The year 1997 marked the tenth anniversary of the publication of David Horowtiz’s autobiography Radical Son. Upon its publication, the memoir was immediately recognized as the most important literary memoir by anyone from the 60s generation. Radical Son has earned a place among the best in the genre of ex-revolutionary literature, a company that includes Chambers’ Witness, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The author’s achievement prompted George Gilder to call Horowitz’s book “the first great American autobiography of his generation.”
With the year of the tenth anniversary of Radical Son’s publication having just passed, Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel to discuss the meaning of the memoir. Today we ask: what explains Gilder’s comment about the memoir? And has Radical Son stood the test of time?
Our guests today are:
Paul Hollander, an expert on anti-Americanism and the author of two masterpiece works on the psychology of the Left: Political Pilgrims and Anti-Americanism. He has gathered together an unprecedented volume consisting of more than forty personal memoirs of Communist repression from dissidents across the world in the new book From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States. His latest book is The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality in the Twentieth Century.
Philip Terzian, the Literary Editor at The Weekly Standard.
Douglas Murray, a bestselling author and commentator based in the UK. His most recent book is the critically acclaimed Neoconservatism: Why We Need It. He appears regularly on the television and radio across Europe and America. He is a trustee of the newly founded European Freedom Fund and a member of the Advisory Board of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. He is the Director of the Centre for Social Cohesion in Westminster, London.
and
Claudia Anderson, the managing editor of The Weekly Standard.
FP: Paul Hollander, Philip Terzian, Douglas Murray and Claudia Anderson, welcome to Frontpage Symposium.
Paul Hollander, let me begin with you.
Your view on Gilder’s description of Radical Son? And do you think the memoir has stood the test of time?
Hollander: I do think that it stood the test of time very well and has very few counterparts. Actually it is an exceptional document because most other members of David Horowitz’s generation refrained from similar soul searching, refusing to confront their youthful illusions and delusions. Thus it is quite unrepresentative (but not uninformative) of his generation.
Presumably, Gilder called it a great autobiography of his generation because of its authenticity and the light it shed on the subculture and ethos of the radical activists and true believers of the period. Moreover it helps to grasp both the differences and (the more often ignored) similarities between the new and old left. It also is enormously informative of other important figures, fellow radicals and their mindset; not only a credible and often moving autobiography and memoir but a rich social history.
FP: Thank you Prof. Hollander. Let me follow up for a moment: in the introduction. Horowitz noted that the people who could benefit most from it -- young leftists like himself – would never read it. Was he right?
Hollander: It is of course very hard to know who read a particular book and who did not but it is very likely that many of his contemporaries and fellow radicals would refuse to read such a book. And in the unlikely event if they read it, they would reject it or scorn it. I suspect that most left-of-center publications (e.g. Nation, Village Voice, NYR of Books) did not review it or if they did managed to dismiss it. People avoid the kind of information that conflicts with their deeply held beliefs.
FP: To be sure, the Left ignored Radical Son or instead completely castigated it without considering its main themes and arguments. Yes, people avoid the kind of information that conflicts with their deeply held beliefs. But the Left has a special talent in subordinating reality to utopian dreams.
Philip Terzian?
Terzian: I’m reluctant to join George Gilder in claiming ‘RS’ as the ‘first great autobiography’ of that generation (I’m not too much younger than DH) only because I’m generally hesitant about superlatives: It’s a little too early, in my view, to judge either the epoch in question or the merits of those personal accounts that have thus far appeared.
That said, ‘RS’ certainly captures the milieu in which DH subsisted—the romance, intrigue, irrationality and violence of the 1960s/early 70s--and best of all, is intellectually honest, a claim few political memoirs can make.
As for the critical cold shoulder, there is no greater villain on the left than the apostate—traitor, turncoat, call him what you will—but this puts DH in good company: I well remember the contempt my parents had for Whittaker Chambers.
FP: Let me follow up with you for a moment Mr. Terzian.
Why do you think that the Left cannot digest a dissenter?
Can you also tell us a bit about why your parents had so much contempt for Whittaker Chambers? Who were they? And what similarities differences do you see between Chambers’ and Horowitz’s memoirs?
Terzian: I can’t say with any certainty, except that the Left operates under certain moral presumptions which seem firmly fixed. That is, anyone who moves from Right to Left has found enlightenment, or at least seen the error of their ways; while anyone who moves from Left to Right has sold their soul, been seduced by power, chosen to betray their comrades for personal gain—whatever metaphor you prefer.
