Political Conversion as Generational Induction

No observer of U.S. politics over the last few decades could survey the period without running into writer and activist David Horowitz. Once an avid Marxist, Horowitz drew the political Right’s ire. Now a conservative, Horowitz leverages his past experience toward Republican causes. Perhaps more than any other American advocate, Horowitz traffics in political conversion, marketing the concept as an industry. Horowitz created the term “second thoughts” to represent his move from the left to the right. He has frequently assembled former radicals and liberals to recount their experiences and underscore lessons learned in public gatherings, once even amassing 25 ex-radicals and 200 attendees at a “Second Thoughts Conference” in Washington, DC.^[1] Political conversions to conservatism are further promoted through his publishing imprint, Second Thoughts Books.^[2]

This chapter analyzes Horowitz’s autobiography Radical Son (hereafter, RS), which details his political conversion. Like the works of Chambers and Podhoretz, RS has influenced leaders at the highest levels of government. When George W. Bush was a presidential contender, Horowitz’s work constituted a third of the writings that Karl Rove made him read, especially as a foundation for associating the 1960s with modern social ills.^[3] After reading RS, Bush remarked that “there was just a lot of history I remember from my early 20s come to life. . . . And here was somebody who blew the whistle.”^[4] Like the previous authors surveyed in this volume, Horowitz has been a major resource in the Republican Party.^[5] Describing the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, Horowitz stated that many of the elected party’s “manifestos resonated with the second thoughts we had arrived at after leaving the radical cause.”^[6] Even President Reagan once joked with him, “I had second thoughts before you.”^[7]

Horowitz models his conversion on past leaders of the “second thoughts generation,” such as Norman Podhoretz.^[8] He characterizes himself as the Whittaker Chambers of his generation, due to the hate directed toward him as an ex-radical in a leftist culture.^[9] These intertextual comparisons have also been reflected in audience reactions to the book; one RS reviewer asserts that “Horowitz is the Whittaker Chambers of our generation,”^[10] and another confirms that “Horowitz’s tale can easily be compared with Whittaker Chambers’ Witness.”^[11]

Horowitz’s rhetoric is foreshadowed in the book’s title, Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey. Where Chambers’s political conversion narrative is about a deductive, Manichaean political-religious odyssey, and Podhoretz enacts a reductive intellectual story, Horowitz uses an experiential, generation-focused journey to frame his transformation. In RS, the conversion form works with three rhetorical features: reflexivity, maturity, and psychological experience. Some sense of Horowitz’s life and times is first necessary to understand these rhetorical moves.

Horowitz’s Life and Times

Horowitz was born in New York City in 1939. The son of Communist activists, he spent some thirty years as a devoted Marxist. After completing an A.B. from Columbia University, an M.A. in English literature from the University of California at Berkeley, and further graduate study at the London School of Economics,^[12] Horowitz has spent much of his career as a political writer and activist. He was the former director of publications and research at the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, and at the age of twenty-three wrote The Free World Colossus, a Marxist manifesto.^[13] He was the former editor of the New Left’s Ramparts magazine from 1969 to 1974, but after his political conversion founded and codirected the Second Thoughts Project in Washington, DC. He is also the founder, president, and codirector of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, in Los Angeles, “whose purpose is to make inroads for conservatism in notoriously liberal Hollywood.”^[14]

Horowitz received a Teach Freedom Award from President Reagan and was an alternate delegate at the Republican Party National Convention in 1996.^[15] In addition to writing many books,^[16] Horowitz has conducted hundreds of interviews on television and radio stations across the United States. Of relevance to themes in this chapter, he has spent a good portion of his career attacking the university system. As a Marxist, he condemned universities as symbols of capitalist imperialism and for their adherence to the status quo during the 1960s. As a conservative, Horowitz now believes that universities are centers for socialist indoctrination. In books like The Professors, he has argued for an academic bill of rights to fight against campus speech codes.^[17] His anti-university campaigns have often run into problems by relying on anecdotal evidence and questionable assumptions, however.^[18] The author has initiated similarly controversial campaigns to oppose reparations to African Americans.^[19] After September 11, 2001, Horowitz formed Discover the Networks, a website that identifies individuals and groups supporting leftist causes.^[20] The site aims to show how “the political left has forged an ‘unholy alliance’ with terrorists”^[21] and thus invites political conversions to the right. Horowitz states that “the events of 9/11 and their aftermath have produced a whole new generation of second thoughters in various stages of reassessment,” as the Left switched from supporting oppressive regimes to “passivity in regard to the defense of America.”^[22]

Horowitz’s earlier book Destructive Generation,^[23] which he coauthored with Peter Collier, set in motion a series of “autobiographical wars over the Sixties” during the 1990s, putting the decade’s legacies into question.^[24] Nicolaus Mills argues that Horowitz’s autobiography was part of a general attack on the 1960s aligned with movies such as Forrest Gump that are filled with clichés about the decade’s movements.^[25] RS sought to revise the claims of historians who found that 1960s discourse centered on demands for “equality,” “personal empowerment,” and “community as a locus for meaningful engagement in life and politics,”^[26] using certain characterizations of the decade to undermine the 1990s Clinton administration and Democrats’ policies.^[27] Horowitz departs from typical Republican positions on a number of issues, though; he is pro-gay rights, pro-choice, and anti-censorship, and he often criticizes religious conservatives such as Jerry Falwell.^[28]

As in Breaking Ranks, Vietnam and the 1960s counterculture figure prominently across the narrative. Horowitz attempts to set the record straight about the Black Panthers, with whom he worked for many years while a member of the New Left. A central turning point in the book (and hence in Horowitz’s conversion) is when he comes to believe that the Panthers were responsible for a close friend’s death.^[29] He says that one of RS’s purposes is therefore to “name the murderers who are still at large, not just at large, but are celebrated in liberal culture.”^[30]

RS responds to some other political developments. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, the United States became the planet’s only affluent superpower, but regional conflicts occurred around the world in countries such as the former Yugoslavia.^[31] President Clinton’s two terms in office steered a moderate agenda through the period, despite his impeachment by the House of Representatives and subsequent acquittal by the Senate. Several other relevant events made national headlines in the 1990s, such as the Rodney King beating and Los Angeles riots, the O. J. Simpson trial, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Columbine school shootings.

The 1990s further brought a new level of celebrity advocacy into the mainstream. An increasing individualism could be observed in U.S. culture, even in different religious faiths, where “Americans turned to religion more often to ‘meet their spiritual needs’ than out of a sense that worship and service was something they ought to do. Traditional Protestant—and some Catholic and Jewish—congregations became increasingly entertainment oriented.”^[32] Rather than using traditional or rational appeals as bases for faith, these religious shifts toward “inductive” and self-focused experiences play a role in Horowitz’s analogous political conversion rhetoric.

Radical Son as Deliberation

Generational rhetoric can be a powerful resource in public affairs. Scholars from Aristotle to Mannheim have engaged the topic.^[33] Linking generational discourse to deliberation, G. Thomas Goodnight writes that “to study how reason enters into history . . . the generational potentialities of argumentation itself must be discussed.”^[34] Generational appeals can position historical experiences as arguments relevant to and limiting present choices.^[35] Glenn Wallach finds that a discourse of “generations” has developed within U.S. public life over the last 300 years, especially relative to the concept of “youth.”^[36] American religionists in the past used the biblical figure of David to evoke a sense of generational responsibility among their audiences,^[37] a meaning not lost in (David) Horowitz’s autobiography. Horowitz writes that his book is intended to influence youth about to enter into politics and who stood to learn the most from its teachings.^[38] In early American public discourse, communicators emphasized generations and youth by bringing together both traditional “conservative motivations” and more progressive “promise[s] of growth.”^[39] The development of the popular press fueled this trend and forwarded a gendered rhetoric in public culture, since the terms of generations and youth were both associated with masculinity.^[40]

Fathers and sons have played an influential role in these messages. In biblical terms, “generation had always been linked to fathers.”^[41] Antebellum speakers went beyond biblical allusions by relating the concept of generations to the nation’s “heroic” founding fathers, joining these notions with a conservative rhetoric underscoring how obedient their audiences should be to such models.^[42] Over time, public figures delinked a language of generational posterity from its religious foundations and used it in more secular spheres to highlight allegiance to one’s kin and the nation.^[43] Following these historical developments, Horowitz intertwines a narrative about his conversion to nationalist, political conservatism with the tale of his family struggles—a generational rhetoric of the personal and political.

Beyond its generational focus, RS is an inductive political conversion narrative. Using modern Protestantism as a case, Peter Berger relates that inductive religious modes of thought find authority in inward turns and an open-minded “arguing from empirical evidence” that “tak[es] human experience as the starting point of religious reflection.”^[44] The liberal theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher exemplified this orientation, as he “oppose[d] the two predominant forms of religious thought in his day—a rigid Protestant orthodoxy, on the one hand, and Enlightenment rationalism, on the other hand,” instead aiming for a faith of personal experience and feeling.^[45]

The authors of Habits of the Heart similarly reveal that “through the peculiarly American phenomenon of revivalism, the emphasis on personal experience would eventually override all efforts at church discipline” in different faith congregations, coming to dominate religious understandings in the United States^[46] This “radically individualist religion” may appear different from fundamentalist faith performances. In the former, “God is simply the self-magnified,” and in the latter, “God confronts man from outside the universe”; the authors find that shifts between these two poles are not at all uncommon, as both orientations tend to use personal experience as a means to knowledge.^[47] Horowitz uses personal experience in a fundamentalist way, crafting an inductive rhetoric of reflective ability, growth, and psychological experience to convince readers of his cause.

Many reviewers largely affirmed RS’s deliberative vision.^[48] Others have been less sparing in their assessments.^[49] Some critics found RS inaccurate on a number of historical details,^[50] while some make a point that, unlike Chambers, Horowitz converted to conservatism at a time when he stood to gain much from the switch.^[51] One of the most frequent objections to the book is that Horowitz maintains the same disposition as a conservative that he once had as a Marxist.^[52]

With bearing upon public deliberation, the three resources of reflexivity, maturity, and psychological experience correspond with a rhetoric of reason, progress, and caring participation that have also been part of the Left’s vocabulary. The three resources create an inductive generational vision, drawing from Horowitz’s leftist experiences and acting as conservative appeals to open-mindedness, intellectual maturity, vindication for past actions, and a type of countercultural status. Like Chambers and Podhoretz, the conversion narrative in RS works in tandem with several rhetorical resources to create a totalizing, propagandistic discourse.

