David Horowitz died of cancer on Tuesday at the age of 86. One of the most influential conservative voices of the last half-century, he was a powerful writer, speaker, and polemicist.
The son of two American Communists and born in 1939, Horowitz was a radical student leader and the editor of Ramparts magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s. He turned to the right politically in 1974, when his friend Betty Van Patter was murdered after going to work for the Black Panther Party.
As he recounts in his autobiography, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, Van Patter’s death caused Horowitz’s conversion to conservatism. The murder was never solved, but here is how Horowitz described it in a 1999 article: “In pursuit of answers to the mystery of Betty’s death, I subsequently discovered that the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto. While these criminal activities were taking place, the group enjoyed the support of the American left, the Democratic Party, Bay Area trade unions and even the Oakland business establishment.”
In works such as Radical Son and The Black Book of the American Left, Horowitz argued that the “activists” of the 1960s, like the “progressives” of earlier eras and the liberals of today, are basically Communists. The Black Panthers, Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground, Saul Alinsky, Tom Hayden, Angela Davis, Todd Gitlin, and Mary Travers of the Peter, Paul and Mary folk trio — all called for a revolution. They weren’t interested in mainstream Democrats such as Hubert Humphrey.
Today, it is no different. “Identity Politics is often referred to as Political Correctness,” Horowitz wrote in his 2021 book The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America, “but it is more accurately understood as Cultural Marxism—the idea that American society is characterized by oppressive hierarchies, and thus divided into warring races, genders, and classes. Political correctness is a term that describes a left-wing party line. It was coined by the mass murderer Mao Zedong in the 1930s to keep his followers under the heel of the Chinese Communist Party. Adherents of the progressive party line today regard white Americans, males, Christians, and Jews as ‘oppressors’—enemies—and themselves as warriors for social justice.”
Several years ago, Horowitz was on a panel at Georgetown University with Michael Kazin, who had been a leader in the Students for a Democratic Society, a leftist group in the 1960s. All the left wanted to do, Kazin said, “was give peace a chance.” Horowitz often reminded readers that during the Vietnam era, Kazin embraced the motto “bring the war home,” i.e., cause as much violence on American streets as possible. Horowitz noted that at a 1969 rally, Kazin led the following cheer: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF [Vietnamese Communists] is Gonna Win!” Horowitz said, “It had been liberalism that guided America to power in the postwar world. It was liberalism that had gotten America into Vietnam. Centrist liberalism was the balance wheel giving synchronicity to the entire political system. But now radicals assaulted the center; if it could not hold, America would fall.”
Leftists were in no way, as Horowitz puts it, “mooning for Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King,” as they would later claim. They wanted to bring the war home and topple the United States.
In his writing, Horowitz often connected the left of the 1930s and 1960s with the left of today. Revolution was to aid in that process. Horowitz’s own Communist parents saw their dreams collapse in 1956 when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made a speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes and the “cult of personality” that surrounded him. Whittaker Chambers, as he chillingly put it, “heard the screams” and saw the lie that was Communism.
“I am constantly asked by people who have read my autobiography, Radical Son,” Horowitz once wrote, “or who have heard me talk about these events, how it is that my former comrades on the left can remain so silently and stubbornly devoted to ‘experiments’ like the Panthers that failed, to doctrines that are false and to causes that are demonstrably wrongheaded and even evil.”
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The answer was age-old: fanaticism and the refusal to accept reality.
In his 2009 book, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, Horowitz said, “An SDS radical once wrote, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’ In other words the cause – whether inner city blacks or women – is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.”
