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Even if one discounts Horowitz's strained, often unconvincing effort to
link his situation to that of Whittaker Chambers, the fact remains that he
writes as one who has lived in the belly of the beast and pays dearly for
each of his "second thoughts." Take, for example, his growing feeling that
what ideologues of the New Left decidedly lacked was a capacity for self–
criticism and, moreover, that anyone who prodded them in this direction
would be summarily silenced. "Even to raise such questions," Michael
Lerner declared at a Berkeley seminar of, by, and for the new radical wave,
"is counter-revolutionary."
Meanwhile, the atroci ties continued: the virtual expulsion ofJews who
had been such a prominent part of the civil rights movement; the wide,
unthinking acceptance of the equation that linked Zionism with racism;
. the dozens of instances, large and small, in which the socialist dream
turned into totali tarian nightmare; and, of course, the murder of his friend,
Betty Van Patten. As Horowitz puts it: "Thinking this way blinded us to
signs that might have saved us. We thought of ourselves as self-effacing, but
in fact we were arrogant. We regarded ourselves as better than others from
our privileged caste who were unwilling to perform the deeds we did.
That was why we didn't listen and couldn't see. Like all radicals, we were
intoxicated by our own virtue."
Eventually, Horowitz came to work the other side of the political
street, bringing the same passion (and, some would say, the same certainty)
that had marked him as a propagandist promoting radical causes. Indeed,
many wondered if Horowi tz had simply slipped to the other side of the
coin, and if what he discovered about the Left would come back to bite
him from the Right. Not so, Horowitz insists, for:
what often impressed me was the tolerance of the conservatives I
knew for human faults and failings, including my own. Some conser–
vatives were like the flinty puritans of liberal caricature, but most of
my new acquaintances and political associates were not. Over time,
their tolerance became intelligible to me. What made one a conserv–
ative was recognition of the human capacity for evil, or for just plain
screwing up. That is why the rules were important. Not because con–
servatives expected nobody to break them. But because having rules
that were respected made it harder for people to do so. This was a
more subtle-but in the long run more trustworthy-form of com–
passion than liberals' softness of heart.
Given Horowitz's history, more second thoughts (and abrupt transfor–
mations) are certainly possible, although his portrait of a sadder, but wiser
political animal makes this unlikely.
