How to Remember David Horowitz
His turn toward Trumpism finally broke our decades-long friendship, which had seen us both move from left to right. Here’s what I’ll mourn and miss about the man.
DAVID HOROWITZ, THE FIREBRAND of the conservative movement, died on April 29 after a lengthy battle with cancer. He was once a dear friend of mine. As I consider the great influence he had on so many, I feel compelled to reflect on the meaning of his life and on the effect he had on the scores of people who crossed paths with him.
I met David in New York City in the early 1950s, when I was a 15-year-old Communist and member of the Upper West Side branch of the Labor Youth League, the name at that time of the official youth organization of the American Communist Party. At one meeting, David, age 13, came to our chapter in his position as the newly appointed youth editor of the Communist Party’s daily newspaper, The Daily Worker. He was from his own bailiwick in Sunnyside, an enclave in Queens, where lots of Communists and fellow travelers lived. The task was in vain; few if any volunteered to write for the paper, and the hope of creating a young people’s section never materialized. (I did, however, contribute an unsigned article about the model U.N. for high school students, which was held at the United Nations in the actual delegates’ section. As far as I know, my article was the only outcome of his recruitment effort.)
David and I were soon friends, and I went frequently to visit him at his home and attended the parties he held there with the other young comrades of the party’s youth movement. When it was time for college, I left for the University of Wisconsin in Madison, while he chose Columbia. Both David and I stayed politically active. After he graduated, David went to Berkeley to study American literature, while I stayed in Madison for graduate school in American history. Now as a member of the emerging New Left, I became an editor of the journal Studies on the Left, while David became editor and a founder of his own West Coast radical university publication, Root and Branch. There was one meeting to see if the two could be merged, but their emphasis was on cultural issues, while ours was broader in its scope.
During the 1960 presidential campaign, David put together the very first student demonstration against JFK in Berkeley, which prompted me to organize a similar one when Kennedy himself came to campaign in Madison. As his car passed, we ran to it and yelled, “Remember, senator, the only real issue is peace with Russia.” As David began to concentrate and oppose the beginnings of sending U.S. troops to Vietnam during JFK’s presidency, I emulated his actions and wrote the first editorial against a U.S. presence in Vietnam for the student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal. We were on campuses two thousand miles apart but we worked in tandem.
THERE WERE TWO VERY DIFFERENT personas to David. The first was a militant and uncompromising radical; the other a sensitive and brilliant writer who put aside politics and often wrote beautiful prose about the meaning of life.
Sol Stern—an old mutual friend of David’s and mine—wrote with me about this in an article published four years ago this week in the New Republic. In that lengthy assessment, we trace David’s political journey from “the radical leftist turned thoughtful conservative turned Trump propagandist.” He eventually became what he himself called “a bomb thrower,” i.e., an in-your-face uncompromising member of the far right-wing.
As an example of David’s more thoughtful persona, Stern and I quoted a paragraph that David wrote in 1993 for a magazine called Heterodoxy he had recently created with his friend Peter Collier. Here’s how David explained what being a newly proclaimed conservative meant to him:
Conservatism, then, is not an ideology in the sense that liberalism, or the various forms of radicalism are. It is not an “identity politics” whose primary concern is to situate its adherents in the camp of moral humanity and thus to confer on them the stamp of History’s approval. It does not have a party line. It is possible for conservatives to question virtually any position held by other conservatives including, evidently, the notion that they are conservatives at all, without risking excommunication, expulsion, or even a raised eyebrow.
It was a rational stance that David would abandon in a few years. When he created what is now called the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which publishes its daily website, Frontpagemag, he had evolved from being a thoughtful intellectual of a conservative persuasion to what the Center itself called a “battle tank, geared to fight a war,” which eventually aligned with Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, a development that met the criterion for David’s fondest dreams. Gone was his belief that a conservative could question anything; the war that had to be waged, as he saw it, demanded total obedience and commitment until victory against the left (a category which included anyone of a liberal or left-wing persuasion). The defeat of the left was necessary for America to regain its soul.
