"When you are a radical, what you are thinking of is power"

huxley, commenting at neoneocon's post: "The willingness to believe that two plus two makes five", quotes reformed radical David Horowitz:

It’s all instrumental — that is, when you are a radical, what you are thinking of is power. It’s about power. You adopt this position. You take up that issue, but it’s all to advance the power. They never think about what it’s going to look like or how to put it together.

I can tell you, a radical never spends five seconds on thinking what makes a society work. That’s not the way they work. They want to know, you know, what they can get away with to advance this big agenda, which is you get power and you change everything.

I respect David Horowitz' opinions. He was on the inside of the communist movement in America.

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Seeking Power

I'm beginning to think of "left" and "right" as "those who seek power" and "those who seek truth". If a person believes objective truth exists, and if a person is seeking truth, that person is in my tribe. I don’t care where they fall on any social issue, on economics, on foreign policy.

If the person doesn’t believe objective truth exists; if the person believes “truth” amounts to mere opinion; if the person is, in conversation, seeking to win the conversation (as opposed to seeking to find the truth); if the person’s objective, ultimately, is the accumulation of power (for ultimate purpose of creating some type of fundamental change in society or in governance), than that person is not of my tribe. And that’s the way I am thinking about it, more and more.

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Radical Priorities

This Horowitz quote:

I can tell you, a radical never spends five seconds on thinking what makes a society work. That’s not the way they work. They want to know, you know, what they can get away with to advance this big agenda, which is you get power and you change everything.

reminded of this Larry Grathwohl video, about his days undercover inside the Weather Underground: