David Horowitz’s analysis of the career of Cornel West is sharp, thorough, and insightful. It can be surprising to learn of the continuing championship of Marx and Marxism on the part of academics such as West — his “resurrection of Marxist delusions of a socialist future,” as Horowitz puts it. Many conservatives surely thought that Communist ideology had been thoroughly discredited with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it turns out that it has the character of a substitute religion for its followers. It can take a person half a lifetime or more to work through the basic fallacy, as it did Horowitz himself, and some never do. The basic fallacy is that the Communist goal of a classless society built on justice and brotherhood is a good idea in theory and only goes wrong when improperly applied. The truth is that Communism is not a good idea, but a very bad one from the very first.

Milovan Djilas, one of Tito’s top administrators in Communist Yugoslavia, eventually realized the truth and became an outspoken dissident. According to Djilas’s Fall of the New Class: A History of Communism’s Self-Destruction, during Gorbachev’s final days in power, the leader was heard to mutter that, despite all, “the idea [of a classless society] was noble.” No, it is ignoble, as Djilas came to see.

Djilas writes that “once in power, communism ‘evolved’ into a monopolistic ideology and Communists themselves into a closed and privileged social layer, a new class of its own kind.” In his last chapter, Djilas writes that among the things for which Communism will be remembered are “the cheap and tawdry sufferings it brought, the humiliations it imposed. It will be remembered for its extermination of the innocent on ideological and pragmatic grounds. It will be remembered for its dark destruction of the human spirit. It will be remembered for robbing the living person of individuality.”

It took half a lifetime and a large chunk of history for Djilas to learn all that about the Communist dream. But Cornel West and academics like him are fixated on America’s “racist and imperial roots,” while Marxism remains a pure ideal. Even a whole lifetime may not be enough to overcome such blindness.