Perfecting the Form: Horowitz’s
Rhetorical Resources

A New Reflective Ability: Reflexivity

Conversion narratives typically characterize change through metaphors of rebirth,^[53] with converts proceeding from one state of being to another. On the other hand, RS is less an ontological tale of being “born again” than an epistemological story, where Horowitz has “the ability to think again,” in contrast with those who do not have this ability. In other words, Horowitz emphasizes knowing in his political conversion, using terms of “I reflected again”^[54] rather than “I am born again” as a persuasive appeal. Moving beyond ontological understandings of conversion, Horowitz’s autobiography shows how political conversions can be grounded in a form of epistemological authority.

Horowitz provides a key difference between other, more religious accounts of conversion and his own less religious, political conversion. While the former presumes an actor (typically God) who initiates change from outside a person, the latter, which may lack an external motivator, is located within the individual. This fits with current definitions of the term “reflexivity” as “the way in which, particularly in modern societies, people constantly examine their own practices and, in the light of that examination, alter them.”^[55] For example, Horowitz contrasts his own revisable, self-referential orientation with his father’s inability to change.^[56] To Horowitz, reflexivity is a resource for asserting one’s linear path to self-validated truth rather than a collaborative way to test arguments with others.

The reflexivity strategy relates to the book’s emphases on generations, youth, and maturity. Horowitz characterizes the inductive conversion as about one’s journey from a condition of non-reflexivity (childish naïveté) to a redemptive condition of reflexivity (adult reflection). Epistemological words and images do much work in the account through the redemptive capacities of what he terms “second thoughts.” This reflexivity theme is similar to Podhoretz’s use of “intellectualism,” but under Horowitz’s terms, the resource is far less about “being” an intellectual than the special ability to “self-reflect” about one’s experience. There are numerous ways to characterize reflexivity as a concept (although all involve a sense of “turning back”),^[57] but I define reflexivity in Horowitz’s account as one’s special ability or orientation for self-reflection and change. This definition is partly constructed from Michael Lynch’s insights into how academic reflexivity, despite its benefits, can be used as a privileging, epistemological “virtue and source of superior insight,” or type of “critical weapon” in claims to understanding the social world.^[58] Similarly, Horowitz’s reflexivity implies a special, tolerant ability to see into the true, real nature of things.

Biographical work tends to mask its rhetorical moves by proceeding in realist form.^[59] This narrative realism associates with what Orrin Judd describes as an “implication that liberalism, as a belief of the young, is a function of being uninformed and emotional, while conservatism, as a belief of the old, comes only with realistic experience.”^[60] Conservative values can be proposed as worthy simply because an author has taken the time to “think again” in this manner. If, as I have maintained throughout this book, the conversion form tends to have traditionally dogmatic attributes, reflexivity’s connections with being “open-minded” give communicators using conversion a way to appear less than dogmatic in their rhetoric.^[61] Such a move may be more difficult in strictly religious forms of conversion but is also less needed because in religious spheres, dogmatism is often expected, even celebrated. Given the pluralistic expectations of U.S. politics and the changing nature of public affairs, dogmatism is a difficult strategy to pursue. For example, Horowitz tells readers that he is against “those most certain in their conviction[s], [and] least impressed by ambiguity.”^[62] Unlike rigid leftists, the author uses the reflexive device to fashion himself as adaptable and reasonable. Reflexivity thus constitutes a civil-religious rhetorical strategy to meet a pluralistic exigency, maintaining the resonant conversion form while reconfiguring it in terms of a tolerant reflexivity more suited to modern political discourse.

Following the pattern of the conversion form, reflexivity is connected with an old and new political life.^[63] Horowitz intensifies his newfound reflexivity: “[M]y second thoughts had led me through a night of the soul that involved the condemnation of my own life.”^[64] These penitent, confessionary terms (e.g., “soul”) reproduce the historically sacred bases of the conversion narrative. At the same time, the text reflects more modern demands for rationality and flexibility in discourse. Once he makes his rightward turn, Horowitz explains to one of his former mentors on the left, “I did not turn my back on the struggle we once shared for trivial or unreflected reasons.”^[65] He establishes a new condition as a freethinker capable of revision—for example: “[Y]ears later, I saw that if I had been able to reflect rationally at the time, I would have recognized the truth.”^[66]

The political Left is cast as religious (as in Chambers’s and Podhoretz’s tales) but also irreflexive. Horowitz says that in fostering second thoughts, he came to see the leftist complaints as apocalyptic.^[67] The author uses reflexivity to describe radicals/liberals as intolerant and lacking in an ability to think about their politics again, like obedient religionists who give little thought to their actions. When growing up, he feared seeing the local Communist Party frequently expel members for having second thoughts.^[68] A fundamentalist religiosity and lack of reflexivity were exhibited by the inquisitions with which the Communist Party convicted its members of “thought crimes” and deviance.^[69] The conversion story brings dichotomizing pressures to such explanations. The “thought crimes” framing reinforces the Left’s inability to have second thoughts. It also underpins Horowitz’s fight against censorship in university classrooms, associating totalitarian efforts against alternative thinking with leftist activism. In the face of Black Panther crimes, Horowitz proposes, for example, that “no radical leader proposed any second thoughts.”^[70] Only the choiceless “first thoughts” of Horowitz’s old life are available to the Left, whose members cannot think a second time about new possibilities. On the other hand, Horowitz makes conservative second thoughts an act of volition, praising his and others’ desire to even have second thoughts.^[71]

