RIP, D Ho
A legend falls.
David Horowitz, who died on Tuesday at the age 86, was not a good man. After his hard turn to the political right, in the mid-1980s, he went about his self-appointed mission of destroying the left with a flamboyant lack of ethics, endlessly writing and saying things that on some level he must have known were false.
His last real test as a thinker and political actor was Donald Trump. He failed it utterly, throwing in hook, line, and sinker for a staggeringly corrupt and destructive person who should have been anathema to the principles that Horowitz claimed to hold and that in some sense I’m sure he believed he held.
All that said, I had a soft spot for Horowitz, who was the subject of one of the six chapters in my book Exit Right. He and Norman Podhoretz were the only two of my subjects who I was able to interview for the book, and I had a good, candid conversation with him. I’d also interviewed him, many years earlier, for a newspaper feature.
Interpersonally, in the moment, if his hackles weren’t raised, he could be very warm. He could even be pretty introspective about himself, humble about what he did and didn’t know.
He was also just so visibly wounded, to the very end. It’s not an excuse for his bad behavior, but his insecurities, and his almost puppy dog eagerness to be liked and heard, made it easier to have some compassion for him. After the book came out, he sent me an email (or maybe a text — I haven’t been able to track it down) attacking me for my terrible mischaracterization of him. It was clear to me from what he wrote that he hadn’t actually read the chapter. I said something back to him like: “David, you’ve been complaining for decades that the left doesn’t take you seriously. I just dedicated a long chapter of my book to taking you seriously. Do you really just want to dismiss it out of hand?”
To his credit, he went and read the chapter and apologized for attacking me. He had issues with it, of course, but overall he thought it was a reasonable and substantive engagement with him and his work. After that, he and I emailed occasionally, usually when I was asking him for help getting in touch with someone on the right.
Our last exchange was in July of last year, when I got an assignment to write about his son Ben, one half of the mega-VC fund Andreesen Horowitz. I asked if he would pass on an interview request to his son, which he did (Ben declined).
After seeing his obituary, I did a quick search of my emails with him, and came across this exchange, from not long after my book came out. I’d mentioned to him the article I’d written about him, many years earlier, and he’d asked to see it. His emails are a pretty nice example of how he manifested in the world, with their mix of aggression, vulnerability, compulsivity, resentment, and earnest desire to connect.
He wasn’t a force for good in the world, alas, but he desperately wanted to be. RIP.
david horowitz <dh___@gmail.com>
Mar 26, 2016, 6:15 PM
Dear Daniel,
Congratulations on your book’s reception. Can you send me the article you wrote about me for the Valley Advocate. It’s unavailable online. Thanks.
David
Daniel Oppenheimer <djopps@gmail.com>
Mar 27, 2016, 4:26 PM
Hi David,
Thanks. The attention has been pleasant, though also surprisingly ephemeral feeling.
Here's the article. I remember that you didn't love it at the time. Looking at it now, I think there's some good stuff, but I hadn't really settled into a steady voice.
Dan
david horowitz <dh____@gmail.com>
Mar 27, 2016, 6:27 PM
That was a pretty shitty piece Daniel. Cheap shots, and gross misrepresentations. I did not obsess on Gitlin, for example, or misperceive his politics. What I disliked about him was his moral cowardice and intellectual dishonesty. I picked him as a subject in my essay “The Mind of the Left” precisely because he wasn’t a loony leftist but - as you call him - a “moderate,” I would even say thoughtful leftist. If an intelligent leftist like Gitlin could be seen to be such an irrational anti-American, then I had shown there was a direct link between utopian agendas and anti-American attitudes. Which was my purpose - explaining the unholy alliance between American leftists and Islamists whom they might be expected to hate. The fact that you didn’t get that is the same reason you didn’t understand or respect me in this essay. I get called all kinds of names by leftists because it’s too threatening for them to entertain the idea that they might actually be wrong and their opponents right. They lack therefore the empathy that is essential to understanding even those with whom they disagree.
Your book is a lot better than this essay. But its weakness has a similar root. As pointed out by one of your conservative critics, maybe Ron Capshaw, you don’t look at the second half of these lives and especially the intellectual work that followed their political transformations. You leave out of the picture the question as to whether the political rationales for their changes had any validity. Instead you fall back on speculative psychologizing, which diminishes their political choices and keeps you within your comfort zone. Having read the chapter on me and watched you on C-Span, you seem like a reasonable, thinking individual. I’m attaching an article I wrote on Christopher Hitchens as an example of what I regard as an empathetic and respectful portrait of someone I knew and had profound political disagreements with. It also is an attempt to measure what second thoughts involve, and thus what your book should have been about.