David’s organization hosted yearly retreats—“Restoration Weekends,” he called them—usually at top-of-the-line hotels, like the exclusive and ultra-expensive Breakers resort in West Palm Beach. The major conservative political and intellectual figures of the day would be invited to speak. Over the years, the lineup you could expect at these three-day getaways shifted hard right. Early on, David’s ecumenical guests included a broad spectrum of conservative figures, as well as avowed political liberals and leftists, whose presence reflected the perspective of conservatism he outlined in Heterodoxy. But as the George H.W. Bush and Clinton years gave way to the George W. Bush and Obama years, David’s yearly meetings began to welcome only the most extreme of Republicans. Eventually, only those sworn to support Trump and the MAGA movement would participate. When Donald Trump first won the presidency in 2016, David welcomed and honored Steve Bannon, whom he regarded as a fellow warrior for freedom and to whom he gave his organization’s annual award for his role in getting Trump into the White House.
Neoconservatives whom David once regarded highly and honored were disinvited from his events and openly scorned and attacked, especially if they rejected Donald Trump. Bill Kristol, then a leading light of neoconservatism, the editor of the Weekly Standard, and an early critic of Trump, was attacked in a vicious fashion by David, who called Kristol “a renegade Jew” in what at the time was emerging as a MAGA organ, Breitbart.com.
DAVID’S ORIGINAL TURN toward the right—as he described it in his autobiography, Radical Son, and in many articles—began with his disillusionment with the Black Panther Party. As a Berkeley radical, he had supported them, helped them with funding, and was often in the company of its leader, Huey Newton. David had recommended a woman named Bettey Van Patter to work as the bookkeeper for the group at the Panther’s San Francisco headquarters. She suddenly disappeared, and eventually her body was found in the San Francisco Bay; it was clear she had been murdered and thrown in the water. David knew immediately that she had been killed by the Panthers, who feared her work in their office revealed material that they wanted kept secret, and not fully trusting her, decided the only course was to get rid of her in true gangland style.
The late journalist Kate Coleman, a friend of David’s who wrote some of the first articles critical of the Black Panther Party, recounted decades later that David “was just blown out of the water,” and the revelation showed that “his guilt was overwhelming. He was really suffering.” It is fair to conclude that this one act, which David has written about over and over through the years, was the catalyst for his re-evaluation of everything he believed while a Marxist and man of the left. Daniel Oppenheimer, whose book Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century includes a chapter on David, perceptively commented to journalist Chris A. Smith that David’s confrontational style made it hard for those he criticized to listen to him and think about his critique of the left. David, Oppenheimer said, “had a very keen sense for where the left’s genuine hypocrisies and vulnerabilities were, but he hit it in this way that was blunt and unsympathetic and unforgiving.”
Oppenheimer was only partially correct. Before he turned to the right, David wrote about his disillusionment for the Nation, the flagship publication of the American left. His article, which appeared in the December 8, 1979 issue, was titled “A Radical’s Disenchantment.” It was, as he later wrote, his “farewell to the left.” The left, he wrote, “could not change itself,” and was “trapped in its romantic vision” and “unable to summon the disposition to look at itself critically.” He continued to blast “apologists of the Left” who refused even at such a late date to criticize the Soviet Union or clear cases of repression in Communist nations such as Cuba. He ended his essay with a challenge to the magazine’s readers: “Can the left take a really hard look at itself—the consequences of its failures, the credibility of its critiques, the viability of its goals?” He then chastised his former comrades for their “arrogant cloak of self-righteousness . . . that makes it impervious to the lessons of experience.”
Although he hoped, or so he wrote, that the left would “fashion a new, more adequate version of radical commitment and radical change,” he would later conclude that his attempt to move in such a direction had been in vain.
The response was a torrent of attack. His mentor, the British socialist and political scientist Ralph Miliband (father of the British Labour Party politicians David Miliband, now head of the International Rescue Committee, and Ed Miliband, now energy secretary in the Starmer government), told David he should not have written the article, and that his arguments had no merit. For years, he would come back to that response and tell one and all—as he often said to me—“I gave the left a chance and not only did they not take it, but they also castigated me for raising such questions.”
It was this kind of rejection that began his movement away from the left in which he grew up and played a major role. One must wonder if a different response from left intellectuals—one that treated his complaints as legitimate and took them seriously—would have prevented his drift into the conservative movement and eventually into its extremist elements.
DAVID’S DRIFT CONTINUED, and his character led him to gravitate toward the most far-right figures—those who, like him, believed they had to wage total war until final victory and the destruction of the left. His writing became more and more tortured and extreme; nuance and thoughtfulness gradually disappeared.
The sadness is, as the extremist partisan persona grew, he was wasting the talent and insights he had to offer. David was a great writer, as readers of his autobiography and his four other personal books can attest. Mortality and Faith is a reflection on spiritual life as a nonbeliever and a seeker for meaning. A Point in Time is a Dostoyevskian exploration of redemption and time; as Walter Isaacson wrote in a blurb, “David Horowitz has produced a meditation on facing death that is poignant and wise . . . he helps us think through that most basic of all questions: what is it that can give meaning to our existence?”