My parents were both professional people in the Washington area—my father (b. 1908) was a research scientist, my mother (b. 1912) a lawyer—and classic anti-anti-communists of their time, although uninvolved (so far as I know) in serious Left politics. (My mother was, in fact, a very active Democrat—an appointed judge in Maryland.) They believed that the Cold War was a product of American belligerence, that the US military was far more dangerous than the Soviet Union, that it was Moscow’s forbearance in the face of American provocation that kept the peace. They were relieved by the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, fearing that the West Germans had their eyes on Czech munitions works. They looked upon Alger Hiss as a kindred spirit—a progressive-minded public servant with impeccable credentials and familiar associations—who got caught up in the McCarthy purges while Chambers was a right-wing opportunist who purged his personal demons by profiting from wild accusations against an innocent bystander (Hiss).
Both WC and DH, in effect, caught a glimpse of the nature of the hard Left, and recoiled—although, in both cases, it was not so easy to move away from their formative political allegiance. I would say that the primary difference between ‘Witness’ and ‘Radical Son,’ as memoirs, is that Chambers’ leftism was almost wholly theoretical while Horowitz’s had a basic emotional content, and their respective tones reflect that.
Murray: People always ask of early apostates “How many followers do they have?” The truth is – and this is certainly the case with the effect of Radical Son – that the knowledge that there is a route out emboldens countless people. What Horowitz says about the people who won’t read the book is true to an extent. But many such people will at least have become aware that a work was out there, and that the case for the prosecution was being made. This is the vital difference. It is the difference between thinking your totalitarian ideology is impregnable, and even conceiving that it might be fallible. The seed of doubt, or stick of dynamite, at the root of the movement does glorious damage.
Toeing the line, not breaking the picket-line is one of the traits of the left. It has – in its focus on human solidarity – noble origins. But it becomes deeply totalitarian. Both Radical Son and the reaction to the book show this. I did a panel last week in George Galloway’s constituency in East London where one of the other panellists (all of whom were leftists) decried Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Commission for Racial Equality for voicing concerns over multiculturalism. Suddenly everyone tumbled in on how despicable he was for saying such things. It became clear that nobody had an argument against, and indeed some agreed that parts of what he said were true. What they despised was that he had broken the line. The left’s fear of this is one of their greatest weaknesses and one which it is a pleasure to exploit. Their response may be silence, but it is a seething silence.
FP: Thank you Douglas Murray, let me come back to you for a moment.
As noted earlier, George Gilder called Radical Son the first great autobiography of that generation. What you think of Gilder’s view of the memoir?
Also, overall, what makes this book stand out in your mind? What are its particular strengths? For instance, Horowitz’s melding of his intensely personal story in his own political odyssey is quite powerfully done, and this is quite unusual, especially in regards to the memoirs of former members of the political faith.
Murray: I agree with Philip Terzian that the emotional content is what distinguishes Radical Son from similar works. Other members of his generation have written as affectingly since, but none I think before.
A book I like to equate Radical Son with is Roger Scruton’s equally moving and brilliant autobiography, Gentle Regrets. Scruton was of course always on the right of centre, and his book written much later, but he, and many others, have followed Horowitz’s lead in being unafraid to put themselves into the story of their time.
When discussing political history and political upheaval there is a great temptation to be academic and solemn - writing as though events are not something which you yourself went through, with personal consequences. Things can go and I think recently have gone in political memoirs too far the other way into the What was happening in the world while I was alive? school of memoir-ing. But Radical Son is the first memoir of its generation that I know of which so perfectly justifies telling a personal story about those times.
People of my generation (born 1979) are often under the misapprehension that the upheavals of the 60s were somehow harmless -- a bit of student fun. Horowitz is right to be personal in response to this, and in response to the self-justifying narrative offered up by the left. What is especially important is showing, as Paul Berman has more recently showed in Power and the Idealists, that the radical left was not and is not some pacifist, anti-totalitarian, liberating care-group, but something which, at its radical fringes and disconcertingly further in, becomes what it claims to abjure. To show this, and do so from personal testimony, is, apart from anything else, a great service to future generations.
