Horowitz was not always this way though. He was born on January 10, 1939, in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, New York to a family of Jewish Communist Party members. According to Horowitz, even though his parents had emigrated to the United States, they wanted to destroy their adopted homeland: “In the land of Washington and Lincoln, their heroes were Marx and Lenin; in democratic America, their goal was to establish a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Instead of being grateful to a nation that had provided them with economic opportunity and refuge, they wanted to overthrow its governing institutions and replace them with a Soviet state.”¹David Horowitz, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (New York: The Free Press, 1997), 44.

Horowitz is unintentionally ironic in portraying his parents as dedicated communist revolutionaries. By the time he came of age, the Communist Party (CP) was thoroughly Stalinized and had largely abandoned revolution for the needs of Soviet foreign policy. Despite the CP’s degeneration, as a red diaper baby, David did receive the rudiments of a political education where he absorbed the values of socialism. In 1949, just as the Second Red Scare chilled politics across the United States, a defiant ten-year-old David attended his first May Day demonstration. Afterward, he viewed himself “as a soldier in an international class struggle that would one day liberate all humanity from poverty, oppression, racism and war.”²David Horowitz, “Left Illusions,” in Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey, ed. Jamie Glazov (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 2003), 102.

Yet Horowitz had his faith in the USSR shattered in 1956 with Khrushchev’s Secret Speech revealing Stalin’s many crimes. Later, he described his parents essentially losing their reason for being: “When my parents and their friends opened the morning Times and read its text, their world collapsed—and along with it their will to struggle. If the document was true, almost everything they had said and believed was false. Their secret mission had led them into waters so deep that its tide had overwhelmed them, taking with it the very meaning of their lives.”³Horowitz 1997, 84.

By now, Horowitz was a freshman at Columbia University as his family’s Communist Party milieu fell apart. In the coming years, Horowitz maintained his socialist convictions but largely focused on literary studies. One result of his literary pursuits was his second book, Shakespeare: An Existential View (1965).

After graduating in 1959, he moved to California, where he began graduate studies in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. It was an auspicious choice. Shortly thereafter, Berkeley became the center of New Left and radical activism that challenged the American war in Vietnam. Attracted to the movement, Horowitz organized one of the first campus demonstrations against the Vietnam War in 1962. That same year, he published Student, an early New Left text.

Afterward, Horowitz and his family moved to Sweden where he spent the next year. During this time, he wrote The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (1965). In this seminal work, Horowitz attacked the prevailing anticommunist consensus that the Soviet Union was an expansionist power and the cause of the Cold War. Rather, Horowitz located the cause of the Cold War in American capitalists and imperialist aggression. Very soon, Free World Colossus proved to be a must-read text for a new generation of radicals and was translated into multiple languages. Later, Horowitz disowned his work for legitimizing a radical worldview:

It was during this same period that Horowitz was offered a job with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in London. At this time, Russell became involved in activism against the Vietnam War. In 1966, Ralph Schoenman convinced Bertrand Russell to bring together a war crimes tribunal to judge American involvement in the Vietnam War. Alongside Russell, those attending were some of the major figures of the international left such as Isaac Deutscher, Jean-Paul Sartre, Stokely Carmichael, Simone de Beauvoir, Vladimir Dedijer, and James Baldwin. Horowitz himself claimed later that he had reservations about the tribunal and did not take part. Yet Horowitz also admitted that he was essential in helping the tribunal by raising funds. Horowitz also participated in other actions against the war. Alongside members of the Trotskyist International Marxist Group such as Tariq Ali, he helped organize the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign in 1966.

While in London, he became close friends with two major European Marxists: Ralph Miliband (author of Parliamentary Socialism) and Isaac Deutscher, the famed biographer of both Trotsky and Stalin. Deutscher was an important political mentor to Horowitz and many radicals, introducing them to the revolutionary tenets of classical Marxism. As Horowitz said in 1969 in a collection he edited commemorating Deutscher: “It was Deutscher’s unique achievement that he constructed in his exile a Marxist vision of Bolshevism and its fate, which could serve as a bridge between the tradition and achievements of the old revolutionary left and the new… and of restoring meaning once again to the idea of Communism.”⁵David Horowitz, ed., Isaac Deutscher: The Man and His Work (London: Macdonald, 1971), 9 and 14.

