David Horowitz, Michael Savage and John Leo are all on this strange crusade to make sure that America's colleges indoctrinate American students in a particular way.  Leo for example is all for free speech on campus except for homosexuals.  It is hard to imagine a university run on Horowitz' principles.

 The odder thing is the realy underlying teory behind their campaign.  That American parents are unware what is being taought to their children and as the payers of the bills they should rise up against the likes of the Todd Gitlins.  Having taken courses at Columbia University in the last couple of years what the facualty seems more concerned about is that their students only want "As" because they don't care what they learn but are in college to get to graduate school.

In some ways it would be nice if Horowitz was correct that Universities really matter all that much any more.
Daniel A. Greenbaum

Todd is there any way you can sue this moron for defamation? Maybe via an English court?  I think his day is coming. He will defame the wrong person at the wrong time and end up like David Irving; exposed in a court of law as a mad lying ass.

It is important to note how the almost never first rate honest critics of the right, with Horowitz a representative example, choose their targets.  For example, many on the right (from Sen McCain to Peter Schweizer the author of Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy [I saw the author presenting the book on C-span but happily confess to never having seen fit to look at the book itself] choose Barbara Streisand as a major focus for their trashing. 

In the case of Horowitz focusing on Gitlin, for example on the issue of patriotism, he could only be using that example to set the bar as high as possible -- like playing holier than thou.  How many others who purport to be progressive would, like Gitlin, attack Noam Chomsky OR Arundhati Roy for supposed anti-Americanism?  We must look carefully at these issues.

 There are, however, many thoughtful as well as well-known left critics of Todd Gitlin, although they don't get the mainstream media play of a useful charlatan like Horowitz.  But their criticisms are taken much more seriously by many more progressives, including myself.  I would really like to see Gitlin try to take the best/most prominent of these criticisms to task in a detailed critique, rather than kick the dead horse of "exposing" Horowitz as full of crap.

 I myself have made some of these criticisms, or at least articulated them (as they are not necessarily all original to me and can be found elsewhere); in at least some cases the comment was troll rated a "2" by Gitlin himself (2 under the old system).  But the manner or supposed 'rudeness' of the presentation or whatever was seen fit to warrant troll rate, the substance of the critiques by me and by others, whether here or elsewhere, goes unanswered, to my knowledge.  I would be interested to see a similarly diligent critique of what I consider issues far more worth addressing, if of less above-ground star quality than Horowitz at some point, if only a few links to where these criticisms have been outlined and answered by Gitlin.

Personally, I just take Horowitz's book as yet another college guide.  I was disappointed to find no one from either of my kids colleges: Carlton and Swarthmore.  Where did I/they go wrong?!?

I think it's a temporary workaround for a problem with Internet Explorer.  Adam Mordecai explained it in a posting a few weeks ago, but I'm not sure exactly where.  In any case hopefully it will be fixed soon.

With all due respect Cloudy, why should the onus be on Todd Gitlin? Quite frankly, why haven't "thoughtful" "progressives" answered the many questions he's put to them over the past few years?

I know why Horowitz targeted him, he did so because Gitlin does resonate with people, he makes perfect sense, and to the right wing zealots, he is a threat to their lies, their propaganda.. if people actually are inspired to think and feel beyond what lies beneath their nose, they might actually start waking up and uniting with others and taking on the right wing controlled power structure..

We know the Bush administration feels above answering legitimate questions put to them, we all know that they can't answer them because it would reveal that the emporer has no clothes. I don't feel that I'm exagerating when I say that I'm sure the "thoughtful", well known progressives you refer to, as well as those less well known progressives that fill the blogs and forums with their diatribes and prognostications find the questions Gitlin has tried to put to them equally inconvenient.... thus the need to try and deflect that by attempting to impune his credibility.

Back in '02, Gitlin wrote a wonderful article for Mother Jones, "The Rough Beast Returns"... it was strikingly important, I was shocked, that there was something relevant in the magazine,  having stopped reading it regularly because of it's obvious disconnect. It dealt with with the rise of anti-semitism in the student movements at colleges and universities..  it resonated with me because I had been shocked to the core at what I recognized as anti-semitism taking root in the online communities of the Naderite-left back in '00. I sincerely ask you Cloudy, why no "thoughtful" progressives ever bothered to answer, or even address the question he closed that article with? (see below)

"If fighting it unremittingly is not a "progressive" cause, then what kind of progress does progressivism have in mind?"

I know there are alot of people who do passionately support and believe in what they saw as the ethics and values of the traditional left, what they believed were shared by traditional progressives, we've been asking the same question, not just to hear ourselves speak but because of our commitment to the issues. For the same reason we rail against the right wing, we recognize hypocrisy when we hear it, we don't wear blinders.