Anderson: Like Douglas Murray, I see Radical Son as an exceptionally valuable record of the sixties in America. No young person can read it and retain intact an idealized vision of that angry, violent decade. It was, after all, a murder that catalyzed the realizations that finally freed DH from the false ideas he’d been reared with. And not just one murder. His investigation of the disappearance of his friend Betty Van Patter ultimately led DH to conclude that the Panthers—true to their slogan “Off the Pig”—had killed not only her but something like a dozen people. The willingness of leftist intellectuals and celebrity apologists to look the other way was part of the signature corruption of that time and place.
But I’d also like to emphasize that Radical Son is much more than an account of a particular generation. One thing that lifts it to a higher plane are the qualities of mind and character the author displays – notably, the passion for truth. I don’t mean just philosophical Truth, but concrete, confirmable fact as opposed to fabrication, deception, lies. After his years of high-flown theorizing about “the system,” it is humble, fact-based journalism and research for a string of biographies that becomes DH’s lifeline: the Ariadne’s threat that leads him out of the labyrinth of leftist ideology and toward a truer world view.
Then there is the integrity of certain key relationships: the respect, not to say reverence, with which Horowitz writes of his first marriage; the commitment to his children; the refusal to walk away from difficult relationships with his parents but instead the struggle to honor and love them; and the long professional partnership and cherished friendship with Peter Collier. This is, to be sure, “A Generational Odyssey,” as the subtitle has it, but it is also the testimony of an individual gifted with unusual courage and sensitivity. (And nobody’s paying me to say this.)
FP: Dr. Hollander, your thoughts on the comments of the panel?
Hollander: The comments amplified my own positive feelings about the book, esp. because it is one of so few that revealingly chronicles disillusionment with 60s radicalism (whereas there have been a considerable number of writings probing disenchantment with the old, pro-Soviet left).
As I have suggested before, the greater reluctance of the more recent generation of the disillusioned (or the more limited disillusionment among them) is probably the result of the fact that the 60s left behind a huge subculture of mutually supportive people. Rather than interested in political soul searching, they have been determined to salvage or
eulogize their youthful idealism.
There is a further, broader issue Radical Son raises, namely: why is it so difficult for most people (of similar experience, intelligence, social background etc) to change their minds about important political-philosophical matters? Why do people have such different moral sensibilities, or thresholds of moral indignation? Why have some been perfectly willing and able to rationalize, say, the thuggish behavior of the Black Panthers, or the perverse and destructive fanaticism of the Weathermen, while a handful of others (like David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh) became repelled and have been willing to say so in public? (These are matters I discussed at some length in my 2006 book, The End of Commitment) I suppose I am raising here the rather large question of why human beings are different. Among its other virtues, Radical Son makes one think about this ancient question.
FP: Philip Terzian, your angle on the themes raised by the others?
Kindly also give us your views on what Dr. Hollander has touched on: what do you think was the fertile soil inside David Horowitz (and some others) that allowed second thoughts to grow, whereas in most leftists that soil is non-existent?
Terzian: I suppose what struck me as a near contemporary of DH's was not so much his ultimate apostasy as his commitment to radical leftism for so long a period of time. To have been in any way involved with the Black Panthers as late as the middle 1970s -- indeed, to be involved with the Panthers at all -- is astonishing to me. Perhaps my reactionary, not to say tory, inclinations were closer to the surface and, as I have said before, my family left background was almost exclusively conversational.
Anyway, my own political activities in the late 1960s were very soft left -- occasional antiwar gestures, the Eugene McCarthy campaign, an internship and speechwriting job at the Democratic National Committee -- and my peripheral experience of the radical left was so unpleasant, and so thoroughly inimical to anything I believed, that the whole phenomenon -- from the Weather Underground to the Greenwich Village bomb factory, even unto the Baader Meinhof gang in West Germany -- struck me as a kind of social psychosis. I use the term advisedly. Which brings me to my own, probably sui generis, response to Paul Hollander: That is to say, it occurred to me at the time that commitment to radical leftism, involving as it did infatuation with violence and a genuine hatred of one's own culture and society, constituted a mental, rather than political, syndrome, explained better by psychiatry than philosophy.
I would guess that while the genetic tendency toward leftism was clearly present in DH it was not accompanied by the kind of nihilist disposition that perverted so many of our contemporaries. Confronted by evidence, his principled response was to break ranks rather than rationalize the indefensible; and given the human tendency to conform, it is no surprise that DH's 'second thoughts' are the exception on the left not the rule.
