RIP: Remembering David Horowitz

David Horowitz, the radical leftist-turned-conservative activist and author, died Tuesday at the age of 86.

The cause of death was cancer. Horowitz is survived by his fourth wife and three of his four children. His daughter Sarah Rose predeceased him in 2008. His son Ben is the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm. 

Horowitz’s influence was perhaps best summarized by conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in a recent interview with venture capitalist Marc Andreessen:

[E]veryone who is a young person on the political right in the 1990s and early 2000s, as I was, has had at least one encounter with David Horowitz of one kind or another. Sixties radicalism definitely lived on in his postradical phase, I think it’s fair to say. 

While I never met Horowitz, I did have the opportunity to read his autobiography “Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey” for a college final paper. Somewhat ironically, the book had been recommended by a famous left-wing professor at my university whose class on the history of the American Left I was taking. 

Reading the memoir would become a highlight of my college career. Horowitz was, at heart, a superb storyteller.

The future journalist and commentator was born in Forest Hills, Queens, in New York City, in 1936, the grandson of Russian Jews who had immigrated to the U.S. His parents were high school teachers and devoted members of the American Communist Party. That all changed when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 issued his “secret peace” that denounced former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin for crimes against humanity.

The speech was leaked to the Western press, and it led the American Communist Party to lose 30,000 members within a few weeks, including Horowitz’s mother. (His father had already left the party by that time.)

Fulfilling the American dream, Horowitz would go on to attend some of America’s finest universities. He graduated from Columbia University in 1959 with a degree in English, and he later earned a master’s degree in the subject from the University of California at Berkeley. That was followed by a position at the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation in London. Horowitz eventually made his way back to the U.S., where he edited the popular New Left magazine Ramparts with Peter Collier.

In the 1960s, both Collier and Horowitz were devoted believers in left-wing causes. They wrote against the Vietnam War, and in his memoir, Horowitz recounts how the conflict became a foil for the Left’s antagonism against the American way of life. 

“[The war] was not ultimately about Vietnam, but about our antagonism to America, our desire for revolution,” Horowitz explained. 

Horowitz also became acquainted with the Black Panthers during this period, in particular cultivating a friendship with the group’s founder, Huey P. Newton. As Horowitz would tell it, he even helped facilitate getting a bookkeeping job for a former Ramparts colleague named Betty Van Patter at a school run by the Black Panthers in 1974. 

A few months later, Van Patter would disappear, and her severely beaten body would be fished out of the San Francisco Bay. An article published in the East Bay Express in 1989 contended that Newton took credit for ordering the death of Van Patter after she refused to lie on the bookkeeping and threatened to go to the police. 

Van Patter’s slaying was a point of no return for Horowitz’s relationship with the American Left. 

“In pursuit of answers to the mystery of Betty’s death, I subsequently discovered that the Panthers had killed more than a dozen people in the course of conducting extortion, prostitution, and drug rackets in the Oakland ghetto,” Horowitz wrote in a piece published in Salon in 1999.

“While these criminal activities were taking place, the group enjoyed the support of the American Left, the Democratic Party, Bay Area trade unions, and even the Oakland business establishment,” he continued. 

Horowitz would take his same zeal for justice that he had when he was on the Left to his work on the Right. He joined a rising group of former left-wing intellectuals in rejecting Marxism and socialism and supporting the policies of President Ronald Reagan. That took the form of publishing influential articles like “Lefties for Reagan” with his friend Collier in The Washington Post.

The two men would go on to publish Heterodoxy, which explored collegiate monoculture and left-wing radicalism. In 1988, they founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (now the David Horowitz Freedom Center).

Horowitz was a pioneer in combating the Left in America, and today he has many imitators. He went on campus tours, where he masterfully dealt with hostile questioning. While Heterodoxy is now defunct, right-wing news aggregators today follow its lead by publishing a continuous stream of the most outrageous events on today’s university campuses.

Horowitz even has some compatriots in academia with centers devoted to preserving and restoring Western civilization popping up all over red state-controlled public universities. The prolific journalist has also mentored some of the most influential voices in right-wing media today, including Ben Shapiro, Stephen Miller, Charlie Kirk, and Candace Owens. (Horowitz’s center has since disavowed Owens for what it called her “ignorant, hateful, and morally obtuse remarks about Israel and the Jews.”)

A major theme of Horowitz’s memoir is the importance of family. Even when he was at the height of his left-wing political involvement, the journalist noted that his wife and children kept him more grounded than many of his peers.

In an atomistic society, where Americans increasingly leave their homes for opportunities, and where digital interaction offers the false promise of genuine human connection, we could all do with holding our families a little tighter.