David Horowitz has been an unrelenting fighter and a happy warrior, who has had his fair share of tribulations. But never has he succumbed to a sense of victimhood. There were always too many good people to appreciate and, when he was young, a world to save, and as he grew older and wiser, warnings to deliver and books to write.
Mortality and Faith: Reflections on a Journey Through Time, by David Horowitz (262 pages, Regnery Publishing, 2017)
What follows is less a belated book review than a farewell to a fighter, but a fighter who could also be called a happy warrior. Still, he was a fighter first, and his happy warrioring was not exactly in the mold of that original happy warrior, Minnesota’s own Hubert Humphrey. What follows will also occasionally dip into personal (and mostly Minnesota) autobiography, while ruminating on this, the final installment of the gradually unfolding David Horowitz autobiography, with a nod to the (hopefully lasting) impact of the author.
My excuse for such an approach is fivefold. The first and most obvious is Horowitz’s recent death. In addition, I’m nearly as old as Horowitz and have had some, but not nearly as many of the serious health issues that he faced. I am also attached to pets, especially dogs, if not in multiples all at once. And I, too, have journeyed from left to right, even if my most extreme position on the left was no match for his. A “red diaper baby” I was not. But an often enthusiastic supporter of happy political warrior Hubert Humphrey and his “politics of joy” I once was.
Both of Horowitz’s parents were high school teachers and members of the Communist Party of America. For a time they taught their son David very well indeed. But the father’s ultimate lesson to his son was very different, not to mention highly ironic. What his father “desperately wanted” was a world “better than the one he had been given.” But the world ignored him, “as it does us all, and went its own way.”
“In the end,” Horowitz continues, “my father’s disappointment was the gift he gave me. His melancholy taught me the lesson he was unable to learn himself.” And just what was that lesson? “Don’t bury the life you have been given in this world in fantasies of the next; don’t betray yourself with impossible dreams.”
Actually, there might even be a sixth excuse, since I spent a bit of time with Horowitz (and a few others) in the late eighties following a talk he had given at Macalester College in St. Paul (where a young Hubert Humphrey had taught political science in the late 1930s and from which my father had graduated a few years earlier). Invited to a post-lecture seminar/discussion of sorts, I had occasion to tell Horowitz that as a young grad student at the University of Minnesota in the mid-to-late 1960s I had used his book, Free World Colossus, in a “free university” course I “taught” (after a fashion) with a fellow anti-Vietnam war grad student.
In my mind’s eye I can still see the rueful smile on his face and the negative shake of his head as I told my story. He was not about to leap to the defense of that piece of increasingly ancient history. And yet he couldn’t quite bring himself to be critical of someone who had once been impressed with his leftist and anti-American past.
Over the years I have read most everything that David Horowitz has published, including these “reflections” on his “journey through time.” In other words, count me among those who were too easily impressed with his thoughts and writings when we were both young and somewhere on the left, and genuinely impressed with his work over the course of both his post-left writing career and my post-left reading career.
In a few other words, I was with him when he was trying to save the world, which at the time really meant saving it from the United States, and I was with him after he had decided that it was much more important to try to save the United States both for the world and from her enemies, many of whom were his fellow Americans–and former allies.
Horowitz’s departure from the left may have been immediate. But it likely was not immediately known to readers who would soon become his enemies or to readers who would soon become his friends—or to a reader such as yours truly who was somewhere in the process of following a political path similar to that of David Horowitz, thereby defining me as a friendly reader who remained a friendly reader.
Horowitz’s immediate separation from the left was occasioned by the murder of Betty Van Patter, his Ramparts magazine bookkeeper. The murder remains officially unsolved, but there was no doubt in Horowitz’s mind that it was ordered by the Black Panthers, to whom he had lent her services, which in turn led her to learning of their financial misdeeds.
A sense of guilt may well have been a factor in his break with the Panthers in particular and with the left in general. But the factor was his awareness of the lengths to which the Panthers in particular and “progressives” in general would go to obtain power and win the day. As he soon came to see it, every progressive was a potential Stalinist in the making, at least until proven otherwise. Verify and then trust might best describe the Horowitz approach to his ideological battles.
The final public act in his conversion process was his “Lefties for Reagan” column, written with his frequent collaborator Peter Collier, and published in the Washington Post shortly after the 1984 election. Intellectually aligned with the right by that point, he was henceforth fully and finally out and about on the right. And that would be after 1984, mind you, not 1980. A somewhat slow learner indeed.
But had David Horowitz gone from the far left to the far right? Not really. The far left? Yes. But the far right? Not really and not ever.
I had no “road to Damascus” moment remotely comparable to the Van Patter murder. But my attachment to the Democratic party, and specifically to the Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor Party of Hubert Humphrey was deep and long standing. I can still see my father bedecked with Humphrey buttons, not to mention Stevenson and Kennedy buttons as well. Born and bred on Minnesota’s Iron Range, how could he not have been a DFLer? My mother’s family were Irish Catholics, so of course they were staunch DFLers, too.
Leaving the DFL was akin to leaving a religion–and that was before the Democratic party had become the virtual religion that the leftist Democratic party is today. Just ask David Horowitz on that subject. Someday I will have to explain to my grandchildren how I could possibly have voted for Jimmy Carter twice. Yes, this lefty was also for Reagan, but not until 1984 as well. Another slow learner. Heck, a very slow learner indeed.