The reflexivity device also promotes a network of reflexive advocates who have traveled from the left to the right. The author’s conference on second thoughts, Second Thoughts radio show, and overall Second Thoughts Project^[72] all testify to the proselytizing aim of reflexivity rhetoric. In Horowitz’s campaigns to make Hollywood more hospitable to conservatives, he hired a documentary filmmaker who himself was previously a Democrat prompted to generate second thoughts by the movement for political correctness.^[73] He hires a corporate lawyer and a Vietnam veteran who had gone through similar experiences as “second-thoughter[s]” to propagate such messages.^[74] Second thoughts rhetoric becomes both about an individual’s capacity for reflexivity and a signifier for the larger conservative movement’s worth. Horowitz has others supplement this theme at every opportunity, including a former wife, who wrote a poem explaining that she had learned from him that “second thoughts are best.”^[75]

As an example of generational deliberation, the experiential, time-based emphases of the conversion narrative merge with reflexivity to endow converts with a special authority about temporal matters. Horowitz argues that “the Left could not look inward and it could not look back,” as it was unable to learn from experience and examine and question its commitments.^[76] Horowitz states that his former colleagues’ minds were so fixated on the future that they were unable to think again.^[77] Unable to turn to the past because of its lack of reflexivity, the Left becomes an ahistorical, unreasoning, and inconvertible entity. Not only does the Left not know how to think again about its commitments, but it has little sense for the long-standing authority that this faculty provides conservatives. RS creates a rhetorical equation in which being able to reflect upon the experiences of the past equals generational expertise. As such, the Left did not understand crime because it didn’t fit into its redemptive hopes for an idealistic world.^[78] Horowitz implies that a reflexive orientation to the past is simply unavailable to leftists whose forward-looking, utopian hopes ignore past lessons.

This time-based rhetoric links with a certain perspective on human knowledge. Argumentation is grounded in a tension between “conserving old knowledge and accepting new knowledge.”^[79] Yet some research finds that many conservatives have “pessimistic expectations for the likelihood of great new insights in a single generation. The individual should seek to perfect himself, to be inner directed.”^[80] Fitting with a gradual conversion framework (like Podhoretz), the author makes instantaneous knowledge bad, compared with knowledge that took nearly three decades to arrive at.

This reflexivity also propagates an inner-directed rhetoric with deliberative implications. Horowitz finds that radicals, and liberals, inability to engage in reflection comes about from being out of touch with their very nature and interior lives.^[81] Horowitz urges readers to turn inward for insights, rather than engage in public reasoning to discover or create new knowledge.

Similar to Witness’s rhetorical pressures, RS’s focus on reflexivity as an ability bears a resemblance to conservatism’s metaethical commitment to “intuition” as an epistemological basis for political action.^[82] Randall Lake finds that in antiabortion rhetoric, “right and wrong are apprehended by a unique moral sense somewhat similar to other human senses” and that this is an intuition that “cannot be refuted.”^[83] Horowitz uses a comparable sense of reflexivity as a solipsistic, intuitive guide for self-awareness and change. Persuasion emanates from an individual’s personal, nonsocial experience, fashioning conversion as a new intuitive ability to judge politics in a way that is free from the burden of others.

Reflexive rhetoric goes beyond simply characterizing others as unthinking. With the conversion form, it becomes a deeply embedded, fixed ability, condition, or faculty that eradicates the deliberative capacities of others. Horowitz argues that his parents were unable to knowingly entertain other alternatives to their entrenched Marxist dreams, since they were “incapable of real self-reflection.”^[84] This is not to discount his parents’ potential ignorance or failure to acknowledge certain political issues. Indeed, Horowitz relates that his obstinate father would not even turn away from some of his beliefs after the unveiling of the Khrushchev report, which detailed the abuses of Stalinism and led many Communist followers to see that their long-standing commitments to Communism were broken.^[85] The point is that the rhetoric centers less on his parents’ reasons for their political beliefs than on their epistemological, mental faculties.

Determinism and reflexivity correspond with old and new political lives. Horowitz makes his father an embodiment of an old, dogmatic, and fateful worldview, as opposed to the author’s new, tolerant, and chosen paradigm. The author’s father was incapable of taking ownership for his fate or changing his character in the slightest.^[86] Horowitz states that the “arc” of his own life had been different in escaping such “ghettos.”^[87] The emphases on a directed journey and “ghettos” fashion Horowitz as a broad thinker and cosmopolitan communicator.^[88] Wedding geographical range with time-based expansion, the “arc” of life signals that Horowitz considers his experience a directional structure from old to new. Making these connections explicit, he writes: “[W]hat was my own choice? In the beginning, I hardly had one. . . . I would make my choices only later.”^[89]