I myself wrote a blurb for You’re Going to be Dead One Day: A Love Story. “I felt a great peace and calm reading Horowitz’s beautiful prose,” I wrote. “He has been able to touch my feelings on a deep level, and cause me to reflect on whether or not I have been able to make a difference while I am among the living.” I stand by this response today, after David himself has passed.
A Cracking of the Heart is about the sudden death of David’s daughter Sarah at the relatively young age of 44. In it, we learn that Sarah became an observant Jew, finding life and meaning in Judaism. After Sarah died, David flew to Berkeley to see his ex-wife, Elissa, from whom he had long been divorced. Yet, he wrote, he had “a durable bond” with her, “forged out of the love we shared for our children, and now for their children, and out of memories of a past long gone.”
Readers of A Cracking of the Heart familiar with David’s politics might be surprised to learn that his beloved Sarah was, like her mother, a woman of the left. Given David’s growing vitriolic right-wing extremism, it’s surprising and impressive to see him reveal his pride in her concern for the poor and the homeless, and his admiration for her trips to El Salvador and India, and a trip to “serve a tribe of African Jews in Uganda.” He quotes from Sarah’s prayer for the United States that she submitted to her rabbi at Congregation Beth Sholom: “Let our leaders pursue justice. . . . Protect our leaders from the seductions of power; Protect our right to protest.”
David acknowledged that he had set out on a course “that put us at odds.” He recalls sending Sarah a draft of his autobiography, and writes that she “wanted me to be less dismissive of political opponents and more appreciative of their human complexity.” Later, she dismissed another of his writings by saying “you went into this book with a closed mind & a chip on your shoulder. This sets you up as someone with an axe to grind & sets a tone of condescending contempt.” His answer: “I get your point, and it’s a good one.” He pledged to try and develop a more “empathetic commentary.”
Of course, he never did—and he must have realized it.
Of Sarah, he writes that “she was drawn to the social causes of the Left both by friends and by her own inclinations.” When he and Peter Collier wrote their famous 1985 article announcing that they had voted for Ronald Reagan, Sarah told her sister: “Can you believe it? Dad’s gone over to the dark side.” After her sister reacted, she added: “Oh well, that’s Dad.” David was upset about her “identification with the Left” which he says, “raised my anxieties about where she might be heading and became a source of occasional frictions between us.”
At times David even recognized his own extremist bent. “In this period of my life,” he writes, “I was unable to speak about such matters without passions rising unbidden that were near ferocious.” Perhaps he was unable to see that he continued in that vein, getting more and more strident. Why was he so strident? He explains: “Trapped in an emotional paralysis, which was born of the recriminations and griefs that had become a dominant feature of myself, I was unable to retreat from the words I had uttered without feelings of self-betrayal.” As for the leftist community, he writes: “For them, politics was the quest for a redemption in this world and it inflamed them with the self-righteous feelings that accompanied such hopes.” Writing in 2009, he does not seem to realize the attitudes of the left that he disdained are precisely those of the right he now supported.
The most striking revelation in A Cracking of the Heart is that Sarah worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. She was drawn “inexorably to its cause,” David notes, attracted to a candidate “who reflected in his biography the multicultural backgrounds in her own family, and a campaign which seemed to represent the hopes she had for her country.” He was skeptical, he writes, but when she told “me she was going to Iowa to campaign for Obama I was whole-heartedly behind her and told her so.” Sarah, he writes, marched “into a heartland winter, in temperatures of two degrees above zero to knock on doors and bring out Americans she had never met to join her in her campaign of ‘Yes We Can.’” She was thrilled that “her cause had won,” and, David writes, “I was able to share her triumph.” He told her, “You can be very proud of what you have done.” America, he says, “has already been changed forever by this Iowa campaign, and this could not have happened without you and others like you.”
YET THIS IS ALSO THE DAVID HOROWITZ who blamed America’s decline and fall on this same Barack Obama, whom he believed had consciously betrayed America and turned it to support its enemies. He repeatedly said in public that “Obama is a Communist,” and he urged others also to say this loud and clear. Indeed, David once told me that he asked the also-volatile Sen. Ted Cruz to give a speech calling Obama a Communist, to which Cruz replied: “I can’t say that.” David said to me, “I’m the only one courageous enough to tell this truth.”
