Home » David Horowitz is dead at 86: RIP

Comments

David Horowitz is dead at 86: RIP — 13 Comments

  1. Neo mentioned Horowitz’s autobiography Radical Son. I consider it among the 10 most memorable books I’ve read. Here’s my favorite passage from it (page 397):


    I pointed out that socialists had contrived to demonstrate by bloody example what everyone else already knew: Equality and freedom are inherently in conflict. This was really all that socialist efforts had shown, over the dead bodies of millions of people. In talent, intelligence, and physical attributes, individuals were by nature different and unequal; consequently, the attempt to make them equal could only be achieved by restricting — ultimately eliminating — their individual freedom. For the same reason, economic redistribution could be carried out only by force. Socialism was theft.

    Socialism could not even achieve the general welfare that its adherents promised. Socialist efforts to create economic equality invariably led, in practice, to the imposition of poverty on society as a whole, because socialism destroyed the incentives to produce. There were entire socialist libraries devoted to the confiscation and division of existing wealth, but not a single article on how people were motivated to create wealth. Socialists did not know how to make a society work. That was the lesson of the Communist debacle, which the Left had refused to learn.

    In the final analysis, social injustice was rooted in humanity’s flaws. There had been social institutions, like slavery and segregation, that were wicked and unjust, and needed to be abolished. But in America’s democracy, social injustices — and other evils which leftists decried — were caused primarily by humanity itself. The problem of controlling humanity’s dark side was what necessitated institutions of constraint —- the economic market and the democratic state. There was no exit from the dilemmas of history.

    It was this perspective — conservative in its essence — that had inspired the creators of the American republic. In the Federalist Papers, Madison had defended the American idea of liberty by means of legal checks and balances as a design to thwart the leveling agendas of the Left — “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.” The conservatism I had arrived at could be expressed in a single patriotic idea: The revolutionary failures of the Twentieth Century had demonstrated the wisdom of the American founding, and validated its tenets: private property, individual rights, and a limited state. Becoming a conservative turned out, ultimately, to be a way of coming home.

  2. Here’s my tribute from Open Thread. David Horowitz has a potent change story indeed:
    ________________________________________

    In 1974 I [Horowitz] began a new project with the Black Panther Party, which the New Left had identified in the Sixties as the “vanguard of the revolution.” I raised the funds to create a “Community Learning Center” for the Panthers in the heart of the East Oakland ghetto. The Center provided schooling and free meals to 150 children, and community services to an even larger number of adults. The following year the woman I had hired as a bookkeeper for the Center was kidnapped, sexually tormented, and then brutally murdered by my Black Panther comrades.

    When I first discovered what had happened, I was paralyzed with fear, a fear that grew as I learned about other murders and violent crimes the Panthers had committed—all without retribution from the law.…

    In the eyes of the left, the Panthers were what they always had been: an embodiment of the progressive idea. To defend them against the “fascist” attacks of the police was a radical’s first responsibility and task.

    In reality the Panthers were a criminal gang that preyed on the black ghetto itself.

    –David Horowitz, “Why I Am No Longer a Leftist” (from “Village Voice”, 09/30/1986)
    http://www.horowitzbiobooks.com/why-i-am-no-longer-a-leftist/

    ________________________________________

    When David Mamet renounced the left, he titled his exit piece, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.”

    David Horowitz dedicated his later life to opposing the left. He fought bravely and effectively. The left, then the jihadists, hated him. He was a lion.

    RIP

  3. “Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And it they are equal, they are not free.” – Solzhenitsyn.

  4. I was introduced to Horowitz, oddly enough, in salon.com. The editor, David Talbot, was a friend of Horowitz, and way back in 1999-00 included Horowitz as an alternative perspective. His column was called Right On and he wrote some things that made a lot of sense to me and his writings were very influential in my “walk away” during this period.

  5. Around the early 2000s, I became increasingly concerned about the radical left that seemed to be infiltrating my quiet college where I worked. I stumbled across Horowitz’s web site and his writings which opened up a whole perspective on what was happening not only to my college, but all of academia.

    He was a giant. RIP.

  6. Circa 1970 I was first introduced to the works of David Horowitz in a Berserkeley used book store (Moe’s? ). I purchased Free World Colossus, which I skimmed but never finished.

    In the late 1980s, I purchased in yet another used book store but in TX, Horowitz and Collier’s Destructive Generation, which was a history of the Bay Area left in the 60s onward. Having spent a year in the Bay Area, and also having left the left by that time, the book was of interest to me. (The dogmatic stance of many far leftists in Berserkeley, several decades before, did not endear the left to me. ) Read it more than once.

    In the Internet generation, I familiarized myself with David Horowitz’s Frontline web page, and read some more of his books, such as Radical Son. Picked that book up at a used book store, with his autograph.

    Some time circa 2010, I was reading, I believe, David Horowitz’s Frontline webpage, and learned about the Murder of Betty Van Patter. Horowitz had recommended her for bookkeeping work with the Black Panthers. Her finding irregularities in their books apparently led to her subsequent disappearance and death. (In her memoir, Elaine Brown wrote of Betty Van Patter’s “arrest record,” a record which apparently existed only in Elaine Brown’s mind.)

    In my year in Bersekeley, I had never met Betty Van Patter, but I knew her children and ex-husband. Betty’s daughter and I were the same age–and at one time were friends. It was rather surprising to find out that people I had known were connected to such a tragic historical event. Not to mention being connected to David Horowitz, as her murder began his process of leaving the left.

    Not long after finding out about Betty Van Patter and David Horowitz, David Horowitz spoke at an event near where I live. Unfortunately, I found about this after the event. Oh well.

  7. He was such a beautiful writer! I think Radical Son should be required reading in any high school or college course that comes close to covering relevant material.

    Funny I was just thinking about David about two days ago; thinking about his marvelous meditation on mortality, morality, and aging: “A Point in Time.” He wrote this I believe in his early 70s. I was only in my early 50s when I read it, but I recognized that he was speaking to the future me. It was also my first introduction to Marcus Aurelius.
    I wondered if he was still doing well…strange that he should have come to mind just at that point in time.

  8. Your post on Horowitz from back in the day is wonderful. Thanks for re-posting.

  9. I was sad to hear this news earlier. David Horowitz was influential on me as I was forming my political opinions. He also gave a voice to other writers who have been an influence on me, like Daniel Greenfield. I actually read “The New Leviathan” when it was first published. It is a very fact-based book, not heavy on theory, but it was helpful in enabling me to see through all the leftist nonsense about “grassroots” movements over the past decade or so. I’ve always wanted to read the “The Black Book of the American Left” series, and now perhaps I will.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>