Politics
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Cultural Contradictions
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Might 15, 2025
As an undergrad, I mocked the unconventional leftist turned reactionary. However along with his merciless, vindictive politics taking on the federal government, he had the final snort.
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David Horowitz, who died in April, spoke on the CU Boulder campus on February 14, 2005, about what’s flawed with varied professors in US universities at the moment.
(Brian Brainerd / The Denver Publish by way of Getty Photographs)
The primary time I considered David Horowitz was in 2006, once I was a 22-year-old senior at Horowitz’s alma mater, Columbia College. A buddy—like me and Horowitz, a Jewish David—had commissioned me to evaluation Horowitz’s newest guide, The Professors: The 101 Most Harmful Teachers in America, for the Columbia Political Evaluation. As a snotty undergraduate, I agreed to take action on the situation that I wouldn’t must learn the guide and that I might admit that I hadn’t upfront. Reasonably than an precise evaluation, I wrote a generalized assault on Horowitz as a “once-radical hack,” accusing him of manufacturing a McCarthyist screed and of libeling 9 Columbia professors amongst his chosen 101—however I additionally diminished his life, or what I assumed with none analysis to be the broad outlines of his life, to a cliché:
I feel I’ll use this evaluation as an opportunity to publicly denounce Horowitz with the identical shoddy scholarship and borderline-racist vitriol to which he routinely topics his way more spectacular targets. Horowitz was born, I might estimate, someday throughout World Conflict II. He most likely grew up someplace inside ten miles of Morningside Heights. He’s most likely a second- or third-generation American, which, to my thoughts, has awfully suspicious implications. His mother and father, I might think about, have been Stalinists, however finally recanted someday across the revelation of the Docs’ Plot and have become Trotskyists as an alternative, most likely whereas Horowitz was in his Portnoy section.
Horowitz might have socialized with Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz in some unspecified time in the future in his profession. There’s a good likelihood he protested the Vietnam Conflict and ROTC. Then, someday between 1968 and 1979, he realized that he hated Arabs and Black individuals. Coincidentally, he additionally realized that the free market works in any case. Then he most likely voted for Reagan.
It’s embarrassing to revisit a few of my earliest writing, however nonetheless, I used to be fairly shut. Horowitz was born in January 1939, eight months earlier than World Conflict II broke out in Europe (arguably, it had already begun in Asia). He grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, about 5 miles from Morningside Heights because the crow flies. He was certainly a second-generation American on either side, and his mother and father actually have been Stalinists, although it was Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 fairly than the sooner Docs’ Plot that broke them. He did in some unspecified time in the future socialize with Kristol and Podhoretz, he did protest the Vietnam Conflict (undecided about ROTC), and the remainder of that second paragraph is actually correct too.
Within the practically twenty years since I wrote that, I’ve realized an important deal extra concerning the historical past of conservatism, and lately I all the time do the studying. When Horowitz died at 86 final month, I assigned myself Radical Son, his 1997 autobiography, broadly considered essentially the most important textual content among the many roughly 60 books he wrote or cowrote. I now see that in some methods I used to be underestimating Horowitz—to my shock and chagrin, the eventual creator of books like Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win (2020) and I Can’t Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America (2021) had precise prose chops and a deep data of Twentieth-century political thought. At one level, he was able to writing a transferring memoir about radicalism and disillusionment, suffused with generational ache, candid self-examination, and indelible portraits of former comrades. I used to be additionally unfair in classifying Horowitz as a “neoconservative,” a time period bandied about usually in 2006; although in some methods his life adopted comparable beats, he additionally differed from the foundational neocons in important and telling methods. However maybe most of all, I used to be unfair in dismissing him as an inconsequential determine. Sadly, he seems to have been forward of his time.
If Irving Kristol is the paradigmatic neoconservative, the constant by line that defines each stage of his ideological journey is anti-Stalinism. As a youngster, he was a Trotskyist; by his 20s, he was a Chilly Conflict liberal, and at center age, he shifted towards the social gathering of Nixon and Reagan, however his opposition to Stalinism was constant, and it was the idea for his antagonism towards the New Left that arose on school campuses amid the counterculture of the Sixties. To Kristol and his cohort of ex-Trotskyists, the unconventional ethical fervor of the New Left was a daunting echo of the dogmatic communists that they had clashed with again within the Thirties.
David Horowitz, who was 19 years youthful than Kristol, had a strikingly completely different journey. He was raised by Stalinists of roughly Kristol’s technology (like Kristol, Horowitz’s mother and father have been the New York–born kids of Russian Jewish immigrants) who skilled McCarthyist repression firsthand, which meant that Horowitz himself, a self-described red-diaper child, grew up below a cloud of political suspicion. Horowitz went on to turn out to be centrally concerned within the New Left, and he knew all its most outstanding figures, from Tom Hayden to the Black Panthers. Based mostly in Berkeley on the top of the counterculture, Horowitz was the co-editor of Ramparts, a radical journal that represented all the pieces Kristol and his fellow neocons hated. And whereas a lot of the neoconservative motion is now defiantly anti-Trump (Irving Kristol died in 2009, earlier than Donald Trump ever ran for workplace, however his son Invoice is the quintessential By no means Trumper), Horowitz embraced MAGA populism.
