From a New Left radical to the Right.
When conservatives discuss the books that drew them to the Right, they typically mention God and Man at Yale, Witness, The Closing of the American Mind, or The Road to Serfdom (a favorite of President Reagan’s), among a few others. I read those books, too, as I drifted from being a Clinton Democrat to holding a low-level post in George W. Bush’s Administration. But another book had just as much influence on me, and was especially relevant to my place of work: Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey by David Horowitz.
Horowitz’s name was unknown to me until it popped up in the faculty lounge after he had declared war on my academic field and colleagues. This was around 2001. I didn’t know about his place in the New Left, time among the Black Panthers in Oakland, work for Ramparts, best-selling profiles of young Rockefellers, Fords, and Kennedys (co-written with Peter Collier, who would go on to lead Encounter Books), or controversial turn to the Right, which he announced during the Second Thoughts Conference he hosted in 1987, the 20th anniversary of the New Left’s march in Washington, D.C.
Horowitz then became even more notorious in the early aughts because of an article he’d written at Salon, followed by a shortened version that was published as an ad in campus newspapers around the country. The title was “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea—and Racist, Too.” (Here is how it appeared in the Brown University paper in March 2001—Harvard, Columbia, The University of Virginia, and other student papers refused to run it.) Among the reasons listed were the “trillions of dollars” already paid to African Americans “in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences,” the enjoyment in the United States of “the highest standard of living of blacks anywhere in the world,” and the sorry fact that “the reparations claim is one more attempt to turn African Americans into victims.”
There was some outrage, of course, and as Horowitz toured the country speaking against the Left and gauging the campus climate, protesters showed up to stand in the audience and turn their backs or line up at the microphone to condemn him during the Q&A sessions. But no violence broke out. True, when the ad ran in the Brown paper, students seized 4,000 copies and trashed them; at Berkeley, copies were shredded; in Madison, Wisconsin, they were burned (see “Race, Reparation, and Free Expression” in The Chronicle of Higher Education). But the ACLU and NAACP condemned the students at the time, and I don’t recall any shout-downs of Horowitz of the kind we saw in the 2010s. The crusade went on without pause for another 10 years.
Horowitz dropped the reparations point and adopted another cause just as irksome to my colleagues in the academy: liberal bias. This resulted in a book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, and a policy proposal, “The Academic Bill of Rights,” which he pressed on college presidents and state legislators to protect students from indoctrination and partisan politics. Every so often, reporters played up skirmishes with AAUP leaders and the anxiety he was causing professors and administrators. Horowitz even had to hire a bodyguard.
From what I could tell, however, most academics rolled their eyes and moved on. They weren’t activists themselves, and if there was a problem now and then with an identity politician in the department, they believed Horowitz exaggerated the impact. He was just a flailing critic of the academic scene, another conservative who didn’t understand us—he didn’t have a doctorate and couldn’t quote Foucault or Derrida. His denunciations of the Left seemed crude and ill-informed to those of us who’d pored over Adorno and Althusser in graduate school and prized nuance and fine distinctions. A condescending response was natural—it was easy.
We English professors who’d grown up in the Age of Theory were still a special group at the turn of the millennium, confident of our smarts and status. Humanities enrollments hadn’t yet tumbled as they have since, queer theory and postcolonialism still had a fresh sound, and eight years of Clinton rule made the election of Bush II seem an anomaly that would be fixed next time. We’d faced the sallies of Bill Bennett and Lynne Cheney a dozen years before and survived. We chuckled at the “tenured radicals” charge.
Horowitz was no threat. He was alone, too, with no real political power we could see. He couldn’t win. (He later complained to me that for years establishment conservatives kept their distance, as publications on the Right including the Wall Street Journal and National Review wouldn’t review his books. A 2005 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education opened by noting, “David Horowitz, one of the country’s most famous converts to conservatism, is waging a one-man war against the academy.”)
And yet, if you were a little unhappy with the conformity in the university, if you’d witnessed at conferences or in meetings any specimens of victimology or special pleading, there was something about Horowitz’s solitary, futile, blasphemous, in-your-face tactics that made you think—or, rather, that made you think about him and us. One couldn’t help noticing the imbalance. That’s what stood out, if you weren’t fully absorbed in the professional party: the David vs. Goliath set-up.
