- Horowitz, David.
Radical Son.
New York: Touchstone Books, 1997.
ISBN 0-684-84005-7.
-
One the mysteries I have never been able to figure out—I
remember discussing it with people before I left the U.S., so that
makes it at least fifteen years of bewilderment on my part—is
why so many obviously highly intelligent people, some of whom have
demonstrated initiative and achieved substantial success in productive
endeavours, are so frequently attracted to collectivist ideologies
which deny individual excellence, suppress individualism, and seek to
replace achievement with imposed equality in mediocrity. Even more
baffling is why so many people remain attracted to these ideas which
are as thoroughly discredited by the events of the twentieth century
as any in the entire history of human intellectual endeavour, in a
seeming willingness to ignore evidence, even when it takes the form of
a death toll in the tens of millions of human beings.
This book does not supply a complete answer, but it provides several
important pieces of the puzzle. It is the most enlightening work
on this question I've read since Hayek's
The
Fatal Conceit (March 2005), and complements it
superbly. While Hayek's work is one of philosophy and economics,
Radical Son is a searching autobiography by a
person who was one of the intellectual founders and leaders
of the New Left in the 1960s and 70s. The author was part of
the group which organised the first demonstration against the
Vietnam war in Berkeley in 1962, published the standard New Left
history of the Cold War,
The Free World Colossus
in 1965, and in 1968, the very apogee of the Sixties, joined
Ramparts magazine, where he rapidly rose to a
position of effective control, setting its tone through the
entire period of radicalisation and revolutionary chaos which
ensued. He raised the money for the Black Panther Party's
“Learning Center” in Oakland California, and
became an adviser and regular companion of Huey Newton. Throughout
all of this his belief in the socialist vision of the future,
the necessity of revolution even in a democratic society, and
support for the “revolutionary vanguard”, however
dubious some of their actions seemed, never wavered.
He came to these convictions almost in the cradle. Like many of the
founders of the New Left (Tom Hayden was one of the rare exceptions),
Horowitz was a “red diaper baby”. In his case both his
mother and father were members of the Communist Party of the United
States and met through political activity. Although the New Left
rejected the Communist Party as a neo-Stalinist anachronism, so many
of its founders had parents who were involved with it directly or
knowingly in front organisations, they formed part of a network of
acquaintances even before they met as radicals in their own right. It
is somewhat ironic that these people who believed themselves to be and
were portrayed in the press as rebels and revolutionaries were,
perhaps more than their contemporaries, truly their parents' children,
carrying on their radical utopian dream without ever questioning
anything beyond the means to the end.
It was only in 1974, when Betty Van Patter, a former
Ramparts colleague he had recommended for a job helping
the Black Panthers sort out their accounts, was abducted and later
found brutally murdered, obviously by the Panthers (who expressed no
concern when she disappeared, and had complained of her
inquisitiveness), that Horowitz was confronted with the true nature of
those he had been supporting. Further, when he approached others who
were, from the circumstances of their involvement, well aware of the
criminality and gang nature of the Panthers well before he, they
continued to either deny the obvious reality or, even worse,
deliberately cover it up because they still believed in the Panther
mission of revolution. (To this day, nobody has been charged with
Van Patter's murder.)
The contemporary conquest of Vietnam and Cambodia and the
brutal and bloody aftermath, the likelihood of which had also been
denied by the New Left (as late as 1974, Tom Hayden and Jane
Fonda released a film titled Introduction to the
Enemy which forecast a bright future of equality and
justice when Saigon fell), reinforced the author's second
thoughts, leading eventually to a complete break with the Left
in the mid-1980s and his 1989 book with Peter Collier,
Destructive Generation,
the first sceptical look at the beliefs and consequences of
Sixties radicalism by two of its key participants.
Radical Son mixes personal recollection,
politics, philosophy, memoirs of encounters with characters
ranging from Bertrand Russell to Abbie Hoffman, and a great
deal of painful introspection to tell the story of how
reality finally shattered second-generation utopian illusions.
Even more valuable, the reader comes to understand the power
those delusions have over those who share them, and why
seemingly no amount of evidence suffices to induce doubt among
those in their thrall, and why the reaction to any former
believer who declares their “apostasy” is so
immediate and vicious.
Horowitz is a serious person, and this is a serious, and often
dismaying and tragic narrative. But one cannot help to be amused by
the accounts of New Leftists trying to put their ideology into
practice in running communal households, publishing
enterprises, and political movements. Inevitably, before long
everything blows up in the tediously familiar ways of such things, as
imperfect human beings fail to meet the standards of a theory
which requires them to deny their essential humanity. And yet
they never learn; it's always put down to “errors”,
blamed on deviant individuals, oppression, subversion,
external circumstances, or some other cobbled up excuse.
And still they want to try again, betting the entire society
and human future on it.
March 2007 