potent quotables: David Horowitz

the following quotes are from Horowitz' Dark Agenda

On 'Social Justice'

When Soviet Communism collapsed in 1991, progressives didn’t give up their illusions. Instead they changed the name of their utopian dream. Today they no longer call their earthly redemption “Communism.” They call it “social justice.” Like Communism, social justice is an impossible future in which the inequalities and oppressions that have afflicted human beings for millennia will miraculously vanish and social harmony will rule... [But] injustice is not caused by an abstraction called “society,” as we on the left had maintained. Nor was injustice caused by oppressive races and genders, or solely by our political enemies. Injustice is the result of human selfishness, deceitfulness, malice, envy, greed, and lust. Injustice is the inevitable consequence of our free will as human beings. “Society” is not the cause of injustice. Society is merely a reflection of who we are... In contrast to the progressive mission of saving “society,” the goal of Christian belief is saving individual souls. Christians see the imperfections and sufferings of the world as the results of acts by individuals who have failed to do good or have chosen to do evil. The social redeemers, on the other hand, do not see individuals as agents of their own destinies. They see them as products of “social forces,” as objects of class, race, gender, and religious oppressions. Progressives focus on alleged injustices that do not depend on the willful acts of racist or sexist individuals, but on mythical factors like “institutional bias” and “systemic discrimination.” Through the progressive lens, individuals and their choices disappear. That is why progressives do not hesitate to impose their solutions on others by force, including the people they propose to save.

On Progressivism's Academic Advance

Since the seventies, the radical movement had been establishing a political base in the universities, purging conservative faculty and texts, and transforming scholarly disciplines into political training programs. These leftist indoctrination programs are referred to as “oppression studies,” “social justice studies,” “feminist studies,” “whiteness studies,” and the like. So advanced has this transformation become that Andrew Sullivan, a principled liberal and prominent gay activist, felt impelled to sound an alarm. He pointed out that this radical movement posed an existential threat to the American order of pluralism and individual freedom: 

When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education, as we have long known it, toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges—your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression—will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.

Sullivan went on to describe how this notion constituted an assault on the fundamental American principle of the freedom and equality of individuals: The whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping from the discourse. The idea of individual merit—as opposed to various forms of unearned “privilege”—is increasingly suspect. The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment—untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights—are now routinely understood as mere masks for “white male” power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of “hate,” rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency. And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself. 

On Progressivism's Attitude Towards Christians

The left’s attacks on religious freedom, and general hatred for those who don’t agree with them, are driven by “identity politics.” Identity politics is an anti-American ideology and a sanitized name for cultural Marxism. Marx viewed market societies as divided into capitalists and workers, to which he ascribed moral attributes: oppressors and oppressed. Society was the site of continual warfare between these classes. Cultural Marxists have extended this picture of class warfare to races, genders, and sexual orientations, attributing all inequality and injustice to the institutions and actions of the oppressor groups: whites, males, heterosexuals, and religious “reactionaries”—in particular Christians—whose views allegedly serve the interests of the oppressors. This is a prescription for true oppression, as the government steps in to create “social justice” by depriving those who have earned it, the fruits of their labor, and distributing them to those who have not. It is a prescription for irreconcilable conflict and division, not the compromise and coexistence that the American founders worked so hard to achieve. The success of the cultural Marxists in reshaping our institutions is why America now appears to be two nations instead of one. If the source of inequality is not circumstance, individual talent, and choice, but is imposed by an oppressor group, it can only be overcome by suppressing that group. It is therefore morally wrong to extend sympathy to an oppressor group or to respect its American rights—rights once afforded to all. To respect oppressors’ rights is to support the injustices they commit. If social justice is to be achieved, one must suppress the perpetrators of injustice by depriving them of their rights. That is why progressives—cultural Marxists—are so intolerant and seek to suppress the free speech of those who oppose them. In identity politics only collective rights matter—not individual rights. What matters is one’s membership in a “victim” group or an “oppressor” group. Membership is based on characteristics the individual cannot change. Identity politics is a politics of hate, and a prescription for war. The liberal but anti-left writer Andrew Sullivan has eloquently summed up the consequences of this view of the world: 

What matters [to the left] is that nonwhites fight and defeat white supremacy, that women unite and defeat oppressive masculinity, and that the trans [gendered] supplant and redefine the cis [people whose sense of their own identity corresponds to their birth sex]. What matters is equality of outcome, and it cannot be delayed. All the ideas that might complicate this—meritocracy, for example, or a color-blind vision of justice, or equality of opportunity rather than outcome—are to be mocked until they are dismantled. And the political goal is not a post-racial fusion, a unity of the red and the blue, but the rallying of the victims against the victimizers, animated by the core belief that a non-“white” and non-male majority will at some point come, after which the new hierarchies can be imposed by fiat.

In other words, by a totalitarian state.