You heard the slogan “Speak truth to power” all the time on the softer sides of the campus, and the fact was that on our turf, we were the powerful, he the powerless. Who did Horowitz expect to listen to him, especially when he had the added temerity to dispute the left-liberal truisms that bound the professoriate together? These were the dogmas of the moment, the sacred cows that the rest of us had to worship or else.
Horowitz came to Emory around this time and contacted me because he’d learned I had attended a few National Association of Scholars meetings, or had written a couple of things against liberal orthodoxy and might be simpatico (though I’d voted for Gore). Reaching out to me indicated how few allies he had in his campaign. It turned out that an AAUP officer was also speaking that week at Emory, and Horowitz and I sat in the audience together.
The speaker was a theorist with a clear political slant, an English professor at the University of Illinois who had written Manifesto of a Political Radical just a few years before. When he finished his lecture, Horowitz rose and asked why the humanities fields had adopted an idea as empirically dubious as “gender” as a disciplinary foundation, a core concept. The question sounded to me like a proper Ivory Tower query, an invitation to discussion voiced in measured tones that deserved a reply. The speaker, however, shrugged it off as a distraction. Gender is a performative social construction or self-fashioning that plays a functional role in sexual identity: that’s an established truth, he asserted, and that was that. Horowitz didn’t push the issue—he only shook his head and sat down.
I recall the room and the silence of the attendees as Horowitz spoke. It was a critical sequence, an exemplary setup, a Millian forensics that didn’t succeed. A dissenter rose to challenge the canon, and the institution answered with the canon thoughtlessly reasserted and backed by the authorities. No discussion, no debate. The speaker moved on to the next question. He had the rest of the room and all of higher education behind him. Why bother with a lone gadfly? The academic norms switched sides: the political hack, the polemical outsider, came off as the scholarly figure, and the academic insider as the anti-intellectual voice of power. Horowitz wasn’t surprised, embarrassed, or dismayed. I could tell that he’d been there before, many times.
We left the room and walked around the quad as he spoke in knowing terms of the way political inducement works. The longer he talked the more he made me feel like a sap for not raising the same kinds of questions in department meetings and at academic conferences. He blamed the humanities departments and “studies” programs for creating a partisan climate that allowed such foolish and destructive notions as reparations, heteronormativity, and other identity politics schemes to thrive. I listened well; he was right. Later I would join him in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to testify in the legislature in favor of the Academic Bill of Rights. That evening, though, I wondered what made him tick. He was retirement age and had no stake in higher education. I wanted to know more of his story. So I turned to his memoir, Radical Son, which was published in 1996.
It tells a different tale of the 60s, and of the 50s and 70s, too. All of it is run through the immediate experience of an impassioned, observant, and sometimes confused young, and then middle-aged, intellectual.
As I read one chapter after another, one myth after another fell apart. The belief that the Communist Party in America in the 50s stood for workers’ rights and constitutional freedoms was exploded by what the party ordered Horowitz’s father to do when the state required schoolteachers to sign loyalty oaths. The Black Panthers as virtuous revolutionaries fighting The Man and forging a new justice ended with the fate of Betty Van Patter. (In 2016, Huey Newton’s successor, Elaine Brown, came to Emory and enjoyed three days of genuflection, which I observed with awe.) The anti-war movement had no more nobility once Horowitz noticed how it lost interest in the Vietnamese people after the U.S. pulled out. The 60s overall slipped from liberation to anarchy. Throughout the book, it should be said, Horowitz spared himself not one bit. It’s not a triumphal narrative—it’s a confession.
The memoir did its persuasive work. After reading it, one couldn’t look back on major developments from that time in the same way. And because the 60s (in mythic form) remain a fount of liberal faith, an adjusted vision of them meant a revised politics.
Most people will remember Horowitz as an activist and organizer, a rabble-rouser and flame-thrower. In my interaction with him, however, it was clear he regarded his writing as his most significant contribution. Radical Son should be included in the conservative canon.
