I am not, it must be admitted, entirely displeased to see that the uneasy alliance between David Horowitz and the racist American Renaissance seems to have come to an end, as evinced by a recent article on the FrontPage site. Horowitz critically engages the AmRen philosophy, contending that it is "culture that is crucial in shaping the American identity, not an ethnicity or race. ... America is ... a multi-ethnic and multi-racial experiment, and Jared Taylor and the Euro-racialists are wrong in contending that it is not." [Emphasis original]
While I applaud Horowitz's volte-face on those I called his "racist, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic allies" who "dra[w] conclusions that should appall Horowitz as much as anyone," this wouldn't be much of a HorowitzWatch article if I didn't take issue with some part of his article, so ....
In the article, Horowitz again brings out the particular devil of his general theory, the "'multicultural' left" hard at work "deconstruct[ing] ... America’s national identity and culture, [and] the American narrative of inclusion and freedom." What is particularly striking is not that the far left rears its head again -- Horowitz has a penchant for elevating radical pedagogues like Gary Leupp and his CRS cronies into a secret cabal of vast if unspecified powers -- but that he somehow comes to the conclusion that paleocon racism is derived from the left, and that Jared Taylor (of AmRen) and his fellow-believers "have fallen into a trap set by the ... left."
Without spending too much time on this topic (it now being 1 AM here in Texas), while Horowitz is certainly correct that the extreme paleocon narrative of America is "the racist nightmare of leftist fantasy" in which "[r]acism ... is just the American creed," it's stretching a point too far to suggest that Taylor gave in to leftist pressure, when his creed predates multiculturalism and its defenders by decades, if not centuries. The bible of American intellectualist racists is Imperium, published by the neo-fascist Noontide Press and formerly1 sold by the magazine. Imperium, itself only a synthesis of racist ideas long in corrupt bloom by the time Francis Parker Yockey began writing it, was published well before Brown v. Board was a file in Thurgood Marshall's attache, and at far remove from the development of radical culturalism that marks the far left today. Were one to judge solely by the timeline of development, one would be forced to the opposite conclusion: that leftist multiculturalism is a reactionary attempt to absorb the worst of white supremacist beliefs regarding America, much as the development of negritude amongst Francophone Africans was no more than an attempt to take the worst colonial stereotypes and turn them into a sheaf of quite dubious "virtues."
Having provided that particular caveat, Horowitz's attack on the AmRen racists is a good move, and one that contains some rather eloquent defenses of American pluralism. (Should you trust Horowitz less than I do, you'll find them to be sugar coatings for the poisonous social policy he intends to force-feed America. Your mileage, I suppose, may vary.)
What I would hope to see is one further step: a repudiation of the "Wichita Massacre" article, not so much for its subject, but for the fact that its entire line of argument is designed to force the reader into a corner from which the only escape is assent, agreeing that either the attack was a hate crime, or else that blacks are no more than subhuman. This intent on the part of the writer suggests that either the entire article should be at the least carefully reviewed.
1. Perhaps currently. Far-right websites and message boards cite AmRen as a source for Imperium, but I have been unable to verify that they currently sell the book.
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