Incidentally, Douglas Murray makes a very important point, to which Claudia Anderson alludes: Namely, the popular perception that radical leftism in the 1965-75 period was largely harmless, undergraduate folly. While I don't want to exaggerate the influence of the radical left in that period (or its residual influence) this is a dangerous and false perception. Those were scarifying years, and seemed so at the time.
FP: This largely harmless, undergraduate folly helped, if not caused, the communist victory in Southeast Asia after 1975 and engendered the mass bloodbath there.
Douglas Murray go ahead.
Murray: The mass-killings in Southeast Asia and the multiple other crimes which have been committed over the years in the name of the left, at the behest of the left, and with the complicity of the left have still not been laid at the feet of the left. To find out about these things now a young person must educate themselves, because they will not learn much of this in the classroom. But this is to return us to the fundamental question raised by Paul Hollander, which David Horowitz’s book so powerfully recalls. It is the question: why do some people wake up and others not? Why do some people ‘get it’ from the start, others ‘get it’ at some point and others defiantly not ‘get it’ at all?
The question is as current now as it was in the ‘60s. I was reminded about this in quick succession by passages on pages 74 and 78 of Radical Son. The former describes the Robeson/Feffer story, reminding us that for some people, preserving a political-religious falsehood is more important than protecting human life. The latter describes the Leninist duty to lie in order to further the cause. I’m sure I don’t need to expand on the current manifestations of these tendencies.
Radical Son reminds us that no truck whatsoever should be given to those who seek to be excused for perpetual wrong-headedness. Very few individuals have the strength to lead the way out of radical movements, but that does not mean that those who fail to do so should be exculpated. It is not enough to say ‘I didn’t know’ or ‘I didn’t work it out.’ To cite just two examples in recent years of individuals who have found their own way out of radical movements through strength of mind and independent inquiry I would cite Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the former member of the IRA Sean O’Callaghan. People like this are very rare, but they are also our hope. Through examples like them countless others become aware not necessarily of the way out of the cave, but of the fact that there is a way out. Examples are few, but their followers can become legion. They show that the human spirit is capable of wrenching itself out from the most enveloping quagmires of lies and pull its way upwards.
Anderson: Why do some people wake up and not others? What makes people different? How does a person find his way out of an intellectual blind alley into which his formative experiences have led him? What Paul Hollander calls “ancient questions” of individual destiny and psychology are what give DH’s book its deepest lasting interest. Radical Son belongs in the literature of conversion—which goes all the way back to Augustine—even more than the literature of political disillusionment. I am second to none in my admiration of Homage to Catalonia, for example, but that is a work far more modest in scope and subject matter than Radical Son. Orwell’s firsthand experiences in Spain over a period of months caused him to revise his view of the Soviet Union’s role there, with appropriate ripple effects through his whole understanding of Marxism-Leninism and democratic socialism. DH’s encounter with the Panthers triggers not just a rejection of the radical left, but an inner revolution that dismantles the entire world view he was raised with and educated into, all the way down to the foundations: all the way to the unforgettable moment when DH realizes that original sin is true and that man, far from being perfectible by politics, is by nature bent toward self-deception.
David Murray’s invocation of Ayaan Hirsi Ali is apt. Though her memoir Infidel rarely achieves the white heat of Radical Son, it too describes a comprehensive inner change and a painful, circuitous journey of escape. Both books illuminate a political moment, but they move us because they are the soul-baring stories of individuals, in all their particularity, struggling toward the light.
FP: Paul Hollander, your thoughts on the previous round?
Let me also bring up, and revisit, this theme:
One significant phenomenon is that Radical Son is not part of the curriculum, the canon. This reflects the deliberate suppression that is practised by the Sixties radicals and their disciples who make up the tenured Left. Indeed, books on the Panthers, the Weathermen and the Sixties appear with almost no reference to Horowitz’s work or to the work he has done on the decade with Peter Collier. This is not much different from Chambers who did not get a biography until 40 years after his death, even though he was obviously a major figure of the era.
Also, as we all know, the author has been caricatured as a rightwing McCarthyite. Paul Berman, in reviewing Radical Son, called Horowitz a "demented lunatic."
What do you make of this suppression of thought as well as slander that is perpetrated by the Left?
