The Black Book of the American Left. David Horowitz
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the infrequent occasions when liberals bothered to address my work.
The most unpleasant aspect of my political odyssey has been the relentless, often malicious distortion of the positions I have taken by those who disagree with my political conclusions. Three of the last four articles in Part I deal with this phenomenon. The first, “Getting This Conservative Wrong,” is my response to an academic historian named Kevin Mattson, who profiled me in a book called Rebels All! as the exemplar of a “post-modern conservatism,” ascribing to me views I simply did not hold. This was typical of the responses to my work by critics from the left who rarely engaged my ideas in an intellectual manner but picked at them hoping to find ways to discredit their bearer. The only real interest they showed in my work, or that of other conservatives, was to make it a symbol of something to despise and suppress. “Something We Did” is my response to a caricature of me in an Off-Broadway play about the Weathermen terrorists called Something You Did. The intention of the play was to exculpate the guilty and indict those who attempted to hold them accountable. Like Kevin Mattson, the playwright had no interest in defending, let alone correcting, his distorted views when I confronted him with the facts.
Another example of this syndrome is described in “Who I Am,” which is my response to a cover story that appeared in The Tablet, an online magazine for Jewish progressives. The Tablet’s editors had assigned a very young leftist the task of doing my portrait. The piece he finally produced, “David Horowitz Is Homeless,” was an attempt to portray me as a hapless figure whose fortunes were declining as he approached the end of his life, where he found himself lost between the warring camps of left and right, unable to find a home in either. “Who I Am” is my attempt to put the facts back in place. The Tablet declined to publish it, but this self-portrait provides a reasonable facsimile of my state of being in what was then my seventy-third year.
Peter Collier has been my friend for fifty years. He was my collaborator at Ramparts and in the launching of my literary career with three dynastic biographies we co-authored about the Rockefeller, Kennedy and Ford familes—all New York Times best-sellers, The Kennedys reaching the top of that list. Peter was also my confidant and partner in the joint transition we made from left to right, organizing the “Second Thoughts” conference with me, coauthoring our démarche in The Washington Post and co-writing Destructive Generation, which we published in 1989. Peter has also been my collaborator in guiding the David Horowitz Freedom Center, although he took a ten-year hiatus to create Encounter Books, an independent publishing company. During that time, he continued to edit our magazine, Heterodoxy. “Peter and Me,” an introduction I wrote to a talk he gave at the Center’s Wednesday Morning Club about his biography of Jeane Kirkpatrick, is my tribute to a valued friend and colleague and the impact he has had on me.
Part II
The essays that make up the second part of this volume begin with “Goodbye to All That,” our swansong to the left. The article was published by The Washington Post under the title “Lefties for Reagan” and was our formal “coming-out” as conservatives, although it was based on second thoughts that had been gestating since the mid-Seventies.
The next two essays, “My Vietnam Lessons” and “Semper Fidel,” belong to this genre, and are attempts I made to confront our radical cohort with the harsh realities of what we had actually done. Vietnam was the defining issue of our generation but the events that unfolded proved that those of us who were active in the anti-war movement had been wrong on every critical point, and that our actions had tragic consequences for the people we claimed to be defending. My decision to vote for Ronald Reagan and join the conservative cause was also inspired by events in Nicaragua where Castro Marxists had seized power through a political coup. “Semper Fidel,” originally titled “A Speech to My Former Comrades on the Left,” was about those events. It was given at a conference organized by Berkeley radicals who probably didn’t realize what they were in for, and who shut off my microphone before I could finish.
Following the appearance of our Post article, Peter and I were repeatedly forced to defend our conservative views. “Keepers of the Flame” is one of these defenses, written following our return from a trip to Nicaragua and in response to a review of Destructive Generation that appeared in The New Republic. The essay reflects our continuing effort to understand what had happened to us—not only why we weren’t welcomed into what we thought would be the political center, but also why our anti-Communist politics were treated with such hostility by the liberal press. The review that provoked our response was written by Paul Berman who insinuated that the sins we described in Destructive Generation were basically our own, and did not reflect the general behaviors or attitudes of the left.
This attempt to revise the past was a common tack of the leftists we now faced. In “Carl Bernstein’s Communist Problem and Mine,” I drew on my personal experiences to expose the misrepresentations in the memoir this Watergate reporter had written about his Communist childhood. The article has even more resonance today than it did when I wrote it because it describes, from the inside, the milieu in which the 44th president of the United States also grew up, along with his chief advisors David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett.55
http://discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1511
A series of attacks on the political right by the writer Michael Lind provided me with an opportunity to describe what a political conversion actually entails and also to correct the distorted picture of the right that was becoming commonplace among its leftist opponents. I responded to Lind’s defamation of conservatives in an article called “Political Cross-Dresser.”
Time and again as I attempted to describe my experiences as a radical, I encountered the resistance put up by leftists to any candor on the subject, their inability to face up to the past, and their penchant for rewriting it instead. “Still Lying After All These Years” and “Repressed Memory Syndrome” are efforts to address this resistance to historical truth. I am not referring here to differences in interpretation of what happened, but to the deliberate suppression of facts or inversion of facts in the service of a political cause.
The article “Fidel, Pinochet and Me” is another attempt to confront my former comrades with the results to which our political advocacies had led. In this article, I compare the achievements of Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet, whom progressives loathed, to those of Cuba’s dictator Castro, whom they adored and whose excesses they excused. Comparing those histories provided a measure of progressives’ disconnect from reality in the service of a destructive illusion, and of their blindness to the human consequences of their ideas and actions. Shortly after publishing the article, I found myself on a radio show with Christopher Hitchens who at the time was one of the radical harassers of the terminally-ill Pinochet, calling for his arrest and extradition for crimes he had committed as Chile’s dictator decades before. When I pointed out that Pinochet’s dictatorship was no worse for Chileans than Castro’s was for Cubans, and arguably a lot better, Christopher burst out on air: “How dare you, how dare you!” I was taken aback by this fervor but replied in as amicable a tone as I could muster: “Christopher, aren’t we getting a little old for ‘how-dare-yous’?” This was the first time Christopher and I had spoken in nearly twenty years and it was to his credit that the next time we did we became friends.66
See “Defending Christopher” and note, Volume 2; also “The Two Christophers” in David Horowitz, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion.
It was a continuing source of fascination to me that progressives, who had been so demonstrably on the wrong side of history during the Cold War, were able to maintain their air of superiority when it was over, while simultaneously marginalizing conservatives in the academic and literary cultures they dominated. The essay “Marginalizing Conservative Ideas” is another facet of my ongoing effort to identify the differences between the two perspectives that lead to such different outcomes.
In the two articles “Can There Be A Decent Left” and “The Left and the Constitution,” I analyze the