In this way, an appetite for self-examination and conversion operate as an organizing principle to bring about what Michael Wallace calls a “retrospective tidying up of the past” across the discourse.^[90] Traveling a tenuous, civil-religious path between a convert’s fervent devotion and the demands of tolerance in a pluralistic democracy, this retrospective ability, in turn, gives Horowitz what Walter Fisher further terms the “characterological coherence”^[91] to deal with possible charges of a self-interested political switch. “Reversals of political opinion” can easily be attributed as “acts of enlightenment or ‘flip-flops’” in public affairs.^[92] Horowitz promotes the former interpretation by using a lengthy conversion narrative to demonstrate that his life has been coherently reflective. Associating reflexivity with flexibility, Horowitz recalls that being inflexible would be wrong, given the rethinking he had practiced in his own life.^[93] Like Podhoretz, Horowitz constructs the journey as a complex, rather than a simple, political conversion. By laying out a life project over approximately 450 pages, Horowitz vindicates himself as having gone through a justified soul-searching over and above more expedient considerations.

In a move echoing Chambers and Podhoretz, Horowitz sometimes entertains a notion that despite the grand change in his life, he also never changed—in this case, that he has almost always been reflexive. He contends that during his years as a radical, he had many doubts about political developments in Vietnam and Cuba but, similar to Podhoretz, thought that his central politics essentially embodied classical liberalism; when asked to justify his political turn, he further advocates for the “continuity of my second thoughts.”^[94] This discourse has it both ways by communicating that the author is both greatly transformed and stable.

Reflexivity and conversion additionally associate with terms of unique and marginal authority. According to Horowitz, his tome Destructive Generation was one of the only books critical of 1960s radicalism—others who wrote similar accounts of the same era had “no real second thoughts.”^[95] In more colloquial terms, since Horowitz has been there, done that, readers are invited to view the author and his beliefs as exceptional, with an epistemological faculty that simply sweeps away generational nonsense. Horowitz creates the impression that he is a conservative pariah for this faculty. Blaming the New York Times for its attack upon his and Peter Collier’s biography on the Ford dynasty (and the book’s poor sales), Horowitz recounts that it was a penalty they received for their “second thoughts.”^[96] He even started a journal called Heterodoxy to argue that conservatives had become the “counterculture,”^[97] appropriating the language of 1960s activism.^[98] John Reilly notes that despite RS’s approaches, “the fact is that people like Horowitz are still swimming upstream in the major institutions of American life. The upshot is, as under his parents’ roof, he can once again think of himself as countercultural.”^[99] As Oneida Meranto further explains, Horowitz co-opts a language of “inclusivity” and victimhood in his public efforts, seeking to make conservatism a type of “protected class.”^[100]

It is critical to note how Horowitz joins terms of conversion and flexibility with marginality to communicate that he is both at the center and the periphery of societal influence. Horowitz double-codes his rhetoric to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, being everything to everyone. While Horowitz and others speak a language that resounds with many Americans, a history scholar argues that their appeals often hide how they end up leading to cuts in spending for various social programs.^[101] Horowitz sees himself as oppressed, in contrast to women, blacks, and other groups historically understood as marginalized. In a sense, his rhetoric of reflexivity appropriates standpoint language by claiming a special vantage point with which to see politics with greater clarity than others.^[102] Standpoint theory consists of three central claims: “(1) Knowledge is socially situated. (2) Marginalized groups are socially situated in ways that make it more possible for them to be aware of things and ask questions than it is for the non-marginalized. (3) Research, particularly that focused on power relations, should begin with the lives of the marginalized.”^[103] Similarly, Horowitz perceives himself an exile, an outsider who has traveled a difficult, forlorn path, but has committed himself to a standard of self-aware, unfettered revision nonetheless.

Critics have affirmed and negated the reflexive persona. Christopher Caldwell writes: “As the gripping pages of Radical Son make clear, Horowitz possesses a fearless capacity for self-examination—hardly a noted virtue of the radical Left. . . . [I]t is this capacity which may have rescued him from an association with murderers. It certainly enabled him to reinvent himself, and to forge a new career as the kind of person his parents had no doubt warned him against.”^[104] In this passage, a special ability to be self-aware and think again highlights the resonance of Horowitz’s epistemological emphases, with the active verbs “rescue,” “reinvent,” and “forge” each underscoring the author’s agency. Sanford Pinsker reflects on how the New Left “lacked . . . a capacity for self-criticism,” claiming that RS’s “painful narrative is more honest—and to my mind, more important—than other memoirs of those times, places.”^[105] James Bowman asserts: “Horowitz does have something of Chambers’s quality of soul” in the “tremendous political honesty and sincerity” that “he is able to bring to his self-examination.”^[106] Another reviewer writes: “I had always been disappointed by the memoirs of political figures on the left because of their inability to reflect on themselves. . . . [I]t wasn’t surprising that radicals could not confront their interior lives.”^[107] Frank Monaldo says that he is also persuaded by BR’s points about “the inability of the Left to address or even admit the brutality” of Communist countries.^[108]

John Walker praises Horowitz’s “great deal of painful introspection”^[109] while Bonnie Parsley comments that “rarely is an individual given to such total introspection. . . . [H]e is able to see the self delusion and denial of reality that had motivated his political life since the beginning.”^[110] One critic calls RS “Introspective, Insightful & Intellectually Honest. . . . His life story is as compelling as any you’ll find.”^[111] Another affirms the sophistication of such efforts: “Horowitz’s transformation is far too complex to be adequately described in a short review.”^[112] Confirming a relationship between reflexivity and the civil-religious line that Horowitz straddles, R. Coleman finally notes that “his gradual move to the Right is tested and validated with intimate reflection and revelation.”^[113]

