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David Horowitz

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For other people named David Horowitz, see David Horowitz (disambiguation).
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David Horowitz.

David Horowitz is an American conservative writer and social activist. A prominent member of the New Left in the 1960s, Horowitz later rejected socialism and now identifies quite consistently with the right wing of the political spectrum.

He is the founder of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, a writer for the conservative magazine NewsMax, and the editor of the popular conservative website FrontPageMag.com. He is affiliated with activist groups such as Students for Academic Freedom and Campus Watch, and frequently appears on the Fox News Channel as an analyst.

Early life and career

David Horowitz was born in 1939 to a Jewish family in Forest Hills, New York. His parents, Phil and Blanche Horowitz, were school-teachers in Sunnyside Gardens, in the borough of Queens in New York City. Horowitz attended Columbia University and later the University of California, Berkeley, where he received a Master's degree in English literature. His parents were long-standing members of the Communist Party USA, which Horowitz would come to reject. While still identifying as a Marxist, Horowitz, along with many other left wing figures of that era, embraced the "New Left", intending to create a socialist movement unstained by ties to the repressive Soviet Union.

During this time, he authored several books which were influential in New Left critiques of American society and particularly its foreign policy, including The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War. Horowitz was an editor at the highly influential radical magazine, Ramparts, a publication which prided itself on its harsh critiques of the US government, having unveiled a Central Intelligence Agency plan for funding student organizations, as well as promoted conspiracy theories about the assassination of President Kennedy.

Horowitz was a confidant of Black Panthers leader Huey P. Newton, and provided legal and financial assistance to the black nationalist organization. He would later cite experiences with his involvement in the Panthers as a catalyst for reassessing his beliefs. In December of 1974, his close friend Betty Van Patter, a bookkeeper for the Panthers, was murdered. While the case officially went unsolved, Horowitz has maintained that the Panthers were responsible for her murder, committed in order to silence Patter from revealing the organization's financial corruption, and thereafter covered up the killing.

His political and ideological doubts were later recounted in a series of memoirs and retrospectives, including Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey, published in 1998. Other events which Horowitz cites as being influential in his conversion from socialism were the impacts of the US loss in the Vietnam War on the peoples of Indochina, and particularly Cambodia, which under the leadership of the Khmer Rouge saw mass terror and famine, leading to millions of deaths. Horowitz believes that the far left turned a blind eye to such atrocities because the ideological vision of the communists was one which they shared, and to admit that something went wrong was to admit that there was something wrong in the ideal itself; the reactions thus ranged from quiet disinterest in the fate of the countries to stark apologia, symbolized by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter's Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, which presented a much more favorable depiction of life under the Khmer Rouge than later came to be accepted.

Horowitz belonged to the more introspective class of leftists, but later became much more vocal in opposing communist movements, voicing support for the Contra guerrilla uprising against the self-declared Marxist-Leninist Sandinista junta in the 1980s. Seeing the widespread resistance to the notion that any such uprising against governments viewed as undemocratic and tyrannical could be legitimate or popular, so long as the governments were of the left, Horowitz began to contemplate a complete abandonment of his deeply-held views, to which he ascribes a fundamental level of religiosity. Along with close associate Peter Collier, Horowitz hosted a 1987 "Second Thoughts Conference" in Washington, D.C., which was decried by left-wing figures such as Sidney Blumenthal, who wrote a piece in The Washington Post describing it as a "coming out" of left-wing radicals to the right. Horowitz denied having such an intention at the time. [1]

Activism on the right

His faith in socialism having died at around the same time as the fall of the Soviet Union and the communist regimes in its Warsaw Pact allies, Horowitz and Collier committed to a completely different cause: opposition to the new status quo of academia and what they perceived to be the destructive influence of it and the new generation of academics. Peter Collier wrote that, "there was only one antidote for the new orthodoxy: Heterodoxy." [2] In 1992, the same year as the election of President Bill Clinton, Heterodoxy was thus founded.

Since that time, Horowitz has involved himself in an increasing number of organizations and movements intended to counter left-wing political and intellectual influence, and to redress various grievances with academia.

He was later noted for his staunch opposition to affirmative action policies, as well as reparations for slavery. Viewing the political atmosphere of many universities as intolerant of such ideas, he went so far as to purchase, or attempt to purchase, advertising space in school publications in order to get his views and arguments across; many of these offers were denied, and in some schools whose papers carried the essay, copies were destroyed and confiscated by protesting campus groups. [3]

Horowitz is known for his support for a proactive, interventionist foreign policy associated with the "neoconservatives", a label which Horowitz rejects as a smear. FrontPageMag.com, his right-leaning website, carries editorials from many authors who were and are strongly supportive of the war on terror and the war in Iraq. However, Horowitz personally opposed American intervention in the Kosovo War, arguing that it was unnecessary and harmful to US interests. [4]

In 2004, Horowitz launched Discover the Networks, a conservative watchdog project that monitors funding for, and various ties between, individuals and organizations of the left. Part of the motivation for Discover the Networks is Horowitz's view that leftist individuals and groups support, whether consciously or not, Islamic terrorism, and thus require ongoing scrutiny. This theme is explored in Horowitz's 2004 book, Unholy Alliance.

An agnostic Jew, Horowitz has rejected the tendency of social conservatives to advocate sodomy laws, and attacked laws that were still existing on the books. He condemned the Republican Party for being unwilling to gear itself towards the civil rights of homosexuals, noting that more homosexuals voted for George W. Bush in 2000 than did blacks or Jews. While Horowitz disagrees with the gay marriage movement, he believes homosexuals have a fundamental right to privacy in their own homes and that the term "homosexual agenda", common among right-wing pundits, is an "intolerant" one. [5]

Academic Bill of Rights

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Horowitz at a book event.

The issue of ideological bias in academia is currently Horowitz's main focus of activism and authorship. His 2006 book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, criticizes individual professors for their professorial conduct. According to Horowitz, these professors are responsible for indoctrination in institutions of higher learning.

Horowitz and others promote his Academic Bill of Rights, an eight-point manifesto that seeks to eliminate what they see as political bias in university hiring and grading. Horowitz claims that bias in universities amounts to indoctrination, and charges that conservatives and particularly Republicans are "systematically excluded" from faculties, citing statistical studies on faculty party affiliation. [6] Critics of the proposed policy, such as Stanley Fish, have argued that "academic diversity," as Horowitz describes it, is not a legitimate academic value, and that no endorsement of "diversity" can be absolute. [7]

Criticism

Chip Berlet, writing for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), identified Horowitz's Center for the Study of Popular Culture as one of 17 "right-wing foundations and think tanks support[ing] efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable." [8] Berlet cited Horowitz's rejection of the idea that some African Americans "could be the victims of lingering racism." In reply, Horowitz wrote an open letter to Morris Dees, president of the SPLC, which urged Dees to remove the article from the law center's website, alleging that it was "so tendentious, so filled with transparent misrepresentations and smears that if you continue to post the report you will create for your Southern Poverty Law Center a well-earned reputation as a hate group itself." [9] Dees refused, and subsequent critical pieces on Berlet and the SPLC have been featured on his website and personal blog.

Horowitz was criticized by self-described "anti-racist essayist, lecturer and activist" Tim Wise, who wrote in the left-wing publication, Znet, that Horowitz was acquiescing to racists for his acceptance of funding from the Bradley Foundation, which supported the publication of The Bell Curve, as well for running a modified piece by "white nationalist" Jared Taylor on the media treatment of black-on-white murders. [10] When Horowitz ran the piece, he admitted that the decision to do so would be controversial, but denied that Taylor was a racist, instead arguing that his "racialism" was an example of identity politics precipitated by an intellectual surrender to multiculturalism; Horowitz denied that he and his publication share the agendas of Taylor. [11]

Books

  • Student: The Political Activities of the Berkeley Students (1962)
  • Empire and Revolution: A Radical Interpretation of Contemporary History (1970 ISBN 0394708563)
  • Corporations and the Cold War, edited, and with introduction (1970 ISBN 0853451605)
  • The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (1971 ISBN 0809001071)
  • The Art of Political War And Other Radical Pursuits
  • How to Beat the Democrats and Other Subversive Ideas
  • Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (1998 ISBN 0684840057) autobiography
  • Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the '60s by Peter Collier, David Horowitz ISBN 0684826410
  • Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations For Slavery (2002 ISBN 1893554449)
  • Hating Whitey: and Other Progressive Causes ISBN 189062621X
  • The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future
  • Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (2003 ISBN 1890626511)
  • Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (2004 ISBN 089526076X)
  • The Anti-Chomsky Reader with Peter Collier (2004 ISBN 189355497X)
  • The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006 ISBN 0895260034)

Co-authored with Peter Collier

  • The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty (1976)
  • The Kennedys: An American Drama (1985)
  • The Fords: An American Epic (1987)
  • The Roosevelts: An American Saga (1994)

Quotations

  • Liberation is no longer, and can be no longer, merely a national concern. The dimension of the struggle, as Lenin and the Bolsheviks so clearly saw, is international: its road is the socialist revolution. - from the 1969 essay "Imperialism and Revolution".
  • For the sake of the poorest peasants in this godforsaken country, I can't wait for the Contras to march into this town and liberate it from these fucking Sandinistas! - In the dining room of the Managua Intercontinental Hotel in Nicaragua, during the fall of 1987.
  • If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus? - from the 1999 Salon.com article, "Guns don't kill black people, other blacks do".
  • The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago? - From "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks and Racist Too".
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