Rating: 
Summary: Frightening, by fermed
Review: David Horowitz deserves to be read by anyone interested in present or past US political activism. He was raised a communist by communist parents in New York City; he experienced the horrors of the liberation politics of the 60's; he saw and was marginally involved in the murderous brutality of the Black Panthers; eventually his honesty and intelligence forced him to reconsider the issues of political truth and falsity. He is now a conservative. His writings are powerful and laser-like in penetrating the lies and the hypocrisy of the left. "The Politics of Bad Faith" is just one of his books that should be carefully read. "Radical Son," his autobiography, is a lucid picture of the leftist "system" that is in place in this country, the aim of which is to undermine the constitution and eventually to incrementally destroy our freedoms. As is usual in cases of defectors who reveal the truth, the organized left can only level "ad hominem" attacks against Horowitz. They simply cannot challenge the reality and the veracity of what he presents. Highly readable and highly recommended. When this book and his autobiography are finished, try "Hating Whitey." One can keep up with Horowitz's writing in Salon, the online magazine.
Rating:
Summary: Horowitz exposes the Left as the home of hatred and bigotry
Review: David Horowitz does a wonderful job of destroying the myths of the Left. He shows how historically the Left's policies don't help the less fortunate but actually enslave them. Mr. Horowitz exposes the fact that when the Left has it's way totalitarian regimes follow with freedom stripped from the masses. The true believers of the Left will hate this book because it shows them for what they really are and the bankruptcy of Left's belief system. For the Right it tells them what they already knew and it is epecially powerful coming from someone who was once part of the Left's elite.
Rating:
Summary: A superb dissection of Leftist "theology."
Review: David Horowitz has done time at both ends of the political spectrum, and he's just the person to elaborate on the "theological" presuppositions of the Left. Readers of Paul Johnson's _Intellectuals_ will be unsurprised to learn that Horowitz finds a whole lotta claptrap clouding the minds of the secular Left. But his discussions of Leftist "messianism" are a fascinating and insightful dissection of the view that we can bring on the New Age ourselves "merely" by chucking tradition and the accumulated wisdom of our forebears and rebuilding human nature and human society from the ground up. The free market beats the muddle of the "planners" every time. Maybe such mitzvot/commandments as "You shall not murder, you shall not steal" really do represent indispensible "design parameters" for a sustainable human society, and it's not our job to undertake "redesigns?"
Rating: 
Summary: the politics of poor research
Review: David Horowitz is an unqualified authority regarding true political issues. He has done a magnificant job of selling out to the right, making a small fortune along the way. Horowitz's weak convictions and clouded, platitudinal arguments are among the right's finest. What else would you expect from an uneducated hippie?
Rating: 
Summary: More Horowitz Nonsense
Review: David Horowitz is up to his usual misguided distortions. Horowitz fundamentally misunderstands leftist thought, yet purports to be all knowing. He seems to have trouble getting past fascist, rightist (no, it is not Marxist or leftist, even if it purported to be) Stalinist authoritarianism. He does not seem to realize he endorses the same authoritarianism (which he simply dresses in different clothes) he purports to condemn. He, of course, is a darling of the media and the establishment as he seeks to condemn anything that in any way smacks of social equality or social justice, or otherwise serves as a basis for correcting the ever growing concentration in fewer and fewer hands of power and wealth in the U.S. So we can expect to see glowing reviews, fawning interviews on talk shows, and statements on what profound intellect he has demonstrated. But he simply is wrong. The roots of evil, if we can discuss such in meaningful terms, certainly are not in minorities or multiculturalism or treating women as something other than doormats. If the roots of evil exist, they are in the willingness of people like Horowitz to glorify the individual at the expense of society, to deny any sense of genuine social responsibility, and in the materialism and greed fed by corporate/multinational capitalism, and the narcissistic glorfication of self.
Rating:
Summary: pretty good at attacking the far left
Review: Horowitz does a pretty good job of attacking liberal policies. He does bring good points especially dealing with the effect of communism had on countries. Rarely do we here about what went wrong and how much of a disaster it was doing things like economic degression and the death of over 20 million in the U.S.S.R alone. He also attacks the left's dealing with sexual behavior and HIV/AIDS and how liberal policies have seemed to increase the level of STD. One of the really good things he talks about is the conotations of words like liberal refering to progressive and conservative to moving backwards. Such conotations will of course give the liberals an advantage in promoting their idea.
