LEE SMITH: David Horowitz, 1939-2025.
I asked him about the upcoming election, Trump, and the global paranoia his campaign had given rise to. He asked of his fellow Republicans, “Don’t they understand the seriousness of this election?” He saw the left primarily as a secularized religious movement rather than a political one. “It’s a faith that seeks redemption in this life with itself as the savior,” he said. “It’s such a beautiful dream, what lie would you not tell and what crime would you not commit to realize it?”
Radical Son is a narrative driven by crimes and lies. He’d helped his friend Betty Van Patter get an accounting job with the Panthers, and Newton had her murdered. That kept Horowitz out of politics for a while, as he wondered if the left could “take a really hard look at itself—the consequences of its failures, the credibility of its critiques, the viability of its goals.” He wrote, “I already knew the answers, although I wasn’t ready yet to draw the appropriate conclusions.”
His parents had not wanted to ask those questions, so when it became impossible to ignore or excuse Stalin’s crimes, they were crushed—they’d nurtured lies great and small for decades. In the Tablet article recounting my afternoon with David, I wrote that, with his parents’ failed political commitment in mind, he’d “resolved not to be played for a sucker.” Now I see that was a coarse formulation, and false. There was nothing calculated about his reevaluation of his place in the political realm. He lived by his sense of what was true and what was good, as he records in Radical Son. It’s a work of profound psychological acuity, whether he’s describing Newton, his parents, the character of an ex-wife, or his failure to see his own faults as clearly as he sees others’.
The fact is that throughout his career, first on the left and then on the right, Horowitz’s main theme wasn’t really politics; rather, it was family. Along with fellow former leftist turned conservative Peter Collier, he wrote several histories of great American families, including the Rockefellers and the Kennedys. Many consider A Cracking of the Heart, his memoir of his late daughter Sarah, to be his best book. Conservatives generally argue, with good reason, that leftist policies are designed to break the traditional family structure. But David believed that failures at home generate the psychological chaos at the heart of the leftist project to undo civilization and remake it in the image of barbarism.
“The perennial challenge,” he wrote in Radical Son, is “to teach our young the conditions of being human, of managing life’s tasks in a world that is (and must remain) forever imperfect. The refusal to come to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age. My own life, which has often been painful and many times off course, is ultimately not discrete—a story to itself—but part of the narrative we all share.”
Read the whole thing.