Hollander: I think that the exclusion or overlooking the important writings of DH (esp. Radical Son) cannot be explained purely by matters political. E.g. Paul Berman's views on many issues (esp. Islamic terror) are not so different from his. There must also be more idiosyncratic, personal elements involved. I think a lot of people dislike his style (confrontational) more than the substance of his ideas.
Also, of some importance that DH retains access to television, i.e. his exclusion from the realm of public communication is far from complete.
It is interesting to compare David's case with that of Christopher Hitchens who has also vocally and publicly renounced his leftist beliefs, supported the war in Iraq, resigned from the Nation, engages in public polemics, and yet he is all over the liberal media. I don’t think that it is the case because of his residual sympathy for Trotsky, or his atheism.
I am not sure that I have an explanation; perhaps being a foreigner (English) makes a slight difference, it might incline his critics or potential critics to be slightly more tolerant. I have the same theory about the relative tolerance of my own politically incorrect views in academia; I felt sometimes that people made allowances on account of my foreign, 56-Hungarian background, that they would have been far nastier had I been a native-born American). But all this is speculation.
As to my thoughts about the previous round, we did not get to the bottom of the question of why human beings are different. (Won’t happen soon). But as to the far greater preference for hanging on to old beliefs (esp. if acquired in youth) that is not difficult to understand: discarding them requires considerable intellectual and emotional exertions, it is far more convenient to retain them, esp. when there is sub-cultural or group support for doing so.
FP: Thank you Dr. Hollander, perhaps I will contribute something to our discussion at this point.
There are something like 600 academic courses on the Sixties nationally. Our researchers have been unable to locate a single one that assigns texts by Horowitz, Collier, Radosh, Hollander or any critic of the Sixties who is not himself a leftist. Surely there is a political edge here, no?
You're correct that there is a personal issue in Berman's case. Berman's remark was an expression of his outrage that Horowitz quoted Berman's praise for Horowitz's role as a Sixties radical in an advertisement for Radical Son. In other words, his outrage was that anyone should think he was endorsing the author of Radical Son. Ten years before the publication of Radical Son, Berman denounced Horowitz as a "renegade" for turning against the Left. So his ire is really political. For his part, Horowitz has praised Berman's work on Islamic terrorism both in Frontpage and in his book Unholy Alliance.
Hitchens is an interesting case of an incomplete apostate. He has published a book calling Henry Kissinger a War Criminal and taking what is basically a New Left view of the Vietnam War and the Cold War. Hitchens’ soft spot for Isaac Deutscher and Trotsky and thus for a version of totalitarian Marxism is also telling -- as is his fond eulogy for the late Edward Said. Hitchens also chose the occasion of Ronald Reagan's death to call him an idiot. None of these gestures were uncalculated. It is hardly surprising that there is a degree of acceptance for Hitchens on the moderate Left that is denied to people like Horowitz.
Horowitz has made a complete break with the socialist faith. That is his cardinal sin.
Dr. Hollander, you state, “I think a lot of people dislike his style (confrontational) more than the substance of his ideas.”
But does this really explain anything? For instance, there are myriad negative book reviews in the literary world that chide authors for their style as well as for their ideas. The point is that Horowitz’s works are not even negatively criticized – they are deliberately ignored.
Let me ask this: Could it be that this phenomenon is related to the reason why the mainstream press refused to say one word for years about the murders that the Black Panthers committed? Berman even tried -- preposterously -- to identify Horowitz and Collier as part of a criminal element of the Left, as though the New Left as a whole had not embraced the criminals.
Could the conversion of Horowitz into an unperson in the intellectual community of the left be related to how the leftist keepers of the historical record have remained steadfastly determined to take their secrets to the grave? SDS leader and later California State Senator Tom Hayden and Los Angeles Times journalist Robert Scheer, who worked with the Panthers and promoted their agendas, have both, for instance, never written a word about Panther crimes in the more than thirty years since. Former SDS president Todd Gitlin’s history of the 1960s fails to acknowledge Panther criminality or any of their murders. Horowitz was a witness to the crimes committed by these heroes of the Left – and as a leftist he acknowledges these crimes. Furthermore, as just noted, his conversion has involved a far different and fundamentally more acute character than most ex-leftists. He sees the roots of Stalinism in the socialist idea itself – and he has illustrated how this dynamic works, from the inside out, more powerfully than any other ex-leftist.
