Life & Wisdom Quote by David Horowitz

Horowitz builds this sentence like a trapdoor: he grants the “left” the advantage of sounding “very good,” then yanks it away with a blunt verdict about results. The compliment is tactical, not charitable. By conceding moral music up front, he positions himself as the hardheaded realist diagnosing a seduction: the left sells compassion as a brand, but the product fails under load.

The line’s core move is a familiar conservative critique compressed into two clauses: intentions versus outcomes. “Sounds” cues rhetoric, marketing, even self-deception; “in practice” invokes policy, bureaucracy, and everyday consequence. The subtext is that the left’s moral language is either naive or manipulative - a way of winning cultural prestige while offloading the costs onto everyone else. That framing doesn’t need evidence inside the sentence; the sentence functions as an all-purpose template you can slot any disliked program into. It’s less a claim than a reusable argument.

Context matters because Horowitz’s authority here is autobiographical as much as ideological. As a former 1960s leftist turned prominent conservative polemicist, he writes from the posture of the ex-believer, someone who supposedly knows the left’s inner logic and its public packaging. The broadness (“the left,” singular; “very badly,” unspecified) is part of the intent: to speak to a general audience’s frustration with institutions, and to turn that frustration into a moral inversion. The left doesn’t just fail; it fails because its goodness is mostly performance.