-Caveat Lector-
The Washington Post
A Radical Transformation
Former '60s Agitator David Horowitz Has Changed His Politics,
But Not His Tone
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 28, 2001; Page C01
BERKELEY, Calif. - The student warriors have pants that pool
about their feet and tattoos that crawl around their biceps, and
more piercings than a Dinka chieftain. They're gathered to hear a
former high priest of the 1960s left.
"I marched for civil rights not only before you were born," the
speaker begins, "but before many of your parents were born . . ."
The audience shifts, restless.
"Thirty years ago I contributed to the atmosphere here" - he
pauses; his eyes dance - "and I'm appalled! This is a place of
intellectual terror! Leftists have contempt for America."
So perfect, this David Horowitz moment, the blend of agitprop and
indignation and intellectual provocation. A week before, the
62-year-old Marxist turned conservative Republican firebrand
called the Berkeley student newspaper and took out an
advertisement to advance his new cause: "Ten Reasons Why
Reparations for Blacks Is a Bad Idea for Blacks - and Racist
Too."
It ran, and a student "coalition of color" confiscated the
newspapers and marched into the Daily Californian office and
demanded that the editor apologize for running the ad. Which,
they insisted, was hurtful, and racist, and oppressive.
Horowitz's trap was so well laid that its jaws slapped shut
before the students realized what had happened. Soon newspapers
and liberal writers and civil libertarians across the country
were slamming the radicals for political correctness run amok.
"Censorship is the weapon of the impotent." Horowitz is a short
cork of tightly wound energy, and his voice trips a bit as he
paces the well of the Berkeley auditorium. He's flanked by two
broad-shouldered bodyguards. "Apparently on this campus some
ideas are too dangerous for people to hear.
"It's pathetic."
The left is authoritarian, the academy peopled with cowards, the
students sheep in service of socialist impulses. Horowitz
finishes, and a gentleman with a large Afro who describes himself
as "a longtime former university employee" stands atop a chair.
"You, sir, are a racist and a bigot."
Horowitz frowns. "If this university weren't such an intellectual
monolith you would realize how stupid this sounds."
"You're a bigot."
"And you're stupid."
Boos keen and Horowitz slides out a side door. But not before he
smiles a provocateur's smile.
"I've always had dangerous ideas. It's just that now different
people find them dangerous."
Long Strange Trip The transmigration from left to right, the long
march from Marx and Lenin to Adam Smith and the joys of bourgeois
democracy, is a road well traveled in American politics and
culture. The Great Depression of the 1930s sent thousands of
Americans into the arms of the communists; revelations of
Stalinist depredations sent many back into the embrace of
anti-communism.
The '60s and the Vietnam War produced another defector class.
When Weathermen leader Bernardine Dohrn offered a pitchfork
salute to Charles Manson in 1970, and some bomb-mixing radicals
managed to blow up their own Greenwich Village town house, more
than a few comrades fled the hills of the far left.
"As happens with many sensible people, when they start
decapitating people in the name of the revolution, reality
settles in," says Hilton Kramer, a conservative critic of art and
culture. "David's political change of heart is one of the most
familiar scenarios in the 20th century."
Few migrated so far and so conspicuously. Horowitz had genuine
lefist bona fides: He edited Ramparts, the quintessential '60s
radical mag. He wrote respected tomes on Marxism and revolution
and advised Black Panther leader Huey Newton.
Reel forward 30 years:
Horowitz runs Frontpage Magazine, a conservative "shin-kicking"
Web publication (www.frontpagemag.com). He has the ear of Bush
adviser Karl Rove and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. And his most
recent book, "The Art of Political War," is a how-to guide for
beating the Democratic Party senseless.
His rhetoric is white-hot; no shadows. The day after his speech,
Horowitz puts fork to endive and romaine at the Cafe Rouge, in
Berkeley's gourmet ghetto. He's talking Clinton.
"Because Clinton is brilliant and a sociopath, he was able to
disguise that the Democrats have become a very ideological,
left-wing party." Horowitz pauses in mid-attack and smiles. He's
having an interior moment. "I know myself: I can really argue a
hard line."
Republican activists love it. They claim Horowitz as their
radical pamphleteer and guerrilla leader - as if Tom Paine met
Mao at a William F. Buckley mixer.
DeLay passes out Horowitz's books at Republican forums. Former
congressman James Rogan is an unabashed acolyte: Horowitz, Rogan
writes, is the "Sun Tzu of the 21st century," comparing him to
the ancient military philosopher.
"He's definitely got a flair, and cradle conservatives have a lot
to learn from him," says Kate O'Beirne, Washington editor of the
National Review. "He is less intimidated by the left and he
throws their tactics back at them, and that's very bracing."