How can you attempt to claim the high ground for them, when if you're honest you have to admit to the elitism, the hypocrisy of so many new "progressives", including the "well known ones", like Chomsky and yes, Arundhati Roy. Are we supposed to sit silently and not dare to criticize hypocritical words and actions, if "ideological purity" acts alot like "compassionate conservatism"... a pathetic farce, exploitation, a smoke screen to hide ones agenda behind.

Ah well, as someone who is taking a college freshman English class, I can attest to the fact that I seriously doubt Ehrenreich is considered required reading even at the poshest, most ivy league school.. the reading subjects in those classes are literature, freshman level is usually devoted to contrasting conflict and authority in literature. Various chapters in the Old Testament, Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Shakespeare's Othello, and the like.

Perhaps like the Marxist Horowitz used to be, he considers his readership, the lowly masses easily duped.. thus the obvious bs..

I think Todd Gitlin did the right thing, Al Franken was right to take on O'Reilly, it really got the ball rolling in people willing to show him for what he was.

First there is the question of why or whether leftists have responded to Gitlin.  I have read or heard many such responses myself, and written quite a few -- and they are not by any stretch mere ad hominem diatribes (incidentally, bold IS very different from italics).  The point is, why does Gitlin, to cite one of the more prescient criticisms made of him by a former sds leader, focus so much on those who are more famous or in the limelight than he, while tending to ignore those less so?

As for the issue of antisemitism on the left:  there is no one that comes out in favor of antisemitism on the left, and many, including myself, who condemn it as a major problem.  Gitlin is hardly unique or original in this respect.  (You might check out essays going back far as 1948 by James Baldwin, and comments by Richard Wright on the subject in Black Boy, published in the 1940s discussing antisemitism in the Mississippi backwater where he grew up in his childhood, circa WWI, as well as essays on the subject by Dr King and others.)  It is hardly surprising at all that no one has "responded" to the question of whether that was a progressive concern.  I agree however that there is still much too much toleration of antisemitism on the left today.

You mention the "hypocrisy" of Chomsky and Roy.  What hypocrisy do you mean?  That kind of statement smacks of exactly the kind of 'impugning of character' you assign to unnamed criticisms by unnamed critics of Gitlin.  I am a stickler for specificity in these kinds of things.  It is precisely what makes a criticism substantive rather than name-calling.

Again, I reiterate my point that the statements by Horowitz are of substantive nonsignificance except for the fact that Horowitz is in the limelight.   That alone merits some response, but does not justify ignoring the many very substantive criticisms, including at TPM Cafe, of Gitlin that have been made of him from the left.  I do not choose to summarize those criticisms here -- there are many in my own previous posts at TPM, which you can look up.  But the point is that those criticisms are made by people of great integrity and intelligence (aside from any opinion or agenda one might have regarding me) in many instances.  It is those criticisms that HAVE been made that have not been answered that I am interested in.

"about Gitlin disagreeing with Chomsky: the monolitic extreme left that took over our universities is neither monolitic nor even uniformly left..."                                                                                                                                             huh? atilla? what?      i am intrigued, yet strangely offended, though i am not an ethnic hun.    please elaborate. 

Thanks.

One of the more infuriating things about Horowitz is that, no matter how nutty he may be, he is not stupid.  So, he has to know that he is spouting nonsense--and must be, for some reason, proud of that fact.

This all must seem like some sort of strange game to him.

Odd, to say the least.

Well, we are talking about a guy who  according to his own auto-biography found it necessary to argue with his own father while his father was on his death bed...I had to laugh when a year or two ago he "denounced" Grover Norquist for not being conservative enough by consorting with various "Arabs".  It was one of those "with a heavy heart I publicly denounce Grover Norquist" posts - now you have to admit that's funny.

For some reason, Stalin continues to be associated with the left, but I've always seen him as authoritarian, totalitarian... much more of a right-winger in a left-wing hat.

What I think Horowitz has done is simply remove his own hat and show his true colors.  There's not much change there.

Actually, there's not much there there, either.

So there!

I remember, way back when in junior high, the teacher drew a line -- with "fascist" at one end and "communist" at another.  Then he drew a circle and the two extremes met, opposite "capitalism."

I'm not so sure of his -isms,  but I liked the broader point: that totalitarianism of any stripe is much closer to itself, regardless of its place on the political spectrum.

Absolutely - the psychodynamics of the case are truly a puzzle. A maladaptive reaction against his upbringing? A pathetic cry for attention and recognition, at any cost? Pure profit motive aimed at personal enrichment? Some seriously twisted combination of the above?

In any case, I maintain that my snap, armchair diagnosis is as close as anyone's likely to get: David's a dick. 

truth4achange

http://www.hairytruth.blogspot.com 

I didn't say Stalin was leftwing, I said Horowitz was a leftwing, Stalinist party aparachik.  Now he's a rightwing, Stalinist party aparachik.