BOOKS
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MacIntyre has no trust whatever in collective solutions or a powerful,
irresistible state. Most cornrnunitarians I know would scoff at "Leave it to
Beaver"; do not yearn for a "smaller world"; and do not talk about collec–
tive anything. They do talk about the need for responsibilities as well as
rights but any sensible person can endorse this proposition. Being a sensi–
ble person, Weisberg himself does. So why this panting and heaving against
cornrnunitarians? These excesses raise one's hackles unnecessarily and to
no good purpose, for Weisberg, in the end, is surely right: liberals must
learn to accept limits to what government can accomplish and conserva–
tives need to honor and support what government alone can do.
JEAN BETHKE ELSHTAIN
Coming Clean About the Late Sixties
RADICAL SON:
A
GENERATIONAL ODYSSEY.
By
David H orowitz.
Free Press. $27.50
How David Horowitz, one of the New Left's movers-and-shakers,
ended up as a Reagan Republican makes for a fascinating read, one with res–
onances that go well beyond the usual reassessments of those times, those
places, that have turned ongoing debates about what the late sixties was and
meant into a cottage industry. What Horowitz provides is a memoir that
cobbles confession about his radical past with a stirring [read: polemical]
defense of his current life as a born-again Right-winger. Of the two scenar–
ios, the first is the more persuasive because,
if
Horowitz scours his former
cornrades-in-radical arms, he is even tougher on himself.
Reading these sections one wonders how he could have been, at one and
the sanle time, so insufferably arrogant and so shockingly naIve? Horowitz's
answer?
Cherchez Ie pere,
for as a scarlet diaper baby, what the young
Horowitz wanted above all else was to avoid the disappointment and bitter–
ness his father felt when the Party abandoned him after decades of loyal,
unquestioning service. Totalitarianism of every shade is notable for such
merciless disregard of the individual, so it is hardly surprising that he would
later come to embrace the giddy promises of participatory democracy. The
rub, as Horowitz would have it, was that the major architects of the New
Left (including himself) were more interested in exploitation and eventual
