Fight Fire With Fire

In Fight Fire With Fire, David Horowitz looks back to his past as a “red diaper” baby whose parents were members of the American Community Party and sees a forecast of today’s politics. Today’s left, which occupies the Oval Office rather than being restricted to the political ghetto in which Communist Party members once resided, follows the same duplicitous concealment of motives as its predecessor. As Horowitz writes, “This camouflage is very old. In my youth, I never once heard my parents or their party friends refer to themselves as Communists. They were progressives—and registered Democrats.” After surveying the contemporary scene, he goes on to ask, “What is ‘liberal’ about these people of the left, except their attitude towards hard drugs, six and criminal behavior? Oh yes, and spending other people’s money?” This pamphlet is a searing indictment of a radical left, in power in the White House and in our popular culture, that is always trying to cover its spots by claiming merely to be “liberal.” But it is something more as well—a how to manual for conservatives who are dismayed at the state of the union and anxious to turn back the leftist tide. Horowitz’s prescription? “Conservatives need to talk less to voters’ heads and more to their hearts, less about budgets and more about the suffering progressive programs cause….Conservatives need to speak as champions of the underdogs whose lives are being steadily constricted by the ongoing destruction of a system that once afforded more opportunity for more people than any other in the history of the world.” Part j’accuse; part expose of the left’s brutal oppression of the racial minorities it works so hard to keep on its electoral plantation; part prescription for a change of heart on the part of conservatives—Fight Fire With Fire presents a vision of how to combat the radical left that is turning America into a country we no longer recognize as our own.