Politics & Power Quote by David Horowitz

Horowitz’s line is built like a courtroom trick: he grants “the left” a flattering self-portrait, then flips the mirror toward its enemies under the harshest lighting. The phrasing does two things at once. “A key” implies privileged access, the secret decoder ring that turns complicated politics into a simple psychological tell. “Mentality” nudges the argument away from policy disputes and toward character and moral temperament, where evidence is harder to adjudicate and easier to generalize.

The core move is asymmetry. By claiming the left “judges itself by its best intentions,” Horowitz frames progressive politics as fundamentally self-excusing: motives trump outcomes, rhetoric substitutes for results. Then he pairs that with an accusation of prosecutorial hostility: opponents “judged by their worst deeds,” with “America chief among them” smuggling in a larger grievance about national legitimacy. That clause matters. It recasts domestic ideological conflict as a loyalty test, where criticism of U.S. power is read less as dissent than as animus. The target isn’t just liberals; it’s a style of moral reasoning that, in his telling, reserves charity for insiders and cynicism for everyone else.

Contextually, Horowitz emerges from the post-1960s arc of ex-left disillusionment that became a durable conservative genre: the defector’s authority. The subtext is personal and political: I’ve seen the machinery from the inside, and the real game is moral double standards. It’s a tidy, potent frame because it flatters the reader’s suspicion that their opponents aren’t merely wrong; they’re unfair. The weakness is the same as its strength: it turns politics into a story about intentions and sins, not structures, incentives, or trade-offs, and it assumes the verdict in the act of “judging.”