In addition, Horowitz’s Empire and Revolution (1969) was dedicated to Deutscher and bore his influence throughout its pages. In this text, Horowitz reinterpreted the Cold War, imperialism, and the USSR under a Deutscherite lens. Despite the deformations of Stalinism in the Soviet Union, he maintained hope that the workers would overthrow the ruling bureaucracy. Finally, the text ended with an unambiguous Bolshevik call for international revolution:

Having returned to the United States and settled in California by 1968, Horowitz became a co-editor of the magazine Ramparts. One of the major radical journals of the sixties, Ramparts sold nearly 250,000 copies at its height. The journal published many of the most important leftist texts of the decade such as Che Guevara’s Bolivian Diaries, with an introduction by Fidel Castro and Soul on Ice by the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver (later a writer for the journal). In 1967, when Martin Luther King Jr. publicly opposed the Vietnam War, he gave Ramparts the sole rights to publish the text of his speech.

This was an easy choice on King’s part since the main thrust of Ramparts’ energies were focused on opposing the Vietnam War. In its pages, the journal condemned various American war crimes in Vietnam such as the use of napalm. Moreover, Ramparts was instrumental in exposing the role of the CIA with the National Student Association, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and the Asia Foundation.

Years later, Horowitz sorrowfully described his actions during the sixties:

The high point of Horowitz’s engagement with this heterodox school can be found in his edited collection, Marx and Modern Economics (1968). Here, Horowitz summarizes a great deal of literature on the relationship between Marxism and bourgeois economists. In his introduction, Horowitz sees the possibility of a convergence between Marxism and mainstream economics through the medium of Keynes. This is reflected in the choice of chapters which include leftists influenced by Keynes such as Joan Robinson, Oskar Lange, Paul Sweezy, and Paul Baran. The introduction approvingly quoted Robinson: “If there is any hope of progress in economics at all, it must be in using academic methods to solve the problems posed by Marx.” Horowitz added: “It is the Marxists, alone, who have been ready to take up the challenge.”⁹David Horowitz, ed., Marx and Modern Economics (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), 17.

While Horowitz’s own revolutionary commitments remained intact, his embrace of Keynes was an early sign of a rightward shift. Like Sweezy and Baran, Horowitz dropped the essentials of Marxist political economy for bourgeois liberalism. As a result, he was unable to explain the material necessity for socialism that grew out of capitalism’s internal laws of motion. Horowitz, like Baran and Sweezy, was forced to deny the revolutionary role of the working class and look for salvation from amorphous “outcasts.” While his understanding of socialism was not scientifically grounded, Horowitz’s revolutionary faith meant he refused to give up the struggle.

By the early seventies, radicalism was beginning to lose steam. The mass movements of the previous decade began to shrink and horizons for a socialist future receded. Unknown to Horowitz and others, an era of conservative retrenchment was about to begin. While many leftists began to question the validity of socialism altogether, Horowitz attempted to carry on but was feeling the strain too. As he admitted in The Fate of Midas (1973): “In the present historical context, the work of a radical intellectual is inevitably a lonely enterprise¹⁰David Horowitz, The Fate of Midas and Other Essays (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, Inc., 1973), 5.

In addition, the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago with its exposure of the Stalinist gulag further shook Horowitz’s commitments: “I had grown up in an environment where the Soviet Union was the focus of all progressive hopes and political efforts. My acute sense of our complicity in these crimes made it difficult for me to read more than a few pages of Solzhenitsyn’s text at a single sitting.”¹¹Horowitz 1997, 193.

While burdened and strained, Horowitz pressed on. By the early seventies, he developed a close friendship with Huey P. Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party. Even though the Panthers were one of the most militant groups of the sixties, they were now in deep decline due to COINTELPRO repression and internal infighting. In many respects, both Newton and the Panthers had severely degenerated. Yet Horowitz was convinced by Newton that the Panthers were leaving behind their simplistic violence and embracing a more creative politics focused on community service.

With the fervor of a newly minted convert, Horowitz was compelled to preach his new anticommunist gospel. In 1987, he found himself in Nicaragua at the behest of Elliott Abrams, an Assistant Secretary of State, to oppose the leftwing Sandinista government. While there, he cheered on the Contras — right-wing terrorists backed by the U.S. — who had murdered 30,000 Nicaraguans. Two years later, Horowitz attended a conference in Kraków, Poland calling for the end of Communism and praising the “wisdom” of free market fundamentalist Friedrich von Hayek.

In 1987, Horowitz hosted a “Second Thoughts Conference” in Washington, D.C. composed of former leftists such as Ronald Radosh, Joshua Muravchik, Fausto Amador, and P. J. O’Rouke. The attendees spent their time repenting for their radical sins and warning about the ever-present dangers of “communist totalitarianism.” As the radical journalist Alexander Cockburn observed, the Second Thoughts Conference was merely an opportunity for Horowitz and company to cash in:

Notes