Probably because he was once a member of the radical academic left, David Horowitz brings out the worst in the contemporary left when he writes about its destructive beliefs and close-minded attitudes. His books and speeches are usually met with wildly vitriolic denunciation by his former allies at Berkeley and the many other colleges and universities in America where tenured radicals (to use Roger Kimball’s useful term) are in power. Many would call him a racist and fascist if he wrote a book on raising hamsters.
Uncivil Wars is not about raising hamsters. It’s about the absurdly divisive and emotional issue of the U.S. government paying reparations for slavery. In the book, Horowitz sets forth his persuasive case against that demented idea. In short, he says it is nonsensical to adopt a policy that would require many people currently living, not one of whom ever owned a slave and many of whose ancestors fought to end slavery, to give up anything to “compensate” other people currently living, some of whose ancestors were held as slaves in the distant past, for the supposed loss the latter group have suffered. There really isn’t anything new in Horowitz’s argument, but he makes it cogently.
What the book is chiefly about is not the argument over reparations for slavery, but rather the reception that argument has received on America’s campuses. The reaction at many of the elite universities to the mere presentation of an “insensitive” statement opposing reparations shows that we have a serious problem: They have become institutions of indoctrination rather than inquiry.
For several years, the contention that the United States “owes” reparations to the black population for the long-gone institution of slavery has been circulating in the media and political circles. Randall Robinson, author of the book The Debt, has been especially vocal in pressing his case, which boils down to saying that today’s Americans are responsible for the bad acts of thepoliticians who permitted slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries. Horowitz thought the time had come for a refutation, so in 2001 he wrote a piece entitled Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea – and Racist, Too. He attempted to have it published in various campus newspapers.
Where it was published, the response from proreparations students and faculty members was swift and nasty. At the University of California, within hours of the publication of the piece in The Daily Californian, Horowitz writes that “40 angry black students accompanied by their political mentor, a professor of African-American studies, invaded the paper’s editorial offices. In a raucous, finger-wagging session, they accused Editor-in-Chief Daniel Hernandez of running an ad that was ‘racist,’ ‘incorrect,’ and demanded a printed apology.” Hernandez capitulated and confessed his errors in the paper the next day, writing that it was “unfair” for Horowitz to have purchased space in the paper without giving a chance for opposing views to answer directly.
What makes that last statement so risible is the fact that neither at Berkeley or any of the other campuses was there any effort by Horowitz’s antagonists to debate his arguments on their merits. Over and over, the protests took the form of paroxysms of rage and emotion. It’s obvious that many college students have soaked up the postmodern idea that feelings are all that matter, not logic and evidence.
At the University of Wisconsin, a mob demanded that the administration bar the Badger Herald, which had chosen to print the Horowitz piece, from campus on the ground that it was a “perpetrator of racist propaganda.”
When the campus paper at Brown printed it, a new element appeared — theft. After the customary demand for an apology was ignored, protesters responded by taking every copy of the paper at every distribution point and threw them away. A spokesman said that the theft was justified because Horowitz had made “a direct assault on communities of color at Brown.”
The whole episode shows that many young Americans, students at top universities, are incapable of rationally discussing their political beliefs. Instead they turn reflexively to storm-trooper tactics when someone challenges anything remotely connected with their “identity.” Horowitz concludes that many Americans, not just those black student protesters, want the status of victimhood so badly that they can’t think logically about arguments denying that they are victims entitled to reparations or other preferential treatment.
While Uncivil Wars makes a useful contribution to the case against reparations for slavery, the greater value of the book is that it exposes an ugly truth about the intellectual climate at American colleges and universities. Horowitz said they have become “swamps of almost bottomless ignorance and malice.” He’s right, and I fear they will remain so long after the silly debate over slavery reparations has been forgotten.
George C. Leef is director of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy and a contributing editor of Carolina Journal, monthly newspaper of the John Locke Foundation.
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