Other critics have been less supportive. One reviewer writes that “though he was a red-diaper baby and a Marxist himself, Horowitz asks the reader to believe that at virtually every step of his political life he entertained profound doubts about the beliefs and methods of those around him.”^[114] Another finds that “Horowitz’s intense and lengthy introspections are sometimes a little repetitive.”^[115] Leonard Bushkoff relates, too, that Horowitz frames his experience in terms of a tiring, “endless introspection.”^[116] Jeff Coulter says that the story “is often intensely self-critical, and the honesty of many of its pages is quite striking.”^[117] He asks why Horowitz fails to discuss the sins of the Right, however, omitting a litany of events that could qualify the author’s claims. These include findings that genuine democracy has not really emerged in countries where Communism has been rolled back, former secretary of state Robert McNamara’s confessions over policy toward Vietnam being a criminal act, and contradictions inherent in the United States’s support for murderous Third World governments, among other issues.^[118]

I would add that Horowitz’s reflexivity has a stopping point. Reflexivity merges with the linear conversion form to present readers with only one political turn from which Horowitz interprets ensuing events. We might question how deliberative the claims to reflexivity are in the autobiography’s totality. Horowitz asserts that his conversion involved a period of deliberation but also that his political understandings are now firm, contradicting the endlessly reflexive standard that Horowitz asserts.

To be clear, I do not mean to downplay the virtues of self-reflection and criticism. My aim has been to highlight the use of reflexivity as an epistemological weapon in Horowitz’s turn to conservatism. This analysis concurs with Lynch that “a reflexive analysis must be entrusted to an uncertain fate” since “there are no guarantees of success” or “inherent advantages” in simply being reflexive.^[119] The problem is that under the conversion form, reflexivity has a certain fate. Simply being able to turn and have second thoughts does not mean that conclusive knowledge has been attained. The extent to which the self is implicated in this process signals a self-sealing reflexivity of absolute conclusions, not a journey of continuing, informed debate.

Ultimately, RS uses a political mode of thought analogous to inductive approaches to religion. Religion scholar Wade Clark Roof has meticulously documented how “a reflexive spiritual style” or a “self-directed approach to cultivating spiritual sensitivity and religious consciousness” now marks many Americans’ religious orientations.^[120] Following the expanding pluralisms and uncertainties of late modernity, such practices often emphasize “self-understanding and self-reflexivity” so much that “the current religious situation in the United States is characterized not so much by a loss of faith as a qualitative shift from unquestioned belief to a more open, questing mood.”^[121] Horowitz grounds his rhetoric in this approach but speaks a language of openness that remains anything but open.

In this vein, a second, related rhetorical resource informs Horowitz’s conversion narrative. Horowitz uses literal and metaphorical frames of youth and adulthood in his rhetoric, knitting together a story about the relationship between himself and his father with the story of his journey to a mature, reflexive worldview.^[122] In essence, conversion narratives can interact with a rhetoric of maturity to conflate biological with political development.

Crossing Personal with Political Development: Maturity

A maturity metaphor works with the conversion narrative, with the political transformation framed as an experiential matter of “growing up.” Horowitz describes Communism, radicalism, and the New Left and its many allies with terms such as “children” and structures the autobiography chronologically with “growth” and “family” themes throughout.^[123] Horowitz’s father becomes increasingly “infantile” in his Marxist beliefs, while Horowitz finally “grows up” as a conservative. The author characterizes leftists as incomplete and immature—for example, New Left leader Robert Scheer, who is described as an “unfinished human being.”^[124] Horowitz tells one of the leaders of the anarchist Yippie movement, “[Y]ou never grew up.”^[125] Leftist “children” should be neither seen nor heard. Children lack an ability to know themselves, wallowing in a world of naïve, often egotistical, perceptions: “Socialism was not only a childish wish, but a wish for childhood itself.”^[126] With deliberative implications, RS advocates that the politics of the Left and the Right should hence be viewed in generational terms of developmental maturation.

Conversion reinforces the maturity resource. Between old and new lives, Horowitz connects the political journey to his personal development as a human being. In chapter headings such as “Coming of Age,” he makes bodily growth a part of the journey to conservatism.^[127] Biological and political development merge, so much that literal and metaphorical allusions to each are often indistinguishable across the book’s 446 pages. Growth is a common metaphor in public discourse, referring to physical and mental development,^[128] functioning in Horowitz’s case to appropriate terms such as “progress” and “progressive” from the left.^[129] The term “progress” also has historical connections to conversion, as in John Bunyan’s conversion classic The Pilgrim’s Progress.^[130] By shifting between biological and political meanings of maturity, RS frames leftists as in a state of arrested development. One of the book’s major concerns is with the future of youth, an appeal that connects biological development with one’s political views, so that one’s beliefs can be seen as either dissonant or accordant with human nature. This makes progress more a matter of “growing up and getting with the pre-determined program” than creating political meaning with others.