Former comrades are less admiring. Richard Parker lived in
Berkeley in the 1960s and labored at Ramparts with Horowitz,
before moving on to more liberal magazines.
"David has an intelligence that sees the world in bold black and
white," says Parker, a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at
Harvard. "He likes his Beethoven played on the ninth mark of the
volume control. It's a world of good and evil, and he knows who
is going to Hell."
But the question arises: Why does Horowitz play the bomb-thrower,
no matter how clever? Why not aspire to becoming the next
Buckley, the right's new Thomas Burke?
Horowitz nods. He knows the tug of such ambition - on the left,
he fancied himself the man who would reinterpret Marx. An
agreeably voluble man with a gray-flecked goatee and hair that
curls down over an open collar, Horowitz recognizes that role is
no longer his.
"I understand I'm provocative. It's hard to change your
character." A shrug. "You have to interview other people: I don't
know how I got where I got."
>From Red to Right Actually, Horowitz has the narrative worked
out. No psychological plumbing needed here; the arrows are laid
out in neon. Horowitz, in his telling, peered into the left's
heart of darkness and nearly lost his soul.
A red-diaper baby, the bookish son of Jewish communists in
Sunnyside, Queens, Horowitz came to Berkeley in 1968 with a wife
and four children in tow. A Columbia University graduate, he had
passed six years in Scandinavia and England, writing books and
lecturing on Marxism. He had tired of his tendency to analyze
rather than live life. He feared he was becoming his father, a
depressed schoolteacher.
Where better to become an activist than Berkeley, a bungalow city
stoned on revolutionary fumes?
"I remember when I first met David," says Peter Collier, his
longtime collaborator and another emigre from left to right. "I
thought, 'My God, this guy writes these Marxoid books. Doesn't he
have basketball sneakers? Doesn't he have a gas mask?' "
He and Collier came to edit Ramparts with all the subtlety that
characterized the era. One of its covers featured a burning Bank
of America with this line: "The students who burned the Bank of
America in Santa Barbara may have done more towards saving the
environment than all the Teach-ins put together."
Horowitz soon met Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panthers,
a man of exquisite dialectics and thuggish impulse. Horowitz was
entranced. As he sees it today, he fell for a familiar left
trope: the romance of the outlaw.
"It's the Rousseauian vision of the noble savage," he says. "The
violence of the poor is always romanticized because their
consciousness has not yet been raised."
Horowitz helped launch a Panther school. When Newton was accused
of killing a teenage prostitute, and fled to Cuba in 1974, Elaine
Brown took over the Panthers. She was no softy; she has written
of watching Newton beat a middle-aged tailor to a brain-smeared
pulp and realizing just how little she cared.
She asked Horowitz to recommend an accountant.
He sent over Betty Van Patter, who worked on Ramparts' books.
Months passed, and she called Horowitz one night, upset at what
she had found in the party's books. She took her concerns to
Brown.
A month later, police found Van Patter's body floating in San
Francisco Bay, her head caved in. (Although journalistic
investigations, including one Horowitz wrote, pointed to Panther
involvement in her kidnapping and murder, no one was ever
charged.)
The death upended Horowitz. He had seen the Panthers' gangster
style, sensed their menace, and yet failed to properly warn Van
Patter.
Twenty-five years later, his voice catches and his face flushes
as he recalls the moment. "When Betty died, I was taken right off
my high horse and blasted into the ether. It was like my personal
report card was ruined. I could no longer justify myself."
His slow inquiry into her death became an inventory of his
self-deceptions. His marriage broke up, he became alienated from
his friends.
By the late 1970s, he had come to question the entire Church of
the Left: He had seen the far left dissolve into violence, and
the moderate left fail to reckon with the toll taken by
communist-led revolutions in Cambodia, Vietnam, Angola and
Central America.
The church analogy is apt, says Collier. "After the first doubt .
. . you cannot keep from sliding to the bottom and questioning
everything."
In 1979, Horowitz wrote a piece for the Nation, called "A
Radical's Disenchantment." Many allies and friends on the left
all but excommunicated him. In 1984 1985, he and Collier wrote a
Washington Post piece explaining their votes for Reagan.
Former comrades say Horowitz's view of the left is drawn far too
broadly, and in crayon. That he confuses the banshees of the
radical left with a larger and more ecumenical liberal movement.
It can be disorienting to listen to Horowitz's analysis. The
modern left may appear in disarray now, but in Horowitz's
telling, it's won. Socialist ideology lies at the center of the
Democratic Party project.
"I wouldn't disagree for a minute that part of the left has a lot
to answer for," says Parker of the Shorenstein Center. "Just as
there is a whole wing of the Reagan movement that refuses to
recognize the killings perpetrated by Augusto Pinochet.
