Dean of the Faculty
Speeches & Articles
“Steinberger’s Defense: An Essay” Reed College Quest
November 29, 2005
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He also says, importantly, that the subversive left today “controls college campuses, and their mind-set is basically totalitarian.” Please understand: America’s colleges (professors? administrators? students?) are presently run by the totalitarian – hence presumably subversive, seditious, treasonous, complicit-in-murder – radical left. At Reed, I suppose that means Colin or me or the Trustees or the faculty or Ed Mcfarlane or Mary Catherine or the Senate or the majority of the students or….
If you think that this kind of stuff constitutes serious, rational, intellectual discourse, that’s your prerogative. I don’t.
I could fill up an entire issue of the Quest with similar passages. There is, for example, the astonishing conviction that anyone who is a Marxist is either evil or deeply complicit in evil deeds. Mr. Horowitz says that the “false doctrines of marxism… led to the deaths of one hundred million people.” There is certainly a technical truth somewhere in there: millions and millions of people have indeed been murdered in the name of Karl Marx. But from this, should we conclude that Marx himself, or his doctrines, or all individuals who find Marxism attractive are morally complicit in, responsible for, or indifferent to murderous deeds? It’s technically true that millions and millions of people have been murdered in the name of Christianity. Should we conclude that Jesus himself, or his teachings, or all people who happen to be Christian are deeply complicit in murder?
As I said in the debate, the very first thing I read by David Horowitz – I had never really heard of him until a couple of months ago – was an article that described his visit to a political science class at Bates College in which the required text was a book called Modernity, edited by Stuart Hall and others. He says that he subsequently bought and read the book and discovered that it’s an “ideological Marxist tome…. The viewpoints in the text ranged from classical marxism to feminist marxism to postmodernist marxism. There were no opposing views introduced except to be refuted.” It’s a fairly obscure book; I myself had no knowledge of it at all. But I did get a hold of it and read it. I was absolutely stunned – I’m not exaggerating – to discover that the book bore exactly no relationship to Horowitz’s description. Far from being an ideological Marxist tome, it’s in fact a quite balanced, straightforward, non-ideological treatment of the leading sociological and historical approaches to modernity. It takes Marx seriously. But it takes Durkheim and Weber at least equally seriously. It is filled with criticisms of Marxism and filled with praise for decidedly non-Marxist or anti-Marxist theories. This is not a matter of interpretation. No one – left, right or center – could possibly think of this book as an ideological Marxist tome. But the worst part of it is this: try as I might, and I honestly tried very hard, I could not see how Horowitz could have simply made an inadvertent mistake. I could not, and can not, avoid the conclusion: either he didn’t read the book as he said he did, or else he grossly and intentionally mischaracterized it. In either case, it seems that a blatant and deliberate falsehood was used to demonstrate that college students are being force fed a diet of radical, subversive, anti-American doctrine.
At that point, I confess that his credibility with me was virtually shot. I’m not used to this kind of thing. But I did persist. The very next item I read was Mr. Horowitz’s article on political warfare in which he argues that the political and strategic leadership of the Republican Party – the party of Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay and so many similar individuals – suffers from “political timidity” and from a “non-combatant attitude,” that Republican leaders have been “afraid to fight the political battle” and are “innocents abroad when it comes to political war.” At this point, I pretty much gave up. The central claim of the essay is so far removed from any kind of political reality, so unconnected with the world that anyone would recognize, that it became impossible for me to take anything that followed seriously.