Since one of the author’s larger projects is to critique universities, reflexivity and maturity interact to replace scholarly with experiential authority. Horowitz once told a student who questioned his conclusions about the propagandistic intentions of university professors, “[Y]ou do not have the mental capacity to understand.”^[131] Not yet mature enough in his or her biological and political development to think again, the student’s questions go unconsidered. Horowitz considers one’s a priori status as a human being before his or her arguments, dismissing the latter under the attributions of the former. In this rhetoric, the 1960s was thus not about issues such as gender roles; it was about childish actions such as bra-burning.

Wayne Booth calls this “motivism,” where “if you can find a class interest or a sexual drive or a kinship interest or a childhood trauma—you have explained away whatever ‘surface reasons’ anyone offers for his belief or actions.”^[132] In framing the Left in childhood terms, RS offers less of a deliberative encounter than a motivist discharge of others’ political actions.

The conversion narrative is also about literal children as a rhetorical resource. In the book’s first few pages, Horowitz cites Irving Kristol, who observed that the barbarian danger for every generation is to its kids, whose main challenge is to become civilized.^[133] Every person has come from a family somewhere, so Horowitz crafts a broad-ranging appeal to the needs of parents and communities. The book concludes with a line supporting his parenting skills and the rightness of the larger political vision: “[M]y children: I had done this right.”^[134] Since conservative appeals about children generally find favor with the public,^[135] Horowitz targets parents and adults concerned about future generations, becoming an authority on youth who flirt with leftist interests.^[136]

A journey to the right connects a new, mature life with a rhetoric for future generations. One of Horowitz’s former wives desired to be at home with their children, which his former political colleagues frowned upon.^[137] In having a third child, he disassociates with his father, who chastises him for breaking the Marxist mold; kids were seen as obstructing the revolution’s goals.^[138] At times, Horowitz even enlists his mother as a doubting Thomas–type character, stating that she once told one of his former wives that “the Left was wrong about how to raise children.”^[139] Of note is how the conversion form makes support for progeny an exclusive characteristic of the Right. This vision is enforced at both a larger political level (the picture that Horowitz paints of liberals/radicals writ large) and from a personal level (Horowitz’s father). Horowitz even states that not having kids is itself a way to be a child.^[140] Combining the conversion form with connotations of arrested development communicates that one cannot be for a Left that is against the very advancement of humanity.

As with reflexivity, there is also a parallel between maturity and antiabortion rhetoric. Randall Lake finds that appeals to childhood innocence are a common feature of conservative discourse. Often used in conservative rhetoric, deontological ethics (or theories of moral obligation) exemplify the communicative approach that one would use with a child, asserting fixed, presymbolic conclusions in public communication.^[141] Similarly, Horowitz uses the maturity device to minimize the deliberative capacities of others.

From a rhetorical perspective, the point of using the child/adult device is to make the narrative seem natural and inevitable and to dismiss the counter-narrative to this natural and inevitable process by construing those who did not convert as abnormal. This explains why Horowitz devotes so much time to telling readers that others had “second thoughts”; he positions himself as a unique political convert but also creates the impression that there was a mass exodus to the right, so that those who did not make the leap are simply stubborn exceptions to a rule.

Some key figures supplement the child/adult device. Horowitz’s political conversion occurred alongside his friend Peter Collier, with whom he coauthored several popular books on the Rockefeller, Kennedy, and Ford family dynasties. The co-conversion relays that the author is not out on a limb with his conservative turn. Since the two cowrote Destructive Generation as a challenge to the “adolescent posture[s]” of the 1960s,^[142] maturity becomes more than an idiosyncratic claim. Citing Arthur Koestler, Horowitz also describes this friendship as a kind of mutual goading toward conservative truth, arguing coauthors see “a father figure in the other.”^[143] Despite Horowitz’s fractured relationship with his own father, the political conversion enables another father-like friend to set him back on the path to maturity and normality.

Other characters normalize contrasts between living as a child and an adult and add confessional, civil-religious overtones to the political switch. Several years after their political conversions, Collier states that Horowitz had a developmental disability during his Marxist phase. Playing the father figure, he had to yell at Horowitz once to carry out the same procedure as a therapist bringing an autistic child back to reality.^[144] As a Marxist, Horowitz is not just a child but an abnormal child, impervious to the demands of growing up. The analogy of a therapist pulling the child out of this phase of stunted growth uses a psychological frame to diagnose the problems resulting from the 1960s (a device explored further below in this chapter). Enlisting Collier as a sidekick to the conversion shows that, as in religious spheres, confessing to others about one’s former actions becomes more than a lifestyle choice; in Horowitz’s rhetoric, it is a path to the right-minded development required of every human being.^[145]

The father character underscores these maturity claims. The child/adult device switches the typical son/father relationship, as a synecdoche for radical/liberal intransigence, compared with conservative openness. Marxism gave Horowitz’s father an attitude of absolute certainty.^[146] His father’s stubbornness and angst as a Marxist was an adolescent cry for attention.^[147] The author’s father embodies the argument: radicals/liberals forge forward with unwarranted certainties that keep them in an arrested state. Horowitz contrasts this with his new political paradigm that tolerates deviance, debate, and broad ideological viewpoints.^[148] Horowitz also details how his father’s public image was very different from his private anguish.^[149] Horowitz describes his father as seemingly heroic but “childlike and beaten.”^[150] This public/private split presents his father and the Left as half-characters, underscoring Horowitz’s holistic accomplishment as a political convert.