We find in one man an understanding, nuanced, and sensitive father and also a harsh, strident, unrelenting fighter against the left—the enemy that he believed was destroying America, and that had to be fought tooth and nail. Unfortunately, it is the latter David Horowitz the world came to know, and he became famous for his strident, harsh, and nasty take on our political life.
As one of his disciples writes in Frontpagemag:
David was MAGA before there was a MAGA and without the movement he helped build, it might never have come into being. . . . Before the Republican Party was ready for Trump, David Horowitz had to teach them how to call the Left by its right names. Traitors. Insurrectionists. The Enemy Within. And he taught them to hit as hard as possible. Leftist institutions didn’t need to be debated, but destroyed. This was not an argument to be settled on a CNN panel, but a war that would end in survival or destruction.
Indeed.
In his Center’s tribute to his life and work, Frontpagemag concludes:
Over the years, David became something of a Saul Alinsky for the conservative movement, shaking a complacent Right out of its sleep and reinventing it as a war machine, laying out the strategies and principles for defeating the Left in too many bestselling books, articles, and pamphlets to count.
David’s message to the conservative movement was that it needed to abandon its habit of embracing noble failure and instead fight to win. Indeed, Donald Trump’s MAGA movement was shaped and guided by David and his disciples like Stephen Miller. And while his passing is an incalculable loss, David lived long enough to see his ideas and tactics become the heart and soul of a new movement to take back America.
What David is being celebrated for is the opposite of the introspective and empathetic writer, a thoughtful and moderate conservative, evident in his personal books. And his supporters give him credit for helping to create the most repulsive and nasty of the Trump entourage, Stephen Miller, who of course, added his own tribute to David. Another right-wing extremist protégé, Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, wrote to single out David’s responsibility for Miller’s career in these words:
Twenty-five years ago, David mentored a high school student named Stephen Miller. He supported him through Duke, through the Senate, and into the Trump White House. Today, Stephen is one of the most impactful architects of America First immigration policy. A legend thanks to David’s mentorship.
That is the David Horowitz of the “battle tank”—not the Horowitz who wrote in You’re Going to Be Dead One Day that although he had dedicated his life to “combatting the malignant delusions of the left. . . . I did not want to turn my back on the non-political dimensions of our lives or the bonds we once had.”
Had he wished, David could have addressed these words of friendship despite political difference to me, after the article Sol Stern and I wrote in 2021. Instead, he responded to us with a savage attack. In it, he cleverly denies he ever said Donald Trump had an election stolen from him, writing that “no one can say with authority that the 2020 election was or was not decided by fraud.” (Mind you, David had told me on the phone that Mike “MyPillow” Lindell had proved that the election had indeed been stolen, and complained about how horrendous the attacks on Lindell were.) In his very next sentence, David contradicts his own assertion that he never claimed the election was stolen, admitting he had written “that there was ample evidence of irregularities and illegalities sufficient to question the result,” and quoting himself as saying that the problems with Biden’s proclaimed victory were “‘overwhelming.’”
Clearly, he was deeply hurt by my inability to remain his friend. I take full credit for the break. I found it impossible to remain his friend, since each time I spoke to him on the phone, he relentlessly went on a tirade about my views without ever giving me a chance to try and respond. For example, he wrote in his response that while Democrats and leftists—apparently Sol and I are among that group—called his side many nasty names, including “insurrectionists” (actually we used the term “insurrection” to describe only the storming of the Capitol) and “terrorists,” all his side did was to call Democrats “liberals” or later “radical liberals.”
Really? Did David not read his own website—or for that matter listen to himself when he delivered speeches and wrote articles, when he repeatedly called the Democrats “Communists” or “fascists” or both? Indeed, in his answer to us, he later refers to “the fascist voice of the Democrat [sic] Party.” And his article is titled “My Former Friends Have Joined the Fascists.” I can only conclude that David had a classic Jekyll and Hyde problem: two different personalities in one person—and depending on his mood or what he was working on, one or the other would appear.
AS FAR AS I KNOW, David managed to go against his “battle tank” tendency toward partisan warfare only once in the last few decades: when he published my tough 2013 attack against a conservative writer named Diana West, who wrote a highly problematic book asserting that the Franklin Roosevelt administration during WWII was run by the Soviet Union and its agents, who subverted U.S. wartime policies to allow Soviet communism to spread throughout Eastern Europe. The title of my article was “McCarthy on Steroids,” and the subtitle called West’s argument a “vast conspiracy without the evidence to back it up.” (David wrote both the title and subtitle.) My review led to a bevy of articles and debates about West’s book in conservative intellectual circles, as well in the pages of Frontpagemag, in which the historian Jeffrey Herf was among those who took my side.
