Very sad news.
Horowitz was the political changer extraordinaire, going not just from left to right but from leftist mover and shaker to becoming a huge force on the right. In both of those roles, but especially the latter – to which he devoted the last forty or so years of his life, churning out article and article and book after book, giving speech after speech and generating tactics and strategy – he was eloquent, insightful, and feisty. His work meant and means a great deal to me.
And boy, was he ever ahead of his time on so many issues. This article about him, which came out ten years ago, offers a summary of his political life:
[Horowitz underwent] a ten-year, slow-motion transformation from theorist of the Left to its worst enemy …
Indeed.
Horowitz knew politics from “both sides now,” and he devoted much of his time to understanding his own early role, his transformation, and the failure of many of his friends and colleagues to go the same route. Early on in that transformation he had experienced a dramatic and extremely serious disillusionment with the Black Panthers, who had committed the murder of a woman he had sent to work for them, and that was one catalyst:
His New Left outlook was unable to explain the events that had overtaken him; his lifelong friends and associates on the Left were now a threat to his safety, since they would instinctively defend the Panther vanguard; and no one among them really cared about the murder of an innocent woman, because the murderers were their political friends.
That’s the sort of thing that can lead to political change – even political reversal – in a thinking person who’s honest with himself.
Forced to look at his own commitments in a way he had never allowed himself to do before, Horowitz realized that it was the enemies of the Left who had been correct in their assessment of the Panthers, just as they had been correct in their assessment of the Soviet Union, while the Left had been disastrously wrong.
Also:
As the Indochinese tragedy unfolded, Horowitz was struck again by how the Left refused to hold itself accountable for the result it had fought so hard for — in this case, a Communist victory. It evidently could not have cared less about the new suffering of the people in whose name it had once purported to speak. He became increasingly convinced, as Peter Collier had tried to persuade him, that “the element of malice played a larger role in the motives of the left than I had been willing to accept.” If the Left really wanted a better world, why was it so indifferent to the terrible consequences of its own ideas and practices?
In November 1984, Horowitz turned another corner. He cast his first Republican ballot, for Ronald Reagan.
Horowitz’s memoir Radical Son was a book I read early on in my change experience. I was never a leftist nor were my parents (just regular Democrats of the mid-century), but a section of my family was from the same Communist milieu in which Horowitz had been raised, and so I was quite familiar with the genre. Some of them never left.
And see how ahead of his time he was when you contemplate these books he wrote and the years in which they were published:
Horowitz’s next book, Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes, published in 1999, quickly became the most controversial work the author had written. It addressed the new cultural dimensions of the radical cause, specifically the determination to make race function the way class had in the traditional Marxist paradigm. …
In The Art of Political War (2002) Horowitz observes that progressives have inverted Clausewitz’s famous dictum and treat politics as “war continued by other means.” By contrast, conservatives approach politics as a debate over policy. …
… [I]n 2002, he launched a “Campaign for Fairness and Inclusion in Higher Education” to foster a pluralism of ideas and viewpoints, and in the spring of 2003 he drafted an “Academic Bill of Rights” based on the classic 1915 statement on academic freedom by the American Association of University Professors. Over the next seven years Horowitz attempted to persuade universities to adopt a code to ensure that students would have access to views on more than one side of controversial issues and that faculty would conduct themselves professionally in the classroom, and refrain from using their authority to indoctrinate students in partisan agendas. To advance these principles Horowitz wrote four books analyzing the situation he encountered on the several hundred campuses he visited during the seven years of his campaign: The Professors (2006), Indoctrination U. (2008), One-Party Classroom (2009; co-authored with Jacob Laksin), and Reforming Our Universities (2010). …
Unholy Alliance was the first book to trace the evolution of American radicalism from its support for the Soviet bloc to its opposition to the War on Terror and to explain how the Left and Islamist movements share a mindset that creates a bond between them. For the Left, America is the hated seat of global capitalism and individualism. For Islamists, America is the hated seat of Western values, a bulwark against the global domination of Islam, and a wellspring of spiritual iniquity. Consequently, these two destructive movements have a shared conception of, and contempt for, the “Great Satan” — America — which they identify as the primary source of evil in the world. They find common ground in their desire to annihilate or “fundamentally transform” it. …
… [A]nother book, this time co-authored with Jacob Laksin: The New Leviathan: How the Left-Wing Money Machine Shapes American Politics and Threatens America’s Future (2012). The new book documented and analyzed what no other work of scholarship had even noticed: that the Left had successfully built the richest and most powerful political machine in American history. The authors’ findings upended the conventional wisdom that the Republican party represents the rich and powerful, while the Democrats are “the party of the people.” The New Leviathan reveals how a powerful network moves radical ideas like Obamacare from the margins of the political mainstream and makes them the priority agendas of the Democratic party.
I’ll stop there, although Horowitz certainly didn’t – until now. RIP.
NOTE: Here is a post I wrote about Horowitz very early in my blogging career. I’ll add that I had an early correspondence with him at that time, and he was kind enough to reply and send me his latest book. I may write one more post about Horowitz, although not today.