At least I can say that my most enthusiastic Democratic presidential vote was not for Carter in either 1976 or 1980. Nor was it for Humphrey in 1968. (Previously “clean for Gene,” I did cast my first and most reluctant presidential vote for HHH come that November). No, that most enthusiastic Democratic vote was for George McGovern in 1972. In fact, I had a chance to tell the former senator as much in late November of 1992. On a Fulbright in Hungary, I was asked to give a paper at a conference on the American left in Graz, Austria. My topic was I. F. Stone and the Cold War, which was a trip down memory lane.
The keynote speaker was, guess who, George McGovern. At a reception following his speech I was able to deliver a half-truth to my neighboring stater, namely that I had cast my most enthusiastic vote for him in 1972. Of course, the other half of this truth was that by that point in my political journey I wouldn’t have done it again!
Now at this much later point in that ongoing journey my most enthusiastic presidential votes have been for Donald Trump in 2020 and 2024. But not 2016? Yes, it was a vote for Trump, but it was much more a vote against Mrs. Clinton. My guess is that Horowitz would likely have voted similarly, save for probably having been a slightly quicker learner by also voting enthusiastically for The Donald in 2016. Trump, after all, has proven to be a fighter and not simply a happy warrior. And a fighter is what David Horowitz was—and what he had come to think was needed in an American president well before 2016.
That would be a fighter and not a right-wing Stalinist. To say, as some have, that Horowitz simply moved from the far left to the far right is far from accurate. It’s also an insult to both Stalin and Trump. Stalin and the youthful Horowitz were committed revolutionaries, and neither was ever truly a national patriot. Trump and the older Horowitz are American patriots and American constitutionalists, despite efforts to paint them otherwise.
That leaves Trump and Hitler. Once again, the comparison is mistaken. Hitler, after all, was a megalomaniac, as well as both a racist and a leftist. How else to account for “national socialism” in his party’s name? Neither Trump nor Horowitz was ever remotely a racist, while both have fought the race-based agenda of the left.
Both, to be sure, are first and foremost fighters, but fighters who would not shy away from being thought of as happy warriors as well. This final installment of the Horowitz memoirs is filled with both his fighting spirit, whether the matter at hand was a political issue or his health, and a sense of happiness, mixed with inevitable regrets, about his life both in and away from politics.
Speaking of politics and political issues, for David Horowitz the issue of the moment was never the real issue. That’s because the issue for Horowitz was always the ultimate goal of the left. And that goal was some version of totalitarian-style control.
To be sure, that was not the not the goal of Hubert Humphrey, who orchestrated the post-World War II purge within the DFL of its communist Popular Front farmer-laborites. But then the thrust of the Humphrey-led DFL was reformist, not leftist. The shift from reform-mindedness to leftist-mindedness began to take place long ago, and one David Horowitz was aware of that shift long ago as well.
And yet Horowitz, the fighter, still found time to be much more than that. He was a reader and a doubter, a father and grandfather, a dog and horse lover, and finally (with his fourth wife) a satisfied family man to boot. Even more than that, this transplanted (to California) New Yorker became, of all things, a hockey fan. For Horowitz the hockey connection can be attributed to his friendship with Ed Snyder, who had created the Philadelphia Flyers of an expanded NHL in the late 1960s. What is there about New Yorkers who adopt California and only then find hockey appealing? Dennis Prager, once of Brooklyn, followed the same pattern. This home-of-hockey Minnesotan cannot begin to explain it.
David Horowitz, the doubter, and David Horowitz, the reader, must be mentioned and briefly discussed as well. A self-described agnostic, Horowitz brings Pascal to the forefront early on in this memoir and retrieves Dostoesvsky before he is through. As an agnostic, after conceding the obvious, namely that he doesn’t know how the universe began, he does claim to know that the book of Genesis teaches a “central truth about human fate.”
For Horowitz, that central truth is this: “We are creatures of desires that cannot be satisfied and of dreams that will not come true.” Genesis, therefore, is essentially the story “of our beginning and our end.” In other words, while Horowitz cannot bring himself to believe in a Creator, he does believe that we are fallen creatures and, therefore, he seems to believe in some version of original sin.
And Pascal? His famous “wager” makes obvious sense to Horowitz. “But can it make an unbeliever believe?” Pascal thought not, and Horowitz agrees. The best he can do is this: “I do not have the faith of Pascal, but I know its feeling.” In sum, while Horowitz may not believe in a heaven somewhere or an afterlife of any sort, he does know that it is impossible to create a heaven on earth. More than that, he also knows that it has been deathly dangerous for millions when their alleged “leaders” give this hopeless task a try.
Then there are a few things that he “understands,” and doesn’t understand: “I understand Pascal’s religion. I understand his hope for a personal redemption, and his search for an answer. But I no longer understand my father’s faith—his belief that men alone, without divine intervention, can transform the world in which they find themselves and create a paradise on earth.” Nor did he understand how Karl Marx and his followers could possibly believe that the world could somehow be saved by abolishing religion.
This unrelenting fighter and this generally happy warrior had at least his fair—or perhaps unfair—share of personal and political trials and tribulations. But never did he succumb to a sense of victimhood. There were always too many good people to appreciate and too many needy animals to rescue to bother with anything as debilitating as that. Besides, when he was young there was a world to save, and as he grew older and wiser there were warnings to deliver and books to write. And oh yes, over the course of roughly the last two periods (excuse the hockey term) of his life he also discovered a country worth saving, and renewing, as well.
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The featured image, uploaded by Gage Skidmore, is a photograph of David Horowitz speaking at CPAC in Washington D.C. on February 12, 2011. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.