I concluded my article with these words:
It is unfortunate that a number of conservatives who should know better have fallen for West’s fictions. It is even more depressing that her book perpetuates the dangerous one-dimensional thinking of the Wisconsin Senator and his allies in the John Birch Society which have allowed anti-anti-communism to have a field day in our intellectual culture.
What led David to depart from his usual partisan stance and not only publish my critique but strenuously support it? I can only surmise, but I think it had something to do with his parents losing their jobs during the McCarthy era, and his understanding that although they were ardent members of the CPUSA, they were not traitors or spies like Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs. West’s conspiratorial analysis reminded David of the kind of scattershot attacks made by Senator Joe McCarthy in the ’50s—and at the time, David was still more of a conventional conservative, not yet the Trump-style extremist he would become.
David and I had parted ways a few times before Sol and I wrote the New Republic article. In 2017, David erupted when I criticized him in two columns in the Daily Beast. The first was about the hoopla over a memo written by a National Security Council staffer, Rich Higgins, in May of that year. Higgins alleged that the Trump administration had been subjected to attacks by the “deep state” and he called for “political warfare.” What was then still called the alt-right (and would today be called the MAGA right) endorsed Higgins’s proposal. But Gen. H.R. McMaster, then the national security advisor, fired Higgins—which prompted David’s Frontpagemag to accuse McMaster of a “coup against Trump,” and of purging “critics of Islam and Obama.” My Daily Beast column was very critical of the Higgins memo; I called it “a true flashback to the way Joe McCarthy and his far-right allies argued in the 1950s,” and said it exhibited the same conspiratorial logic used by the John Birch Society. And I argued that David and others—including Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Michael Anton—believed themselves to be waging a “war for America’s soul” against, “in Joe McCarthy’s words, a ‘conspiracy so immense.’”
I again criticized David in the Daily Beast in 2018, in an article about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision to appear at David’s annual Restoration Weekend. I chastised David for going “off the deep end in recent years” in his support for Trump. And I quoted many incendiary public comments David had made—about George Soros, about locking up Hillary Clinton, about “anti-white racism”—concluding that “If DeSantis is angry that comments he made at Horowitz’s forum are being used to smear him as a racist and an extremist, he should think about his association with and praise of the Horowitz Freedom Center.”
David responded by writing that Ron DeSantis was being lynched by the mainstream media. The “summary moment in the DeSantis lynching was written up for The Daily Beast by a former friend of mine and now a Never Trumper—Ronald Radosh.” He condemned me for making “reckless attacks” and for depicting David as an “unhinged extremist.” He concluded that I had “gone over to the other side of the political divide to join a disgraceful lynch party” to destroy DeSantis—a “witch-hunt that dwarfs anything McCarthy ever attempted.”
One might think these bitter exchanges would have been the end of our relationship. But a while later, we found ourselves both speaking at an event in Grove City College in Pennsylvania. David’s wife, April, said it was time for us to make up and reconcile, and we agreed to all go to lunch together and talk in a friendly fashion. My memory is that the lunch was rather strained, but we were civil to each other and David agreed that we had to restore our friendship.
After that we communicated via e-mail and spoke often on the phone. When I wrote a tough column in 2020 about Angela Davis for Arc Digital, David told me that I had “said everything there is to say about Davis,” and how good he thought my case against her was.
We exchanged many emails. In one of them on December 4, 2020, he wrote me that “I think you’ve joined a party of communists and criminals”—referring to the Democratic party. All he would grant me is that he was glad that I had “not given up what you know about the hate-America left”; he hoped I would win my battles against the Democratic party’s left but doubted that I would. Most of our correspondence ran over the same territory again and again. I stopped communicating when it was clear he was not listening to anything I said when I talked to him on the phone. It proved impossible to really be a friend of a person who made such accusations about my political choices.
I would like to remember David Horowitz for the few times he departed from the usual kind of response he had to extremist right-wing political views—the times when his better angels took over and held him back from the extremist cesspool. It is the David I choose to recall who was a good father, was proud of and supported his own daughter with whom he disagreed politically. That was the David who was my friend, not the man whose greatest recent achievement was to give our country the likes of Stephen Miller.
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