It’s easy to change your political affiliation when nothing much is at stake. It’s a lot harder to recognize that your whole professional life was a mistake when you are a leading ideologue of the Left, have committed a treasonous act for the cause of leftism, and led a friend to her death because of your political delusions. David Horowitz found the courage publicly to admit his complicity with these terrible acts and rebuild his life. His autobiography Radical Son tells about his journey with great simplicity and sincerity.
Horowitz grew up in the family of Jewish-American Stalinists, and the only departure from his parents’ ideology that he allowed himself was to withdraw support from the kind of leftism that supported totalitarian regimes. He thought it was possible to have a different kind of leftism but was eventually forced to recognize that totalitarianism was the only possible destination for these political beliefs.
The horror that Horowitz experienced when Black Panthers murdered a friend of his whom he sent to work for them was a turning point in his political life. He had to reevaluate his entire trajectory and free himself from the shackles of his unfortunate beliefs.
Alongside the story of his political evolution, Horowitz tells the equally fraught story of his personal life. When he stopped trying to be the savior of humanity and became a right-winger, he still couldn’t fully leave behind the savior mentality. Horowitz married a drug-addled prostitute and tried to improve her life. The prostitute robbed him blind for 7 years, and after there was nothing left to take, moved on to a fresh mark. Horowitz began to reevaluate his life and read his father’s diaries. That’s when he found out that his father had also married a drug-addled prostitute back in his youth and also wasted 7 years on trying to “cure” her. It’s fascinating how life works.
Great book, highly recommended. I found out so much about the New Left. Do read, you won’t be sorry.
Clarissa's Blog 
It’s good that Horowitz finally wised up and became conservative, but I still don’t like him. Him and his cohorts in the 60s did so much damage and his website Discover the Networks is garbage, he’s got pages on all these celebrity dopes who are Democrat supporters, there’s nothing illegal or wrong about being a Democrat and most celebrities are Democrats anyways.
Plus he’s spread lies in his books about college professors being liberal, when in fact they were either rumors or misunderstandings. I just don’t trust anyone who’s ever been a Communist, he went from Communist, fuck America hippie to a neocon supporting the war in Iraq which caused so many problems. Bush was barely conservative, the Iraq war messed up our foreign policy and ended up causing Isis. It would have been better if his idiot parents weren’t Stalinists in the first place, these people should have never been allowed in the US
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“David Horowitz found the courage”
I suppose his book reads very differently now than 20 or more years ago. I remember first reading a column? or articles? by him in the late 1990s and not being tremendously impressed.
My takeaway was that he had metamorphized from one kind of ideology driven inflexible weirdo to another kind of ideology driven iflexible weirdo…
And he supported the Iraqi invasion, so….
I agree that turning away from his previous destructive beliefs was a brave thing, I just wish he had gotten some moderation and independent judgement (instead of relying on ideology) along the way.
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Temperament is destiny because it’s very physiological. For example, I’m intense and excitable not because I choose to be that way but because my nervous system is set up that way.
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“Temperament is destiny”
How much of this is culture vs biology?
I ask because for some reason a video about Israel by Norman Finkelstein showed up in feed and and I watched…. or tried to but…. omg I couldn’t take it. Supposedly he’s talking about how terrible Israel is but it’s all completely self-centered and self-aggrandizing….
Israel is illegitimate because he, personally, doesn’t think it’s a real Jewish state or a Jewish state isn’t needed but it was all about him. Palestinians for all the emoting he did are simply victims with no agency and beneificients of his compassion. His knowledge of their plight is his burden and gift to the world….
I’ve heard lots of Jewish speakers and I’ve agreed or disagreed but never had this visceral reaction before… If Jewish activists in the Civil Rights Movement were 1/10th as insufferable I can fully understand Blacks getting sick of them very, very, very quickly.
Out of curiosity I wondered what he thought of the russian invasion of Ukraine…. for the sake of your blood pressure…. you don’t want to know.
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Oh, are we talking about Finklestein *A Nation on Trial* Finkelstein here?
I was forced to read that screed in college, and then write a paper about it.
He uses some version of the word “perpetrate” approximately 50,000,000 times, and it was not a long piece. His writing sucks elephant balls. Nearly illegible. I kept wondering if maybe English wasn’t his primary language.
But no, he was born in New York City.
Co-author Bern very nearly as bad.
Twenty-odd years later I can still sum up my paper:
“I’m sure these authors had a valid point in there somewhere. But if they can’t be bothered to talk plain English WTF does it matter? This is3 academics vomiting ink onto a page for the sole benefit of other academics, and pretending it has some kind of significance for the larger world. Which means the debunking will reach ten people, while Goldhagen, the supposedly debunked, reaches thousands. What the bloody hell is the point of even publishing this trash?”
My prof was not amused. But I still got an A in that class, so…
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Oh, that dude. I’ve repressed the memory of his existence completely because it’s sad to observe somebody so intellectually impotent going on and on with the same boring idea for decades. How does he not tire of hearing himself say the same thing?
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I feel so understood.
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As other commenters have pointed out, Horowitz seems to be someone who changed his politics without particularly changing his character.
As for the New Left, I recommend Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage if you haven’t already read it.
(commenter formerly known as AcademicLurker)
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I am yet to meet anybody who did change their character much as an adult. I definitely haven’t and I’m not going to attempt it. Does anybody know such people?
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It was interesting to me that right as Horowitz was taking a rightward turn in his political life, he started running his personal life in a very left wing way. It’s very clear he and everyone else would’ve been much happier if he’d just stayed with his first wife and the mother of his children.
While not as gripping as Radical Son, I did actually find Chris Rufo’s book to be quite informative as well. I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface on this era.
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When you are undergoing intense and dramatic personal growth, it’s impossible to stay married to someone whose growth ended two decades ago. People can preserve a marriage in these circumstances but it will be a dead marriage. People will start living their entire emotional and intellectual life outside of the marriage, only coming back for meals and exchanging remarks about the weather. A marriage is a lifelong conversation. Once the conversation stops, or stops being the most fascinating thing you can experience, the marriage dies.
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