"David needs to grow up. He's never come clean about how deeply
involved he was with the Panthers, and that prevents him from
taking a full and measured view of his soul and human complicity
in evil. His experiences should produce caution."
If Horowitz views leftism as a displaced pathology, his critics
return the favor. They speculate that Horowitz's political
transformation is grounded as much in his character as in his
ideology. "And I will leave it to the psychiatrist to figure it
out," says Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the liberal American
Prospect.
That seems too harsh. Left-leaning liberals of the 1970s were
surely slow to recognize the authoritarian nature of many Third
World liberation struggles. And however much he is haunted by his
service in the New Left, Horowitz's writings on the Black
Panthers, American communists and New Left nihilism offer a
bracing rejoinder to the romanticism that lingers about those
groups to this day.
"David's writings, particularly on the Black Panthers, have been
hugely influential even among liberals," says Kramer, the
cultural critic. "As they read it, many liberals just quietly
walked away."
Che Horowitz Question on the Horowitz Web site: David, what's
your recommendation for the Republican strategy on the Florida
recount?
Horowitz: "This is my answer, courtesy of Al Capone: 'If he comes
at you with a fist, you come at him with a bat. If he comes at
you with a bat, you come at him with a knife. If he comes at you
with a knife, you come at him with a gun.' "
Crowds of boisterous young Republicans gathered outside the U.S.
Supreme Court as the justices considered the election case last
December. Waving signs, chanting "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Al Gore has
to go!" the demonstrators were a '60s flashback rendered in bow
ties and plaid.
And Horowitz was their Che, their Mao, their Abbie Hoffman.
The activists passed Horowitz's e-mailed "war room" briefings
back and forth. They carried his books. And several credited his
teachings with inspiring what columnist Paul Gigot celebrated as
the "bourgeois riot" in Miami that persuaded Dade County election
officials to suspend their recount.
So the former Marxist achieves celebrity status. But behind his
revolutionary roilings, his personal life has reached a calm
patch. He and his third wife live comfortably in Los Angeles, and
he has reconciled with his first wife and children.
He smiles, a bit sheepish; his ex and their children carry an
immunity to his politics. They vote Democratic. "I cling to
family. I work towards reconciliation." Friends are another
matter. He and his former friends on the left communicate in
angry open letters and phone calls not returned.
"Politics is a choice of comrades," he says. "I appreciate that
it's very hard to peer over the edges of your own prejudices."
And yet . . . he claims to yearn for a more serious dialogue.
"I don't have the platform," he says. "When you have a cultural
authority, you can afford to do the nuances. A part of me longs
for a reflective dialogue."
Horowitz, however, often creates his own dissonance. Two years
ago, he wrote a series of polemical yet incisive and serious
essays on race, affirmative action and the left. And he bound
them together in a book, which he called "Hating Whitey: And
Other Progressive Causes," a title that ensures many of his
critics won't read it.
The sense is of a man who bridles at being shut out of polite
conversation on race and politics, yet delights in spilling milk
across the Establishment's table.
The war over his reparations ad is no different. He seized on an
idea that has recently moved into the public eye. And he wrote a
10-point attack manifesto and sought to place it as an ad in
college newspapers, from Berkeley to Brown University. The
Cornell, Columbia, Harvard and Yale dailies declined to carry the
ad.
Quite a few of his points seem sensible enough: How, exactly, do
you establish who gets paid 140 years after the fact? What of the
white descendants of the 340,000 Union troops who died to win the
Civil War, a conflict that ended slavery? Should the tens of
millions of immigrants who arrived in the United States since
slavery was abolished have to pay reparations?
And what of the guilt-tripping of reparations advocates, the
insistence that the essential America was built on genocide,
stolen land and stolen labor?
Yet his advertisement is written in a low argumentative style,
designed to sting more than to convince. The tonal point is
neatly encapsulated in Point 9 of his manifesto: "Reparations to
African Americans Have Already Been Paid."
". . . Trillions of dollars in transfer payments have been made
to African-Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial
preferences," Horowitz argues in his ad. "If trillion-dollar
restitutions and a wholesale rewriting of American law (to
accommodate racial preferences) for African-Americans is not
enough to achieve a 'healing,' what will?"
When some students and their faculty advisers react with outrage
and theft of newspapers, and reporters across America write of
the controversy, Horowitz all but vibrates with pleasure.
"I'm pushing the envelope," he says. "I'm actually helping
liberals by getting them to denounce the lunatic left."
The next day, an e-mail arrives: Horowitz, challenging Harvard
scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. to debate reparations with him
anywhere, anytime.
"My personal odyssey has given me much less respect for
intellectuals," he says. "I respect street smarts. I have the
disposition to be a battering ram."
So the former Marxist bookworm picks up the rhetorical paving
stone and flings it at the windows of the high Establishment.
Still revolutionary after all these years.
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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