Kommisar David and his Crusade

'Academic Freedom' is the banner cause of Trotskyite turned NeoCon, David Horowitz, and he's going about Uni campuses ranting and raving about "leftist totalitarianism" in higher-education. For starters, Horowitz is only giving publicity to these marginal lefty kooks that few has ever heard about it until he began his campaign to bring his own conservative counter-revolution to university faculties. Secondly, few conservative oriented people chose the liberal arts anyway; righties usually go in for the hard sciences, Business. One will meet few if any liberals in Engineering schools if they are political at all, for instance. How about turning academic 'freedom' on its head and require the University of Chicago to accept Market-Socialist professors at their Economics Department, hmm?

What Horowitz is up to really, is anyone's guess. Some conspiracy oriented paleocons believe that Horowitz is actually an unrepentant Sixty-Eighter New Lefty who attached himself to the NeoCon movement to garner notoriety and also it is a big cash cow for him; Horowitz's books tell the NeoCons and their fellow-travelers what they want to read and hear, and they admire the fact that he is an "ex-Marxist"('ex'?), so he should know what he is writing and ranting about when he assails lefties, liberals, Muslims and 'self-hating Jews'( their phrase for any Jewish person who is not in lock-step with the Likud Party of Israel). He does seem to have a personality-cult about himself, Horowitz does, and perhaps has a goal of being the Noam Chomsky for Rightists.

Again, who ever heard of Ward Churchill until Horowitz made him a poster-child dartboard in his 'Academic Freedom' crusade? If anything, Horowitz is enabling these 'kooky-lefty professors' and getting what he dubs the 5th Column all fired up. It is a big duh! that there are Leftists who hate the United States, but as I pointed out in a previous post here - there are plentiful Right wingers who loathe the Republic as well - more than Left 'Fifth Columnists' in my judgment. Seldom will you hear Horowitz blasting them, partially because they are his fellow-travelers, politically.

Let's take Horowitz at his word and entertain that his political conversion is genuine. If so, his agenda is worse than it appears, and his goal may be to purge all the leftist professors from the Campus and replace them with right-wing nuts. So much for 'freedom'. This would be exactly the Weimarization of academia. In the 1920s the German university system was dominated by political thought of the Conservative Revolution, a force that openly hated the Republic, democracy and liberalism. Pro-democratic and liberal professors were few and far between. Though today's conservative intelligentsia in America claim they are all for democracy and the Republic, some are attached to the anti-democratic Vienna School of Economics(look at Chicago Uni, Nevada-Las Vegas) and other anti-republican, authoritarian think -tanks and what have you. Horowitz himself, though he claims to be a secular agnostic, makes common cause with the Religious Right that has a strong Dominionist/theocratic influence. If it wasn't for their crack-brained belief that Israel will convert to Christianity at the "end of Time", these are the very people who would champion the expulsion of Jews and then some from Christian America. I know that politics makes for strange bedfellows( myself included...I'm a New Deal liberal who likes Buchanan's trade protectionism and most of his foreign policy), but Horowitz crosses the line into zany wackiness;his fellow-travelers are something else to behold. Just read the comments at his FrontPageMag.com. Sheesh!

Horowitz wallows in his own form of McCarthyism. Noted is that he accuses often critics of Neoconservatism of being motivated by Anti-Semitism; the word 'NeoCon', Horowitz and his pundits say, is a 'code-word' for Jew, and this is how Anti-Semites communicate with one another. This is the worst straw-man argument that I have heard in quite sometime, and it brings up shades of 'Thought Crime' - the same thing that NeoCons accuse the leftist Politically Correct commisars of engaging in. And when NeoCon critics get defensive and retort it is just about ideology and that some of their favorite people happen to be Jewish - the NeoCons say "I toleja so!". NeoCons even accused Radical Centrist,Michael Lind(who's father is Jewish) of Anti-Semitism because he named names of the Neoconservative movement, many who had Jewish surnames like his. That's like saying anyone who hates Rap and Hip-Hop is anti-Black, though many of the older Black people can't abide the cacophony either;when they get defensive and retort that they like other Black oriented music like Jazz, Motown, 70's Soul - they are accused of engaging in the "some of my best friends are Black" spiel. You can't win with some mind-blown ideologues.. It is best not to even try.

Returning to the main theme, what is needed in higher education are more engineers/technocrats, physical economists, anyway, regardless of their politics. That the Left has the hold on University liberal arts is really of no grand consequence. Having a bunch of right- winger Classical scholars running the departments sets off a more dangerous thing and is not what I would call freedom.