Briefly, Horowitz began out a lot additional left and ended up a lot additional proper than most neoconservatives ever did. The story of how that transition occurred was additionally way more dramatic. The neocons, broadly talking, moved proper starting within the late Sixties as a result of they have been troubled by the unrest that they noticed on school campuses and in city slums; on the time, Horowitz was very a lot a part of that unrest. His transition got here within the mid Nineteen Seventies and was triggered, not less than in his telling, by a traumatic incident: the unsolved homicide of his buddy Betty Van Patter. Van Patter had been the bookkeeper at Ramparts when Horowitz really helpful her for the same position for the Black Panther Occasion in Oakland, the place Horowitz was serving to Huey Newton set up a college. She mysteriously disappeared on the finish of 1974, and her battered corpse turned up within the San Francisco Bay over a month later.
Present Problem
Horowitz believed the Panthers had his buddy murdered and that the New Left writ massive ignored her destiny out of deference to the Panthers, and he turned overcome with guilt over his private complicity. Although it took one other decade for Horowitz and his frequent co-author Peter Collier to “come out” as Reaganite conservatives and one other decade after that for Horowitz to totally mirror on his story in Radical Son, Van Patter’s dying marked the start of the tip of Horowitz’s relationship with the left. To the extent that we are able to belief his personal account, nothing lower than a lady’s life had been sacrificed to his misguided beliefs. He sank right into a despair, and by the point he emerged, he had concluded that Marxism, together with all the revolutionary causes that had outlined his life to that time, was false.
That revelation hits across the midway level of Radical Son, which up till round there’s a gripping account of a life on the American left. After that, Horowitz’s life begins to deteriorate, as does the standard and coherence of the guide itself. Having destroyed his first marriage, which produced 4 kids, in a reckless affair, Horowitz proceeds to cycle by two extra chaotic and ill-considered marriages (the fourth one caught). As he alienates previous associates, he passes by the phases of a basic midlife disaster: new vainness automotive (which he crashes), new vainness dwelling, new and more and more half-baked political positions, and a rising closeness with right-wing donor networks. As he units all the way down to report all this within the mid Nineteen Nineties, his transformation right into a Republican demagogue is full. Thus, by the point I turned conscious of him a number of years after the publication of Radical Son, he was hounding school professors in a farcical reenactment of the McCarthyist persecution of his mother and father, and he was recruiting younger conservative demagogues on those self same elite campuses and funneling them into careers on the skilled proper.
In hindsight, essentially the most influential determine Horowitz nurtured in that interval was a scholar at Santa Monica Excessive named Stephen Miller, who at the same time as a youngster had begun making common appearances on right-wing speak radio in Southern California. Horowitz helped steer Miller to Duke College, the place Miller established a department of Horowitz’s nonprofit empire, now known as the David Horowitz Freedom Middle, which the Southern Poverty Legislation Middle acknowledges as an anti-Muslim hate group. With the advantage of Horowitz’s patronage and tutelage, Miller turned an outspoken reactionary at Duke in the course of the George W. Bush years, and Horowitz additional helped him land his first Capitol Hill job, which set him on the trail to turn out to be one in all Donald Trump’s prime advisers. At the moment, Miller is the one determine most related to Trump’s brutally repressive deportation insurance policies, together with how these insurance policies have been used to terrorize and imprison campus activists with out due course of.
Horowitz’s affect additionally extends to a different a part of the Trump coalition: the clique of Silicon Valley oligarchs who funded Trump’s victory final 12 months and now anticipate fealty to their enterprise pursuits, which embody AI, cryptocurrencies, and monopolistic disruptions of conventional sectors. A key determine in that world is Horowitz’s son Ben Horowitz, who together with Marc Andreessen based the enterprise capital agency Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) in 2009. Andreessen and Horowitz every donated $2.5 million to pro-Trump Tremendous PACs final 12 months (although Horowitz additionally gave to Bay Space native Kamala Harris, whom he’s identified for years, presumably to hedge his bets), and after Trump received, Ben Horowitz proclaimed, “Hallelujah!” on the a16z YouTube present. He and Andreessen agreed that Joe Biden’s makes an attempt to manage the tech trade represented a low level of their trade’s fortunes, they usually have been overjoyed on the prospect of a president who would, as Andreessen put it, take away the boot from their neck.
To the extent that Stephen Miller and Ben Horowitz signify his legacies, David Horowitz is a forerunner of the Trump coalition, with its grotesque alliance of fever-swamp nativists and Bay Space plutocrats. Twenty years in the past, he was considered one thing of a clown and a provocateur, fairly than a severe conservative mental, even when his earlier profession had proven mental promise. However at the moment’s Republican Occasion is much extra consistent with the vindictive fashion of Horowitz than with what The Weekly Commonplace was publishing again when George W. Bush was attempting to make “compassionate conservatism” a factor. As an undergraduate at Columbia, I thought of Horowitz a joke, however 500 miles to the southwest, one other undergraduate noticed him as a profession guru. At the moment, that man has the facility to tear aside immigrant households wherever in the US out of sheer malice, and all I’ve is {a magazine} column.
David Klion
David Klion is a columnist for The Nation and a contributor at varied publications. He’s engaged on a guide concerning the legacy of neoconservatism.