David
PS: You’re smarting because all those reviews seem “ephemeral” - not enough reward for all that work, which is a universal author complaint. Try being blacklisted for 30 years by all those liberal journals that reviewed your book, and put on a par with a silly comedian because you took a disapproved political turn. I make no apologies for the polemical essays I have written, but they shouldn’t be judged without taking into account the attacks they are responses to, or conflated with my more serious intellectual work. All I ask from writers who don’t share my views is to distinguish the polemical dimensions of my work and my causes from the intellectual. But this has been a vain hope. For 30 years the left has chosen not to engage with my intellectual critique - or for that matter the conservative critique - of its illusions and excesses.
Daniel Oppenheimer <djopps@gmail.com>
Mar 30, 2016, 10:27 AM
Hey David,
Been pondering a response for a few days, trying to imagine your experience of reading that old article, your experience of being ignored by the mainstream liberal publications, your reaction to the parts of my book you've read, etc. Also trying to figure what of my visceral response is defensiveness, and what is meaningful and useful.
Also thinking about how poor a medium email is for these kinds of conversations. In my experience it tends to lead to an endless, and usually rather futile, point counterpoint kind of argument.
I also keep coming up against what I think is a fundamental issue here, which is that we disagree profoundly about some important premises. Much of what I think you see as the left's fundamental nature I see as its characteristic pathologies and neuroses -- ways that the left tends to go wrong, when it goes wrong, but not ways that it inevitably goes wrong. Perhaps even more fundamental, I suspect, is our disagreement about the relationship between our psychologies and our politics. You may be right that I focus on psychology as a way to evade the politics, but of course I wouldn't have written the book I did if I thought you were right about that. My instinct is that far too many of us use politics to evade psychology, and that our basic discourse around politics doesn't pay sufficient attention to all the unconscious, irrational, historically and biographically contingent reasons we believe what we believe. That was a big part of the argument of the book, which doesn't mean that it was a good argument, or that I pulled it off. Or even that your critique is necessarily wrong. I'm just not likely to find the critique very persuasive, since it cuts against some of my core beliefs about human nature and politics.
But again, email is not a great space in which to hash this out. I hope we have a chance at some point to sit down and talk in person. I also wonder, considering what you've said about the book, whether your frustration with the old article is obscuring what seems like a relatively straightforward fact to me--that I did take your politics and reasoning seriously, and wrote at length about your reading of Kolakowski, your thoughts on the Panthers, your piece on Fay Stender, etc. It feels a bit like you're not taking yes for an answer.
Dan
david horowitz <dh____@gmail.com>
Mar 30, 2016, 12:35 PM
Dear Daniel,
I am grateful for this thoughtful communication from you and would like to continue the dialogue. I have waited 30 years for someone on the left to engage me and not just caricature what I have written as a preface to dismissing it. I actually agree with you that our political views are shaped or profoundly affected by our psychologies. I took a stab at that in the essay on Christopher I sent you. I also have written what I think is one of my best books about the leftist world view being a way of dealing with our mortality, an alternate faith as it were. However, analyzing individual psychologies is a tricky business, and risks diminishing the analysand. As a result of our conversation, I am going to re-read your book and will give you a more considered view of your portrait of me now that I know you a little better.
As to whether the left is a pathology itself or whether its excesses are merely pathologies within it is an interesting question and one that I would enjoy hashing out. I am a great believer in the two-party system. I think there always needs to be an argument between the compassionate and the hard-nosed, even though there is room for compassion within the one and a sterner attitude within the other. However, I think that the utopianism of the left is in and of itself pathological and that this pathology has swallowed what used to be called liberalism over the last several decades. I see very few people I would call liberals on the left - Kirsten Powers would be one, you would be another. Todd Gitlin - to resurrect my obsession:) - is the more common case in my experience. Todd has been on two journalism faculties where there is not a single conservative, without protest. When I complained about the monolithic character of the Columbia faculty, his comment to the Columbia Spectator was that I was “bonkers." Where is his commitment to a pluralism of ideas? And he is typical.
If you are ever have occasion to come to California, I would very much look forward to an evening or afternoon with you.
David
PS: I have attached part of the introduction to one of my books (Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion) which summarizes my view of the left as a destructive passion.
David and I were email penpals for a few years back in the early 2000s. We were friendly if not friends. Our correspondence became less and less political over time. I think he, most of all, wanted to be seen as a great writer and astute observer of human nature. But I believe that his political and moral fundamentalism prevented him from fully realizing his literary ambitions. He could only see heroes and villains and very little in between. I haven't paid any attention to his work in at least 15 years. I want to be surprised that he supported Trump. I want to believe that David's strict moral sense would've prevented him from supporting such a man. But I also could've predicted that David would've embraced the cartoon-like deification of Trump—the hero worship. It's that very same hero worship that led David to embrace some nefarious figures on the left in the 1960s. I once wrote to David that I thought he'd based too much of his current life on getting revenge on his former self. He said he'd ponder that theory. We stopped corresponding shortly after that.
You're more charitable than I!