The Curious Case of David Horowitz

Late in 1987, David Horowitz and Peter Collier, both former editors of Ramparts magazine and ex-New Leftists, sponsored an assembly of one-time radicals in Washington, D.C. The gathering, titled the “Second Thoughts Conference,” was seen by Horowitz as an opportunity for the outstanding anti-radical intellectuals of two previous generations to pass the torch of righteous anti-communism to Horowitz and his cohort. But after much talk--in which I, as a former leader of the revived Young Communist League of the 1960s and recent convert to free-market economics, was proud to participate--the torch was not passed.

Hilton Kramer of the New Criterion and other elders excoriated us “Second Thoughters” for remaining mired in ‘60s psychology and for refusing to admit that we had been, in the words of John Maynard Keynes, “a generation of immoralists.” Irving Kristol was dismissive: “I’m already on my third thoughts.” Depressed almost to tears, Horowitz paced the marble lobby of the Grand Hyatt hotel, asking, “Why wouldn’t they do it? Why wouldn’t they acknowledge us as their heirs?”

The answer can perhaps be found in the trajectory of Horowitz’s own career. Horowitz first came to attention in 1962 when his book, “Student,” an engaging examination of the early protest movement in Berkeley, was published. Eager to develop a theoretical underpinning for an emerging New Left seeking to distance itself from the Stalinist apologetics and practices of the Old Left without abandoning the dream of a democratic socialism, Horowitz wrote two canonical texts of the new radicalism: “The Free World Colossus” (1965) and “Empire and Revolution” (1969). These titles were accompanied by numerous ancillary works largely devoted to a revisionist view of the origins of the Cold War. Horowitz and Collier would go on to write a series of bestselling biographical studies of powerful American families: “The Rockefellers” (1977), “The Kennedys” (1984) and “The Fords” (1988).

During this period, Horowitz grew increasingly disenchanted with the refusal of many of his former comrades to denounce the thuggery of Black Panthers who had committed crimes in the name of revolution. Moreover, he began to despise the apologetics made on behalf of revolutionary regimes in the so-called Third World and the dogged anti-Americanism that seemed to deform so much of the New Left critique. He began, as he put it, to have “second thoughts.” He began to see himself--and to be regarded by many of his former allies--as the Whittaker Chambers of the New Left. Unlike Chambers, however, whose autobiography “Witness,” is an essential item in the literature of communism, Horowitz, despite several attempts (see his anti-’60s polemic “Destructive Generation,” published in 1989, and his 1997 autobiography, “Radical Son”), had yet to write so formidable and indispensable a work.

The publication of Horowitz’s newest book offers an opportunity, once again, to examine why he continues to fail to measure up to the standard set so many decades ago by Chambers. The new book is not, as its title and subtitle would have us believe, about “the politics of bad faith” or “the radical assault on America’s future.” It is not about America’s future (or even much about its present). It is a set of essays on the failure of Marxist-Leninist ideology, an ideology in which Horowitz, a certified “red diaper baby,” as the children of American Communists came to be known, grew up.

Horowitz begins grandly, evoking in his introduction “a conflict that for two hundred years has dominated the political history of the West.” This is at best a slipshod formulation. The controversies underpinning the Cold War and America’s later culture wars may seem to “have their origins in the French Revolution, when radicals sat to the left in the National Assembly and their opponents to the right,” as Horowitz insists. But such a scheme is badly skewed. Factional and ideological polarization is nothing new. Recall the Sadducees and Pharisees in Judea during Roman times; as for the oft-maligned French Revolution, it produced Jacobinism and the guillotine, the inspiration for Leninist politics as well as the most philosophically elaborate version of modern bourgeois democracy. But Horowitz rarely lets the facts of history get in the way of a good story.

The problem is the story he tells has been told before. The core essays in this book are “The Left After Communism” and “The Fate of the Marxist Idea.” Unfortunately, nearly everything relevant about the broad failures of communism--why it failed as a political movement and why it failed as a system of governance--has already been said (and said with greater eloquence and insight) by others, beginning 90 years ago with the anti-Bolshevik polemics of the Mensheviks and continuing through the chronicles of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among others.

Nevertheless, Horowitz inexplicably seems to believe that the history of counterrevolutionary thought begins with him. He is disconcertingly uninterested in the struggles and sacrifices of the numerous individuals who preceded him on this well-worn path of secular apostasy. It is as if the history of anti-communism in the 20th century consisted of little more than Chambers, Leszek Kolakowski (who is his other major intellectual hero) and, surprise, David Horowitz. The man’s hubris is breathtaking. The achievements of such figures as George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gertrude Himmelfarb, among others, are so much greater by any measure than those of Horowitz and other ‘60s ex-radicals that even to suggest an ideological continuity is absurd.

Still, Horowitz retains admirable qualities. Rooted in his radical origins, these virtues are his large-scale outlook, his interest in history and his commitment to morality in political life. Unlike so many of his generation, Horowitz, at least, remains an activist, passionate in his conviction that ideas matter. In this regard, he offers an immense contrast to the great majority of his opponents as well as his rivals. The post-’60s radicals, particularly those who found themselves in the American academy, have assumed, with rare exceptions, an appallingly uniform narrowness, rigidity, ultra-specialization and, above all, narcissism, since the social explosions of 30 years ago. Indeed, they match or exceed their conservative counterparts in their addiction to prejudice, self-righteousness and indifference to the consequences of their postures and actions. Horowitz, for all his bitterness and self-importance, continues to care more about the fate of ordinary Vietnamese, Nicaraguans and other people around the world than about the need for a positive self-image among American intellectuals.

He is at his best in a chapter called “The Religious Roots of Radicalism.” Here he takes on one of the few themes in anti-radical literature not to have been adequately developed by others. He is fascinating when he writes about the Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria and about the school of Jewish mysticism that eventually transformed the anxiety of Jews at the universal chaos of the time into belief in the imminent arrival of a messiah. Horowitz advances the view that Lurianic messianism began the radical temptation of Jews in modern times. But, as elsewhere, he goes too far. Pious Jews will almost certainly be offended by Horowitz equating Lurianic Kabbalah with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Horowitz suggests that both offered humanity a God-like existence. Religious Jews will be outraged by the comparison for, in addition to the insult to Luria, one of the most saintly figures in Jewish history, Horowitz ignores the fact that Jewish mysticism has always sought to promote “godly” or “heavenly” behavior--behavior that has rarely led to immediate messianic frenzies.

Horowitz is a curious case. He sees clearly the danger of the messianic temptation in others but is unwilling to recognize the illusion in himself. He remains, at heart, a man with a mission; only the mission has changed. Once a man of the left, he now is a man of the right. His modus operandi, however, remains remarkably the same. The rigidity at the core of the ideology Horowitz now so fervently promotes, the prosecutorial zeal with which he pursues his enemies (both real and imagined), betrays a man uncomfortable with a more charitable and complicated view of the world he inhabits. He refuses to abandon a morally absolutist world-view. That is a pity. His refusal cripples his critique.

Horowitz, in the end, has much in common with Chambers but, alas, falls short of his hero’s example. Still, he is the closest thing we have to a Chambers. Unlike Horowitz, Chambers somehow succeeded in seeing himself objectively, avoiding a public role as a single-minded, hectoring Jeremiah. His example remains exemplary. Horowitz may yet surprise us, but on the evidence of this slim volume, it is unlikely.