Rating:
Summary: I got caught with too much so, bringing it in from Mexico
Review: Horowitz is at his intellectual best as he skewers the Left for its colossal deceits. A century of blood, famine, gulags, and philosophical failure should be enough to convince even the truest believers in progressivism that something is awry with their Leftist plan for humanity. Very quickly Horowitz shows us the errors in our thinking. Just because Utopia doesn't work doesn't mean that those who follow its mystical idealism won't continue to bang their collective heads on the proverbial wall.Intellect is not relevant where huge amounts of energy are spent on blocking and denying reality. Horowitz catalogues his forays against this logic-tight mindset. As one might suspect the roots of this thinking find themselves in the dogma of religion. Greed and personal self-interest are bad, and altruistic sharing is good. The fact that this is counterintuitive, from the standpoint of reality and historical experience is lost on the zealots. They often refuse to debate, that is they won't agree on definitions and the confines of deductive reasoning; thus they argue in Bad Faith. Hence, "the Politics of Bad Faith" is an apt phrase for delineating their upside-down philosophy. Nothing much can be done to breach this impasse unless all parties retain an open mind to new information. Unfortunately, worldviews are seldom changed and too many go through life on intellectual cruise control, secure in the soundness of their ideology. It's reflected in a song of the 60's, Horowitz's own Leftist heyday, "Blowin' in the Wind". Listen to it again and see what I mean. This is a good book, but you won't see it reviewed and discussed on the major networks or in the major print media. Horowitz needs a new plan to bring his thinking to the downtrodden. Stay tuned.
Rating: 
Summary: Same old Horowitz with a different title/cover
Review: Horowitz is the conservative caliph out to convert or eliminate liberal infidels. More thought-provoking conservatives like Shelby Steele have successfully argued that white guilt is the commodity of choice that many liberal minority leaders willingly accept in exchange for their own sense of responsibility for their communities' problems. Likewise, Horowitz succeeds in proving how profitable it can be to describe his feelings of shame for having been a Marxist. Horowitz certainly knew how easy it would be to pander to conservatives long before he jumped ship. Books and essays written by converts have a tendency to garner high praise and high royalties from people of the same political persuasion.Conservatives love to suggest a book like Horowitz's as an example of a testimony from "a liberal who grew up." The problem with converts is that they tend to assume uncompromising stances to prove their allegiance to their new cause--Horowitz is no exception. On a positive side, his chapter on how overzealous proponents of gay rights delayed community efforts to halt the spread of AIDS is worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Simply superb
Review: Horowitz is, as always, at his best. We are yet to see a Leftist confront him on an intellectual level. Every Left-wing criticism is filled with personal insult. The Left is yet to challenge Horowitz on the ideas that he raises, and argues, so powerfully and persuasively. This book is another example of Horowitz finding, and dissecting, the pathology of the socialist mindset. His eloquence and intellectual prowess are surpassed only by his intestinal fortitude. This is a must read.
Rating: 
Summary: A Strongly-Worded Moral Indictment
Review: I appreciate the opportunity offered by Amazon.com to comment on my book The Politics of Bad Faith. I am especially grateful for this opportunity because my book, though largely analytical, is also a strongly worded moral indictment of an intellectual generation guilty of complicity in the crime of socialism, and therefore of some of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century. It is further guilty of "bad faith" in not acknowledging its complicity. Its intellectual bad faith also extends to the covert attacks on the work of critics of the left in the guise of "objective" commentaries. I have in mind reviews whose purpose is ostensibly to provide politically netural previews of books for libraries and bookstores...The suggestion that The Politics of Bad Faith is either incoherent and thrown together or that its arguments are not presented in a manner open to counter-arguments is itself a form of bad faith, since even the most casual reader of the book would be aware that both these canards are false. I wrote The Politics of Bad Faith because of the remarkable fact that the intellectuals who call themselves "liberal" and "progressive," and who now dominate our university culture and magazines of opinion, by and large supported the socialist experiments of the 20th Century that resulted in 100 million deaths and spread poverty throughout the former Sino-Soviet empire. Without so much as pausing to examine their responsibility for these tragedies they have continued to promote the destructive intellectual paradigms and political agendas associated with the socialist tradition. Thus it is a striking fact that the dominant intellectual influences in the academy today are those of marxists, communists, fascists and proto-fascists -- Marx, Nietzsche, Gramsci, Foucault and Heidegger. Moreover, the conservative, anti-Marxist tradition of writers like Hayek, Von Mises, Aron, and others is systematically excluded from the academic canon. Of course America is hardly on the verge of a totalitarian temptation. To show how destructive these ideas can be, even in a democratic context, I have included a chapter called "A Radical Holocaust" which explores the complicity of the left in the spread of the AIDS epidemic in America. Why is the intellectual left impervious to the actual fate of its political utopias? Because it is in thrall to a "bad faith" in the religious sense as well. In a chapter called "The Religious Roots of Radicalism," I have explored the origi ns of the modern left in Jewish mysticism, and particularly in the idea of a "tikkun olam" - a repair of the world - a term progressives use to describe their task, which is that of self-appointed agents of a human redemption. It is in this delusion that we can find the source of the incomparable destructiveness of socialist achievements. I have also included in The Politics of Bad Faith two lengthy letters to radical friends which provide an intellectual history of my exodus from the left an d - I hope - a comprehensive explanation of why the left is so wrong-headed and politically reactionary. Finally, I conclude the book with an outline of what I believe the philosophical foundations of a modern American conservatism should be.
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