and the rights guaranteed by our rational Constitution such as freedom of conscience to believe and act, we may refer to as, Horowitz’s View from Objective Reality.
Horowitz’s other major accomplishment in this slim book lies in his original connection of the legacy of the fifteenth century revolutionary Protestant Reformist, Martin Luther, to America’s own unique version of constitutional republicanism, moral individualism, and respect for the sanctity of the individuals’ life and conscience regardless of personal theologies or lack thereof.
The Jeffersonian dedication to religious conviction as a matter of purely private concern between God and an individual’s conscience for which humans are accountable to God rather than priests is in three Lutheran axiomatic principles: first, the equality of all before the law; second, the freedom of all in matters of conscience; and third, the inalienable nature of the rights protecting these two.
America Betrayed is an exploration of how the formation of the American republic is antecedently indebted to a secularized version of Luther’s principles. The book is too breviloquent, the explication on Horowitz’s part too compelling and concise to give away his approach here. But there is much to recommend in his analyses of how freedom of conscience and expression, the separation of church and state, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution extended by the diversity of the sects created by Luther’s Reformation to “a universal community of believers in the values embraced by the Founders derived from Luther’s creed.”
In his new book, Horowitz aims to set the record on race straight once and for all. While listing all the ways in which America’s past was virulently racist, Horowitz denies that America was ever a racist country. I shall give a charitable interpretation of what he means by this and why his answers do have plausibility.
Horowitz does list the racist Presidency of Woodrow and his racist policies, the reality of Jim Crowe laws, anti-miscegenation laws that held sway in the United States until the historic Supreme Court decision barring such laws in Loving vs Virginia in 1967. Horowitz does mention that in 1958 ninety-five percent of Americans disapproved of interracial dating.
I would add that beginning in the 1900s there were countless race riots led by whites that targeted and killed blacks. They include the Springfield race riots (1908), the Atlanta race riots (1906), the East St. Louis Riots (1917), and the Tulsa Massacre (1921) which decimated what was known as the Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Black-owned businesses such as banks, hotels and insurance companies were burned to the ground, blacks murdered.
The racial harm inflicted by whites against blacks in the United States as systemic and mainstream is indisputable. As part of our celebration of our unprecedented republic we can celebrate that our nation is no longer bigoted and systemically racist. We can celebrate that the core principles of our founding documents enabled moral progress. Today, there are no freedoms and rights enjoyed by white Americans not equally enjoyed by blacks.
A charitable interpretation of Horowitz’s view that America was never a racist society is that he means that metaphysically speaking, racism was never endemic to the authentic spirit of America. This means that, given the ideals of equality enshrined in our Founding documents which declare unequivocally the inalienability of the rights of all human beings who were made equal by their Creator, racism was morally offensive to the constitutive spirit of America.
My view is that Horowitz means, also, that even amid racist acts committed against blacks that there were always moral rejoinders and remonstrations against the overtly racist factions that sought to deny blacks full membership in the American republic. This would include the nefarious motives of those who wished to destroy the founding principles of America that, at core, were anti-racist. That people violated these core tenets of equality among all persons is, in effect, a violation of their own moral personalities, and not as Horowitz believes, the spirit and essential character of America.
If interpreted in this manner, then in America Betrayed Horowitz has written a magnificent American mythology that pays tribute to the nation’s commitment to racial equality and justice for all.