DAVID HOROWITZ HAS PREDECESSORS

(From Nash's book, p. 136 and 128)

Horowitz is our current wingnut critic of academia and intellectuals but he stands at the head of a long line of critics from the Radical Right. The first major book to attack "liberal" academia was God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley, published in 1951. This was followed by E. Merrill Root's Collectivism on the Campus in 1955 and Felix Wittner's Conquest of the American Mind in 1956.

There were also many wingnut magazine articles, such as "God and Woman at Vassar" in the Freeman, November 3rd, 1952. In the National Review, there were two regular columns devoted to the perfidy of the liberals in academia: Russell Kirk's "From the Academy " and Buckley's "The Ivory Tower."

This attack mode was seen again in Robert Bork's recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal*, bundled with an attack on the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court:

"The Court's philosophy reflects, or rather embodies and advances, the liberationist spirit of our times. In moral matters, each man is a separate sovereignty. In its insistence on radical personal autonomy, the Court assaults what remains of our stock of common moral beliefs. That is all the more insidious because the public and the media take these spurious constitutional rulings as not merely legal conclusions but moral teachings supposedly incarnate in our most sacred civic document. That teaching is the desirability, as the sociologist Robert Nisbet put it, of the "break-up of social molecules into atoms, of a generalized nihilism toward society and culture as the result of individualistic hedonism and the fragmenting effect of both state and economy." He noted that both Edmund Burke and Tocqueville placed much of the blame for such developments on the intellectual class -- in our time dominant in, for example, the universities, the media, church bureaucracies, and foundation staffs -- a class to which judges belong and to whose opinions they respond. Thus, ever-expanding rights continually deplete America's bank of common morality."

*
Their Will Be Done
Robert H. Bork.
Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition).
New York, N.Y.: Jul 5, 2005. pg. A.20