So could it not be for this reason that Horowitz has been written out of our cultural history? In other words, could it be that just as the Soviet regime consistently rewrote its own history and erased inconvenient individuals from its past, that the academic and literary Left, which determines the parameters of political discourse in our culture, diligently keeps Horowitz’s work as far out of society’s consciousness as possible?
It is true that Horowitz has a place in the popular culture and that is good. But in the intellectual culture, except for his work on universities, he remains invisible.
Your thoughts?
Hollander: You are right, Horowitz's sin is the thoroughgoing rejection not only of the practices but also the ideological foundations of the Left and this does distinguish him from people like Hitchens. I would not dispute that his excommunication or the hostility he has inspired has mainly or primarily political roots, but they are combined and colored by the personal aspects I mentioned earlier.
People who are so unwavering in their hostility to DH cherish what they regard as their youthful, 60s idealism; his critiques of this idealism are the most unforgivable. They identify their political beliefs with their past, their youth, their supposed youthful purity.
These attitudes also explain why critiques of the 60s you referred to earlier, have been excluded from the college curriculum.
And of course there is a critical mass of such people, a whole generation or "cohort", who can give one another aid and comfort and support clinging to these nostalgic, comfortable beliefs.
FP: Absolutely -- as your works Political Pilgrims and Anti-Americanism have crystallized Dr. Hollander, the leftist’s vision is a direct outgrowth of the depersonalization and politicization of his own personal problems and neuroses. And the leftist’s clinging to his own identity -- which he himself has manufactured on a field of lies -- is much more important to him than the truth.
Terzian: I think Hitchens' status can be explained two ways: First, and it's a banal point I concede, but his Englishness lends a certain personal quality that Americans admire and which DH can hardly approach. Secondly, and I speak as an acquaintance (and sometime admirer) of Hitchens', he is only a partial apostate: He remains a social democrat in the Orwellian tradition, with Islamic jihadism taking the place of Stalinism. It's one thing to break ranks on a question (Islamic jihadism) which crosses political lines; it's another to pointedly reject the left and align oneself with the right, as DH has done. CH strikes me as one of life's temperamental nonconformist while DH seems to be searching for a political home to share with others.
Attachment to the left is a romantic instinct; adherence to the right is a cerebral action. It is the difference between emotion and reason. Tom Hayden, Todd Gitlin, Robert Scheer et al fail to address their admiration for the Panthers because they continue to believe it was the correct thing to do at the time, and because they cherish the visceral sensation -- sense of sanctimony, self-satisfaction, etc -- that leftism yields.
DH has succeeded in growing up, and his heresy is the sort of rebuke to leftism that can only infuriate those still attached to the cult. Hence the personal attacks and violent language. I do make a distinction between the juvenile romanticism of academic socialists--Berman, Gitlin--and the psychosis of radical leftism. And while I remain mystified by DH's journey toward the Panthers, I admire his ability to analyze his circumstances honestly and take the steps that would not only upset a lifetime's convictions but relegate him to pariah status (in certain quarters).
As a journalist I tend to approach these subjects indirectly and address them with irony or sarcasm; DH is far more direct and declarative and willing to march into the line of fire. That is the sort of bravery that is seldom rewarded in one's lifetime. While it is true that 'Radical Son' has been excluded from the canon, I would argue that it is far too early to expect a final verdict. We will have to wait until the 1968 generation has passed from the scene, at the very least, for scholars to begin to appreciate its value.
Murray: Berman’s attack on DH strikes me as symbolic. The re-emergence of violent Islamism has woken up a good cross-section of left and right. On both (and all) sides some people ‘get it’ and others don’t. Those of us who are seen to be on the right are at something of a disadvantage here. Where the leftists who understand the threat are congratulated and applauded for making the leap, a lot of conservative-minded people are assumed to be the people who of course get it.
As a result, far more attention is paid to – if I may – the sinner that repents than the person who was right all along. This is in some ways as it should be (encouraging more leftists out of their mind-set). But people identified as being on the right do suffer for it. The reason is that a number of leftists can only save what credibility they still have with their former comrades by attacking people known to be on the right. I find myself providing this role a bit myself where allies with whom there is not a jot of difference publicly distance themselves from you not because there is any real difference, but because demonstrating that they are not with a conservative means that they are not a conservative – it’s a signal to their comrades that they have not ‘sold out’ entirely. It’s not especially nice to find yourself providing that role, but the advantage is that some people remain in the left even as they are aligned actually on the right. I think that’s good. They can cause far more damage where they are.
