The basic facts of David Horowitz’s political odyssey, one of the most significant of the last forty years, are well known. A “red diaper baby” who grew up in what he has called the ghetto of communism, he became a leading Marxist “theorist” in the early 1960s and one of the godfathers of the New Left. But following America’s defeat in Vietnam, Horowitz began to reevaluate the damage those commitments had done to the country and, over time, became the left’s worst enemy and a leading spokesman for conservatism.

The Black Book of the American Left, a projected ten volume work, is the result of this unique political odyssey. It collects all of Horowitz’s conservative writings over the last thrity years—at once a sharp incision into the heart of the left’s agenda; an explorations of routes conservatives might take in response to its permanent assault on America; and a unique trip log showing the evolving intellectual journey of an original and provocative thinker.

In Progressives, the second volume of this this monumental work, Horowitz shows how this term, once used by America’s communists to hide their true identity, is now used by liberals to describe themselves and their movement. Today’s “progressives” believe that they alone are forward looking while the rest of humanity lags behind; that their vision of what's good for everyone else justifies their coercive means; that because they are social redeemers building
Utopia, they can ignore the devastation caused by the construction process.

In addition to dissecting these destructive self delusions of the progressive mind, Horowitz demonstrates a deft touch in this volume in his profiles of Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, Huey Newton, Bill Ayers, Tom Hayden, Oliver Stone, Eric Hobsbawm, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Betty Friedan and other self described progressives with whom he has come in contact during his political journey. He probes the truths behind their biographies and shows that while their rhetoric may be utopian, their intellectual energies have been focused solely on the work of destruction.

“In the Orwellian tradition of the ‘progressive’ project, there is no higher imperative
than bleaching away the nexus between progressive ideology and the epic destruction it inevitably wreaks. No one has contributed more than David Horowitz to the vital work of making that nexus indelible. In the first volume of The Black Book of the American Left, Horowitz offered captivating remembrances of his life and times as one of the Left’s key theorists. This second volume, Progressives, is a worthy successor, holding American Leftists to historical account while illustrating that they are direct descendants – and, when they think no one is listening, proud
descendants – of Marx and his progeny.”
—Andrew C. McCarthy

Horowitz’s writings reveal that today many of America’s political and academic elites, including the president of the United States, are blind to the moral treachery of those close to them, associates who in the past have committed terrible crimes or who dream of committing them in the future, yet they choose to honor and protect them…The Black Book project was conceived of as a dual challenge: to persuade leftists of the destructive consequences of their ideas; and to persuade conservatives of the malignancy of the forces mobilized against them.”
—Barbara Kay, National Post (Canada)