The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America by David Horowitz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
David Horowitz is one of the cleanest writers and clearest thinkers about contemporary politics. Like me, he is what used to be called a neo-con, that is, someone with the wherewithal to escape the leftist thought-plantation. There is truth in Sun Tzu’s saying to “know your enemy” and it clearly helps if you were once one of the opposing team.
Horowitz’s latest clarion call, The Enemy Within, is a stem-winder. His first epigraph quotes Lincoln: “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” His thesis is that the U.S. – and by extension the West – is committing suicide due to leftist authoritarianism that has manifested itself so clearly in recent years.
His dedication is to the righteous victims of the leftist machine, and provides a good summary of the most egregious examples and forms of leftist tyranny: to “inner-city kids” trapped in failed public schools; to “inner-city inhabitants” at the mercy of Democrat justice-free zones; to the “innocent victims of criminal aliens” due to the “sabotage of America’s borders”; to “Europeans and Asian-Americans” denied rights by the systematic racism of “woke” institutions; to the lifework of “business entrepreneurs and employees” destroyed by the “Democrats’s dictatorial shut-down orders; and to “American patriots betrayed by the Democrats’ contempt for America’s constitutional order and shameless support for its foreign enemies – Islamic jahadists, China, and Iran.”
The book was published too early, in 2021, to also be dedicated to all lower- and middle-class Americans whose livelihoods are being crippled by high inflation brought on by the usual leftist incompetence and child-like impulse to destroy all that they touch.
This set of grievances, as profound if not more troubling than those listed by the Declaration of Independence against British tyranny, will cause the largest electoral shift in history in the coming November elections – that is, if the Democrats’ massive retail election steal that was so effective in the 2020 election doesn’t erase it. If a modicum of election integrity can be maintained, the Democrat party is facing extinction.
On the first page of Horowitz’s cogent arguments he declares that “Americans are more divided today than at any time since the Civil War” and that the “two parties are now guided by outlooks so different that their supporters seem to inhabit alternate universes.” The proximate cause was that “for four years slander has been a weapon of first resort for the ‘Resistance’ to President Trump.” Worse,
The effect of the anti-Trump obsession and the strategy of obstruction has been to deepen conflicts and make them all but unresolvable. [p.3]
Horowitz exposes the anti-American fervor animating the New Left by continuing,
Another casualty of the Democrats’ ‘Resistance’ had been patriotic loyalty, which in now suspect as loyalty to ‘white nationalism’ and ‘white supremacy.’ [p.4]
What could have caused a once patriotic party to flirt with nihilism and annihilation in the relentless pursuit of power?
The source of these divisions is a reactionary ideology usually referred to as “Identity Politics,” which has engulfed the Democrat Party and undermines its liberal instincts. It is an ideology that is racial and collectivist, that privileges groups over individuals and demonizes those who fall on the wrong side of its social equations. [p.4]
In other words: the ideology of cancel culture that has run amok and is silencing all dissent. Horowitz zeroes in on the philosophical basis of this totalitarian movement:
Identity Politics is often referred to as Political Correctness, but is is more accurately understood as Cultural Marxism – the idea that American society is characterized by oppressive hierarchies, and thus divided into warring races, genders, and classes. [p.4]
I quote at length Horowitz’s opening argument to show what a concise writer he is, marshaling his case one step at a time.
The last sentence of the first chapter’s opening argument reads:
It is this regressive attack on America’s fundamental principles by the Left that is the source of irreconcilable conflicts and ugly passions that are currently tearing the nation’s fabric apart, and that is the subject of this book. [p.10]
A few minor quibbles. Horowitz makes it sound as if by simply pulling the lever for a candidate with an R after his name will solve most everything. As the continued abject cowardice and cravenness of RINOs shows, the problem is not solely the Democrat party but the Uniparty, the fusion of the radicalized Democrats with establishment, globalist Republicans, who are more than happy to sell the country, its dreams and economic security to the highest bidder. If there is any hope for the nation’s recovery from tyrannical governance currently metastasizing, patriots must get heavily involved in primaries now, rejecting RINOs in favor of true America Firsters.
Business as usual will only send the country more speedily to destruction and perdition. Instead, the Uniparty must be put out of its misery.
Horowitz does not emphasize the seriousness of the spiritual battle we are in, most likely as his last book, “Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America” (and this written by a secular Jew!), thoroughly treats the subject. Clearly, our galloping cultural nihilism is the fruit of a secular-humanist, elitist and globalist cult which denies God or that our Creator should have any say in the conduct of human affairs.
In a nod to this tragic truth, Horowitz ends this latest tour-de-force with a coda titled “Love against Hate,” which he borrows from the recovering-journalist Daniel Greenfield’s article “An Election between Love and Hate.” That election steal he correctly terms “the greatest political crime in the history of the country.” [p.200]
Think about it. The vast majority of America patriots, and a growing majority of all Americans, believe the 2020 election was influence by fraud and is illegitimate.
Yet while the entire Stasi-governmental infrastructure, plus the corrupted intelligence community, the treasonous Fourth Estate, our tech and indoctrination masters of Big Tech and Big Education, unite to destroy both the voice and livelihood of dissenters, the patriots themselves remain extraordinarily peaceful and patient, trusting in God and our fellow Americans. Truly, there is no better example of love of country and fellow man than their forbearance.
Horowitz’s ends on a sobering note:
In sum, everything Democrats and their allies did with the power they had won showed that their ultimate goal was not to replace or destroy one man in office, or to win one election, but to establish a one-party state. [p.201]
That is, if the country lets them or if their fellow-travelers don’t wake up in time and reverse themselves. Here’s to praying that they do.
David Horowitz, The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America, 2012, Regnery, Washington, D.C.