Leftists Who Turned Right : Politics: Once the reigning dukes of radical chic, Peter Collier and David Horowitz have seen the conservative light. In Heterodoxy magazine, the pair bashes liberal causes and offends ex-fellow travelers.

Add it up, church lady: They’re white. They’re male. They’re heterosexual, middle-aged, middle-class and conservative. Could they be . . . Satan ?

Some folks in leftist circles had worried that evil forces had possessed Peter Collier and David Horowitz (not the consumer guy) way back before they first voted for Ronald Reagan.

After all, Collierwitz, as they’re collectively known, had been bona fide ‘60s radicals, co-editing the firebrand magazine Ramparts and policing intellectual barricades in support of peace, justice, Ho Chi Minh and all God’s other Good Causes.

Then --Lord have mercy --they flip-flopped, converting to capitalism and conservativism, and stepping, in the eyes of former brethren, over to the side of darkness.

Before long, Collier and Horowitz worked for the right with all the fervor they’d devoted to the left, shredding ‘60s idealism and ideology in a 1989 book, “Destructive Generation,” lecturing and organizing political forums. Now, they are blanketing the nation with right-wing agitprop, including their new PC-bashing magazine, Heterodoxy, and Horowitz’ new talk show on Santa Monica-based public radio station KCRW-FM, “Second Thoughts.”

The fall from “the heaven of radical millenarianism,” was painful, they now say, but not without its rewards.

“For us,” Collier says with a devilish smile, “there’s a perverse pleasure to all this, to realizing that Satan is the hero of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost.’ ”

Peter Collier was reared in a working-class Valley neighborhood, but his parents scrimped to send him to a private school tucked into the hills where a Hollywood Bowl parking lot now stands.

Horowitz, a “red diaper” baby, grew up in 1940s New York City, immersed in his parents’ Stalinist-flavored communism. He attended the Workers’ Children’s Camp--Camp Wo-Chi-Ca--where such leftist luminaries as Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson serenaded Horowitz and his youthful fellow travelers. The overt and subtle pressures to believe in the workers’ paradise all-encompassed and Horowitz never doubted his life’s course.

About 1960, Collier enrolled in a Shakespeare class at UC Berkeley in which Horowitz was the teaching assistant. Collier went on to graduate work, stretching his studies for seven years as he focused on Civil Rights demonstrations in the South, the Free Speech movement at Berkeley and Vietnam war protests.

Horowitz, whose first book, “Student,” became a manual for the New Left, moved to London and wrote a heftier book of Marxist analysis, “The Free World Colossus.” He and Collier met again in the mid-’60s at Ramparts.

In 1972, they began work on the first of four family biographies. “The Rockefellers” was supposed to have been a Marxist assessment of America’s power elite.

But as they researched, they found that the Rockefeller dynasty was all-powerful only in the minds of their leftist colleagues. The biography became the story of a disintegrating family.

While the authors worked on the book, their political crusade continued. The Black Panthers, with their demands for social and economic justice, struck a chord.

Horowitz and Collier supported the group, and even got some younger Rockefeller offspring to kick in money for the cause. The authors’ enthusiasm was contagious, and Betty Van Patter, a naive but dedicated young Ramparts accountant, volunteered her services to the Panthers.

In early 1975, Van Patter turned up with her skull bashed in, floating dead in San Francisco Bay. Although the case was never solved, word spread in radical circles that the Panthers had killed Van Patter for knowing too much about the group, Horowitz and Collier say.

Collier, who once heaved a brick at a sheriff’s deputy during the People’s Park demonstrations, called the Berkeley police.

The officer who answered the phone laughed, Collier says. “He said, ‘People like you spend their lives cutting us to pieces, undermining our effectiveness, calling us pigs and the occupying army of the ghetto, then when one of your friends gets murdered, you come to us for help and we can’t help you.’

“It was an interesting moment.”

Both Horowitz and Collier felt responsible for Van Patter’s death. Horowitz, however, found his faith’s foundations crumbling: “I was disintegrating under the tragedy. I was a religious leftist in a way Peter never was, I grew up in the church of the left.”

Horowitz’ marriage decomposed, then he and Collier split.

At the same time, Collier says, the Vietnam war ended, and none of the left’s utopian dreams materialized. Instead, “the re-education camps started filling, the boat people set sail.”

From their respective perches, both Collier and Horowitz waited for their progressive brothers and sisters to speak out against Communist atrocities in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Instead, people said, “If it was happening it was OK, but it wasn’t happening,” Collier recalls.

In the late ‘70s, Collier and Horowitz decided to start talking to each other again.

Horowitz remembers his anxiety as he drove toward his friend’s house. In an act of rebellion, Horowitz, owner of many proletarian Volkswagens, had bought a bourgeoise Datsun Z with a racing seat.

“There are a lot of things radicals deny themselves to store up moral credits so they can bully other people,” he says.

Horowitz was certain Collier would be appalled.

Instead, Horowitz found a vintage Mercedes coupe in his old comrade’s driveway.

Still, the political drift was gradual. In 1980, Horowitz and Collier dutifully voted for Jimmy Carter.

But it was also then that Collier nervously admitted to Horowitz that he had subscribed to Norman Podhoretz’s neo-conservative publication, Commentary. And that same year, they wrote “Requiem for a Radical,” for New West magazine.

The article was about Fay Stender, a friend who had worked for the Prison Law Project, and become politically and romantically involved with the charismatic black poet-revolutionary George Jackson.

When a cohort of Jackson’s from the Black Guerrilla Family shot and paralyzed her--and she eventually committed suicide--Collier and Horowitz say they took it as a metaphor for the left’s own destructive tendencies.

So Horowitz and Collier told the story.

