Romance, Fantasy, Arrogance, Blindness: An Inside Look at the Communist New Left

David Horowitz’s 1997 autobiography Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey has just come out in a second edition. The book provides many insights not just into the thinking of both his Old Left parents and Horowitz himself and his New Left colleagues, but also into who and what is influencing us today. Here is Horowitz’s summary of the communist dream:

Marxism was about a new creation that would begin with a “new man” and “new woman.” It was about remaking the world. About going back to Eden and beginning again. It was the romance to end all romances (p. 112).

Romance, fantasy, arrogance, blindness—these are words used by Horowitz to describe the delusions he and his comrades suffered when worshiping the “revolutionary fantasy” of communism during the 1960s and ‘70s. “Like all radicals,” says Horowitz, “we were intoxicated by our own virtue” (p. 299)

Horowitz was a founding member of the New Left while a graduate student from 1960-62 at the University of California, Berkeley. For many years he was an editor of the New Left’s flagship Ramparts magazine* and as a result knew all the players in the New Left. By the 1980s he developed “second thoughts,” as he calls his move away from the Left. Today he is an outspoken conservative.

Horowitz’s parents were unapologetic members of the American Communist Party, that is, until 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech about the crimes of Stalin leaked to the West.** Up to that point, Party members had blinded themselves to the rumors of Stalin’s purges, show trials, and executions. Horowitz’s parents, after Khruschev’s revelations, left the Party, thereafter calling themselves Progressives. About two-thirds of the Party’s members also left, losing decades old friendships, as Horowitz points out, and becoming “non-existent” to the remaining members.

The New Left, says Horowitz, was a movement of Marxist revolutionaries founded to save communism from Stalin. Fidel Castro was one of their heroes who was doing communism “the right way.” John F. Kennedy, invader of Cuba and agent of the “imperialistic” ruling class, was not a hero, though a new leftist years later rewrote history to claim they all loved JFK.*** The New Left throughout the 1960s was opposed to the Vietnam war and viewed the Black Panther Party as “vanguard of the revolution” and “America’s Vietcong.”

The new leftist Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), spearheaded by Tom Hayden, came into prominence in the 1960s, eventually morphing in the ‘70s into the Weather Underground. A founding SDS statement coined the words “participatory democracy” as code for “soviet democracy.” In my undergraduate days, the former was promoted as a fuzzy form of direct democracy. In fact, a soviet was an elected, usually local, organization in the USSR, thus making communism another form of democracy! SDS’ers believed in and meant communism.

Hayden died in 2016 but in his SDS days was instrumental in causing the Newark riots of 1967 and organized the violent protests at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago (pp. 184-88). The 1968 riots, according to Horowitz, are what succeeded in allowing the Left to take over the Democratic Party, which it today still controls. In Hayden’s post-SDS life he became a California state politician and husband of actress Jane Fonda.

The Weather Underground made revolution explicit with many bombings of banks and government buildings, including the US Capitol in 1971 and the Pentagon in 1972. Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn were two early leaders. Both are now retired, Ayers from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Dohrn from Northwestern University Law School. Ayers, Horowitz said in a recent article, ghost wrote Barack Obama’s autobiography and “mentored the insurrectionary founders of Black Lives Matter.”

Though Marx thought capitalism would eventually collapse on its own, later revolutionaries, starting probably with Lenin, sought to help the collapse along. Hence, the remorseless bombings of the Weather Underground and today’s deliberately blind eyes to the ravaging of civilization by such violent organizations as Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

The Black Panther Party in the 1960s was founded by street thugs, led by Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver, but to the new leftists, including Horowitz, Panthers were the oppressed minority who dared to rise up and fight (in some cases with guns) with an “in your face” activism.****

Horowitz in the early ‘70s collaborated with the Panthers to found a school in the slums of Oakland, California, and recommended a white woman, Betty Van Patter, who had worked for Ramparts magazine, to do the school’s books. Unfortunate for Van Patter, she asked too many questions about the Panther’s finances and ended up in San Francisco Bay. The Oakland District Attorney's Office could not prove who committed the murder, but suspected a Panther named Flores Forbes.

Van Patter’s death in 1974, along with suspicions Horowitz was beginning to have about the Panthers, was the turning point for him to leave the Left. He had been cautious in conversations with Newton, but did not suspect the worst. Van Patter’s daughter at the time, as well as many years later, could not believe at the time and years later that such an “idealistic” group of people would do such a thing.

Horowitz in the new Preface to Radical Son suspects that Forbes was the murderer, or knows who committed the crime, and that Newton likely ordered it. An internal group of enforcers to torture and murder anyone who did not toe the Panther Party line are believed to be guilty of at least a dozen murders. The enforcers were called, interestingly for today’s times, The Squad. Forbes was its head.

Today Flores Forbes is Associate Vice President of Strategic Planning and Program Implementation at Columbia University.

After much questioning about communism and socialism, especially about how the “noble ideal” in practice always seems to end up with millions of dead people, Horowitz concluded that the ideal itself was flawed. The aim of communism and socialism was to abolish private property and make everyone equal. But, Horowitz identified:

The abolition of property was really the abolition of private association and civil society, and of the bourgeois rights they underpinned. Socialist unity could only be achieved as a totalitarian solution (p. 308).

And everyone is not equal in nature. Who is to decide how everyone is to be made equal, asks Horowitz? A “ruling caste,” he concludes, seems always to arise.

Horowitz near the end of his book even cites Austrian economists F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises who demonstrated the impossibility of socialism ever working, especially in the determination of prices independently of the market.

To use Hayek’s words, though Horowitz does not, the leaders of the “noble ideal” have always suffered a fatal conceit to think they had a god’s-eye view and a god’s omniscience to plan an entire social and economic system.

The “revolutionary fantasy” of socialism does not work. It only destroys.


* When Ramparts closed in 1975, several editors, though not Horowitz, went on to found Mother Jones.

** Horowitz’s father in 1935 on a trip for the Party wrote to his soon-to-be wife about the people of Colorado. He said that he felt like he was in a foreign land and that “most of us [Party members] aren’t really ‘patriotic,’ I mean at bottom deeply fond of the country and the people” (pp. 30-31).

*** “We were Marxist revolutionaries when we began the New Left and would have scorned anyone who supported Kennedy in the way [Todd] Gitlin suggests” (p. 115, Horowitz’s emphasis). Todd Gitlin today is professor of journalism and sociology and head of the doctoral program in communications at Columbia University.

**** The Left’s association with African Americans goes back at least to the 1930s. See this article about African American Manning Johnson who from 1930-39 was a member of the American Communist Party but left it because he saw that the communists “were using black Americans as pawns in their hope that a ‘bloody racial conflict would split America.’” The notion of  “systemic racism” is a concept of the Left and goes back to that time.