i read horowitz’s column and think: the answer to his travail lies in the little town of fatima.

Brilliant apercu from Horowitz. Why then does he so firmly oppose (at least for the United States) the only form of state that seems capable of resisting the blandishments of socialism: a society that is strong because the majority of its people are rooted in their land and guided morally by religious faith, a society sustained by its traditions? Such societies need not be intolerant of minorities - as long as those minorities do not try to subvert it.

Horowitz has abandoned socialism and the hard Left, which must have been wrenching for him. As far as I can tell, he still longs for the sort of deracinated multicultural dream-society of secular, economics-driven neoconservatism. But that is precisely the sort of uprooted society in which socialist demagoguery can easily flourish. He has not yet worked out the contradictions. HRS

Mr. Sutherland makes an important point. Horowitz and others believe that total tolerance for homosexuality is just a natural extension of American liberty, and fail to realize that our form of society, including its economic freedoms and property rights, cannot survive the sort of tolerance they demand.

In my article “Why homosexual liberation is incompatible with our political order,” I wrote:

“[Limited government and local and popular self-rule] require a moral people with stable loyalties and strong sense of personal responsibility who are able to look after themselves and rely on those around them when they need assistance. Liberty also requires that people obey the law not out of coercion but out of a voluntary sense that one belongs to an actually existing community with a shared sense of moral truth as reflected in its laws. In other words, liberty and self-government require a cohesive culture, which in turn requires strong family ties, which in turn require traditional sexual morality.”

http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/000417.html

Here’s a further, eloquent expansion by David Horowitz on the link between socialism and poverty:

“There is a sense, of course, in which the left has always been defined by its destructive agendas. Its utopian vision was just that - utopian, a vision of nowhere. In practice, socialism didn’t work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy. In the vast library of socialist theory (and in all of Marx’s compendious works), there is hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth - to what will cause human beings to work and to innovate, and to what will make their efforts efficient. Socialism is a plan of morally sanctioned theft. It is about dividing up what others have created. Consequently, socialist economies don’t work; they create poverty instead of wealth. This is unarguable historical fact now, but that has not prompted the left to have second thoughts.”

http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=7618

What a shame that Horowitz is so insightful on leftism and Marxism, and so blind on some of the contemporary forms of liberalism.

Harry Jaffa, in an older but still timely book review, discusses some of the issues raised in this thread:

http://www.claremont.org/writings/910101jaffa.html