As for the ’68-ers dying out. I think it’s true that that’s what’s needed to get a fairer view of the generation. It will certainly be easier once the ‘romantic’ allure still felt by some survivors is subjected to the cold gaze of history. But I’m reminded of something that the great Michael Barone said at last year’s Restoration Weekend. He said then that there’s good news and bad news here: the good news is that the ’68-ers are dying out; the bad news is that he’s going with them. There are some amazing people to have come from that generation – people to whom those of us following recognize ourselves to be enormously indebted. We started out by looking at DH’s book as a generational work. The history of that generation has barely begun to be written, but it has certainly already acquired one of its first, and most important texts. It may not be on the syllabuses now. But it will be.
Anderson: I agree – generational change will take care of the exclusion of DH from the intellectual history of the sixties. Radical Son is simply an irresistible find for some future historian. Jamie pointed out that Whittaker Chambers didn’t get a biography until 40 years after his death. But what’s 40 years! I’d say DH may have to wait as little as 40 years to begin to achieve his rightful place.
Returning to the contrast between DH and Christopher Hitchens, we failed to mention perhaps the most obvious explanation for Hitchens’s remaining a darling of the liberal media after his partial apostasy: his rakish charm. Marry that wit and genuine learning of his to the dishevelled, inebriated, bad-boy panache of Hitchens and you have a kind of highbrow performance art that, on almost any subject, is sure to shock and entertain. People love audacity.
DH himself tells us in Radical Son that when he reentered the political fray after his big change, he “made a decision to speak in the voice of the New Left – outraged, aggressive, morally certain.” But not especially charming. He says flat out that he wanted to see his former comrades made to squirm by being put on the receiving end of their own tactics.
DH might have had a different place in our political discourse if, when he adopted what he calls the “modest” aims of liberal politics, he had also adopted the modesty of tone of someone seeking to persuade, rather than one seeking to pulverize. Think of Bill Buckley at the height of his powers, deploying a sharp intellect in gracious and witty engagement with opponents. This is not to blame DH for the texture of his individuality – only to note that his hard edge has consequences. Never mind. I suspect it is less his steely polemics than his masterpiece, Radical Son, that will secure his place in history.
FP: Well, let’s finish up here. In this last concluding round, let me ask this: if you were addressing young people today, what would you tell them that they could learn from Radical Son. Why should they read it?
Dr. Hollander?
Hollander: Young people, or anybody, should read Radical Son for several reasons:
First of all, it is one of very few writings which chronicles and analyses disillusionment with radical leftist political ideas and ideals of the 1960s variety. It is also solid social history and a rare critical examination of the period. It is well written and radiates authenticity.
Finally, Radical Son is likely to be a durable document of the timeless conflict between utopian social-political hopes and aspirations and the limits imposed on these aspirations by human nature and the endemic conflicts between various incompatible values and beliefs human beings entertain.
Terzian: I would counsel the young—I’m enough of a Boomer to reel at the sound of that phrase!--to read Radical Son for two reasons.
First, as a corrective to most accounts of its era. DH is writing about very specific times and places, but he was part of a larger whole, and Radical Son offers a perspective that is both honest and instructive not only about its times but about the conditions that bred those times.
Second, it should be read as a cautionary tale for true believers, enthusiasts, seekers of enlightenment or universal justice, utopia, and so on. As I have mentioned before, I am a journalist by nature as well as trade—an observer rather than participant—and my detachment (or aloofness or emotional disconnection or however it might be phrased) from the times in which I’ve lived is such that accounts like DH’s are like dispatches from another country.
I think it’s wise to inform the young, in plain terms, that this is a tough, complicated world, and that dedicating oneself to a cause or movement in pursuit of a perfection mankind has never achieved is to invite severe disappointment and disillusion.
Murray: They should read it firstly because it will educate them honestly about an era which has too often been written about dishonestly. But also because it will also provide many readers with a morale boost. Many young people reading this book will learn from it one of the most simple and important lessons of all - that they are not alone.
Anderson: In addition to all those good reasons, having to do with history and politics, they should read it to notice what the author found to be of true value, as he shed his illusions: family, friendship, courage, and the graces of the heart.
FP: Paul Hollander, Philip Terzian, Douglas Murray and Claudia Anderson, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium.