Re: [Marxism] The new generation of renegades

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 20 Apr 2008 10:17:12 -0400 Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> With friends like these . . .
> 
> When David Mamet declared last month that he was no longer a 
> 'brain-dead liberal', he joined the ranks of leftwing writers, from 
> 
> Arthur Koestler to Kinglsey Amis to Christopher Hitchens, who have 
> moved to the right and attacked former allies. Playwright David 
> Edgar 
> challenges the new generation of renegades
> David Edgar
> Saturday April 19, 2008
> 
> 

Is it just me or has there been a decline in the
intellectual quality of defectors from the radical
left to the right?  It seems to me that people
like Max Eastman and James Burnham were
fairly substantial thinkers when they were
on the left, and to some extent remained
so when they became rightists.  The same
can also be said for Sidney Hook. 
And Whittaker Chambers could at
least turn a phrase and sometimes
say something that was at least half interesting.

David Horowitz was a reasonably competent
popularizer when he was a leftist, but not
what I would consider to have been a particularly
original thinker.  As a rightist, he is a joke
as a thinker.  

Christopher Hitchens, I think is now trying 
to have it both ways.  After having spent
the past five years as cheerleader for the
failed Iraqi War, he seems to be making
an effort at undoing some of the resulting
taint on his reputation by becoming a leading
promoter of the New Atheism.  That
way he can appeal to some of his old
progressive fans that he ditched after
9/11 without having to repudiate his
more recent political positions.
(And he can now bash Islamism in
the name of Enlightenment secularism).

And as far as David Mamet is concerned,
please!  He was never any sort of a
recognized thinker on the left, and even
then was an uncritical apologist for
Israel.  I don't think there is any
chance of him morphing into any sort of a
substantial thinker as a rightist.

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