David Horowitz has an interesting story to tell. Born into an Old Left family, Horowitz was active in the New Left in the 1960s, then rejected the entire experience and became a neo-conservative; he now boasts of being, the most hated ex-radical of his generation. Unfortunately, in his talk at SIUC Jan. 27, Horowitz did not tell his own story. Instead, he treated us to an ideological diatribe against leftists, who he told us have committed all the worst crimes of the 20th century. Horowitz’s talk replicated many of the problems he claims belong exclusively to the left; he demonized individuals and groups, while demonstrating a faith in conservatism that is based more on being a true believer than on a balanced view of history.

There are plenty of reasons to be critical of the left in this country. There is a dark side of the ’60s about which Horowitz’s sponsors suggested he would enlighten us, but I saw little attempt to educate in his talk. Horowitz simply repeated the neo-conservative line about the Old Left, the New Left and the Marxists, who in his view dominate universities. For Horowitz, leftists are all alike:un-American and treasonous, blind believers in the goodness of humanity at best, dangerous criminals at worst.

Two points of his rather unfocused talk I found particularly offensive and misleading. One was his characterization of the Old Left (American communists) as being an un-American conspiracy that posed a threat to the United States. (This is a point of view that is supposedly proved by the documents now coming out of Soviet archives.) While there is little question American communists deluded themselves about the nature of the Soviet Union, it does not follow from this that communists were mainly spies who hated the United States. In fact, most American communists loved their country and worked to improve it. They did not commit espionage, they promoted labor, civil rights and the abolition of poverty.

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Horowitz’s argument justifies McCarthyism on the basis of a supposed communist threat we are now supposed to acknowledge was very serious. Yet it still seems clear to me that anti-communists posed a greater threat to American democracy than did the communists. Thousands of people lost their jobs in the 1950s (including my grandfather, who worked in Hollywood at the time), but they never expressed any hatred for the United States and hardly were one inch from treason, to use Horowitz’s phrase.

The second point that was hard to take was the way in which Horowitz caricatured university professors today. Supposedly we are all leftists who deprive our students of a balanced view of the issues, grade them on their politics rather than the quality of their work and intimidate them so much that they dare not express a conservative point of view.

He harkened back to the good old days of the 1950s when there was much more academic freedom than there is today. This is simply nonsense. Although it may be true that many faculty are more to the left than their students today, we do maintain a vision of education that includes:opening people’s minds to new ideas and teaching them to read, think and write critically and encouraging them to reach their own conclusions. I dare say that is a very different view of education than the one David Horowitz demonstrated for us.

As to his all-to-brief treatment of the New Left, a movement he was involved in and thus perhaps could speak about with some particular insight and authority, Horowitz merely told us the Black Panthers committed acts of violence and the anti-war movement was not pacifist. Such points are not news to anyone who has read the burgeoning literature of the ’60s. While the extent of the first point the Panthers penchant for violence is still being debated in the literature, the second point is so obvious it hardly bears mention. While there was a violent and even anti-American strain in the New Left, it does not add much to our understanding of this movement to give the impression that is all there is to it. Neither does it serve our country well to suggest the high ideals the frequently motivate movements for social change inevitably end in violence and death. Shall we tell young people, as Horowitz’s speech seemed to suggest, that it is a mistake to have ideals about making the world a better place?