“It was written in sorrow more than anger,” Horowitz says.

They were scorned as traitors, ridiculed as right wing lackeys, and ultimately exiled, they say.

“If the left had just responded . . . “ Horowitz muses.

“We’d still be on the left,” Collier finishes.

Collier now lives in the hippie poet town of Nevada City, Calif., a move he and wife Mary Jo made in 1980 to dodge the threat that their three children would get their “compulsory mis-education” in Berkeley secondary schools.

Horowitz, whose four children are grown, now lives with his third wife, Shay, in Studio City.

Collier is the gentleman scholar, the diplomat, the repository of philosophical tidbits: “I think it was Kierkegaard who said, the problem with humanity is that we are destined to live life forward but understand life backward.”

Scrapper Horowitz looks like a radical professor circa 1975, slightly disheveled, his mildly dyspeptic facial demeanor draining into a Van Dyke.

They are, though, more alike than different, and almost immediately they go like lumberjacks on a two-man saw, enthusiastically cutting through a forest of former beliefs.

“The history of the left is a history of bankruptcy, murder, exploitation of the poor and oppressed from the French Revolution on,” Collier says.

“They’re users,” adds Horowitz. “They didn’t really care about the Vietnamese. They use blacks, they don’t care that the welfare act didn’t work. . . . You don’t find Leftists doing mea culpas.”

” . . . Leftism is an infantile disorder, an unwillingness to grow.”

“ Everything we predicted turned out to be wrong.”

“The history of the left is history of failed predictions.”

“It’s an occupational disorder as well as a genetic defect.”

“It is a theological enterprise,” says Horowitz. And apostasy begins with “the first doubt that can’t be answered.”

Assemblyman Tom Hayden also recalls Horowitz’ conversion in religious terms. In 1982, Hayden says, the changeling supported his election campaign, saying that he found his post-radical positions “realistic.”

Then, two years or so later, Hayden remembers, Horowitz approached him with much more fervor. He wanted Hayden to join his new group “Second Thoughts,” which was re-evaluating the ‘60s; he wanted him to become a conservative.

“For him, it was like a conversion experience, where you purge the devil . . . I felt like I was being pressured by a religious door-to-door salesman. He said I’d get a lot of support,” Hayden remembers.

“(Horowitz said) ‘Now that you’re in the system why don’t you keep moving over? You’ll have a bright future. If you don’t, you’ll always be haunted by your past.’ It was like a cult group.”

Hayden held his ground: “I said, ‘Look, I’ve made some mistakes, maybe grievous ones. But I’m not about to repudiate the ‘60s. For what? In favor of Nixon’s version of them?’

“My ideology has stayed somewhere between center and left and I’ve tried to remain anti-Establishment . . . . These are guys who have made 180-degree swings. I don’t understand people like that. Whatever was wrong with their position then is the mirror opposite now.”

Michael Lerner, a former editor at Ramparts and now editor of the progressive Jewish monthly Tikkun, attributes the Collierwitz conversion to their utter entrenchment in the cause: “They were responsible for the most bizarre orthodoxies of the new Left.” Lerner says that while many on the left saw the Black Panthers as oppressed, for instance, few were so naive as to embrace them unskeptically.

“David became a Black Panther cheerleader,” Lerner says. In fact, he says, Horowitz and Collier were snookered by every group that claimed to be oppressed: “They became camp followers of political correctness.”

Now he sees them as “opportunists of the most extreme sort. They are the opposite of people with political courage. Wherever the bandwagon goes, they jump on.”

Had some Yippie, just back from a two-decade acid trip, stumbled into April’s American Forum meeting in Los Angeles, she wouldn’t have been too disoriented.

Mixed among the Young Republican-style Yupsters in sports coats and success dresses are college-aged kids with statement hair and torn jeans, casting sidelong glances at their rosy-cheeked sister activists.

Here, too, is the old rhetoric: “We are here because we are pro-freedom!” And “The American Forum is for people who are tired of the status quo!”

The guest speaker, former Secretary of Education and former drug czar William Bennett, calls himself “a sort of a revolutionary.”

Horowitz says, “We remain as always rebels, and rebels in defense of what’s right and what’s just!”

Such fiery, supposedly anti-Establishment oratory makes people like Hayden, who wasn’t at the meeting, scratch their heads.

“You’d think Jerry Rubin had become President or something,” he said later. “For Pete’s sake, Reagan and Bush have been President for almost 12 years. . . . What’s the big deal?”

The deal, according to Collierwitz, is that politics and culture are two sides of the societal whole, with culture more important. “The center of balance that we set out to destroy has never really been replaced,” says Horowitz.

“The destruction of the center is the destruction of the immune system of the culture,” Collier adds.

And so, under the umbrella of their Center for the Study of Popular Culture, they have launched sundry ventures to tug American culture back from their former leftist comrades who, they contend, now control Hollywood, the news media, and the universities.

“It’s an embarrassment that there are more Marxists in American universities than there are in the whole Eastern Bloc,” Collier says.

Collierwitz now publish COMINT, a quarterly geared to revealing alleged leftist bias in public broadcasting.

They support the monthly American Forums, they say, to give Hollywood folks a place to get a conservative perspective “without being blackballed,” by the entertainment industry.

And they publish the monthly broad-sheet Heterodoxy, which in its first two issues has listed the 10 worst (read left-leaning, feminist-oriented, etc.) academics in America, and chided militant gay rights organizations for their “politically correct” assaults on the notion of “heteronormativity.”

” . . . This cultural leftism, which loves to posture as the adversary, is really the dominant force, the cultural Establishment,” Collier says. “Heterodoxy is a guerrilla publication.

“I love Heterodoxy. It gives me the opportunity to kick the power structure in the shins and watch them squeal.”