Paradoxically, while appealing to a need for conversion (i.e., grand change), RS’s rhetoric solidifies human nature in a way that communicates that little individual or social change is possible. Horowitz comments on the irreducible nature of his childrens’ character.^[151] He describes the “immutable state of our nature”^[152] and opposes progressives as wrong in thinking that evil is simply a lack of understanding.^[153] In classifying people as either youth or adults, RS reduces human knowledge and action to fixed individualistic orientations in which interlocutors can do little. The external events of the world may act as a check and counter to one’s orientation but mostly present one with a choice to get in line with reality rather than debate a different course of action. Strong contrasts between death and life that, as mentioned, figure prominently in conversion narratives^[154] support such emphases. Horowitz relates that the loss of his friend at what he believes were the hands of the Black Panthers confirms that her murder was connected to a worldview they had absorbed from their “mother’s milk.”^[155] This discourse alternates between biological and political development, positioning the latter concept in terms of the former.

Similar to reflexivity, maturity discourse claims both continuity and change. The author reminisces that Robert Scheer used to ascribe an “innocence” to Horowitz.^[156] He also refers to the “virginal quality” he had in his early life.^[157] A contradiction emerges between how others are accountable and not innocent for their previous acts and the purity that Horowitz attributes to himself in his early life and as a Marxist. Oppositely, for instance, RS takes great pains to describe how there is an ongoing “myth of innocence” about Tom Hayden and many young 1960s political activists as idealistic youth.^[158] One implication is that, just as there are bad kids and good kids, while Horowitz was a captive of the Left, he was so uninformed as to be less accountable for previous, detestable acts. We find here an effort to communicate both “I have changed” and “I never changed,” locating the blame for generational mistakes more squarely upon other 1960s advocates and allowing Horowitz to answer charges of political expedience and opportunism with consistency claims.

Although Horowitz claims to be agnostic,^[159] admonitions about maturity often take on a biblical quality, highlighting the implicit civil-religious strategy at work across the text. In one passage, he explains that he had reached a point where he neeeed to grow up and “put away childish things and to . . . live with passion, love wisely, and know oneself.”^[160] The Judeo-Christian Bible is replete with references to and advice toward children.^[161] Horowitz repeats the biblical verse from 1 Cor. 13:11 (without attribution) in the line: “[W]hen I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”^[162] The title of the book, Radical Son, itself echoes the Father-Son relationship at the center of the New Testament, including the “prodigal son” story.^[163] In one section, he further intones a double meaning between his first name, David, and the biblical figure David.^[164]

Political converts can claim no faith (and that liberals/radicals are religious) while still using a language of faith. Horowitz says as much throughout the book: that he needed to write his life’s events in order to make sense of it all, a task that he describes as religious in nature.^[165] Horowitz plays both sides of the fence in coding his message to secular and religious audiences, or what David Domke and Kevin Coe call a double-messaged “God strategy.”^[166] This strategy also helps Horowitz reinforce his point about reflexivity.

This is no Pauline conversion experience. Horowitz implies that his political turn is a decision both rationally thought through and well-informed by experience rather than the result of a childish, blind leap of faith. He advises the reader to “know oneself”—not to know “God,” as in Chambers’s case, but to become inductively self-conscious and epistemologically regenerated. Yet the conversion form and subtle religious allusions are retained throughout the narrative. Horowitz even remarks that in his post-conversion life, for the first time, “I felt a providence at work.”^[167] Using biblical and secular-psychological language, RS blends references to growing mature as a matter of transcendent principle with growing mature as a thinking, self-aware being.

Various critics have affirmed the maturity resource. One reviewer resonates with all three of the book’s rhetorical devices in claiming that “the reviewers who discount this work are at best individuals with growth stunted intellects who wish to remain Peter Pans and never grow up. . . . I see that the Left is basically a huge dysfunctional family.”^[168] Bowman finds that Horowitz is to be praised for recovering from “a life spent with overgrown children.”^[169] Horowitz is authoritative and exceptional, as “it takes someone who is himself recovering from an epic case of arrested development really to understand the essentially infantile quality in the New Left. . . . [I]t is only he and not his fellow radicals who grows up.”^[170] Another reviewer confirms that “Radical Son is a powerful and moving book. In the deepest sense, it is a book about growing up, politically, intellectually, spiritually.”^[171] One critic states: “I will use it to continue teaching my children the Truth.”^[172] Dave Duffy, a fellow traveler from the political left to the right, finds it an inspirational book, especially in its “Rebirth of Individualism” and contrast between youthful innocence and the learned experience of adulthood.^[173] Affirming a religious reception of the political conversion narrative (and thus the kind of civil-religious double-coding identified in the book), one Christian pastor writes that RS is “a very influential book for me. . . . If Horowitz is a ‘radical’ son, our Lord Jesus is a Covenant Son, and so are we all—sons & daughters.”^[174]

On the other hand, Justin Raimondo negates the maturity persona: “David Horowitz is such a big crybaby. . . . In other words: Wahhh! Wahhhh!”^[175] Jeff Coulter finds that “to fetishize a reified conception of human nature is a standing flaw of conservative thought throughout the ages . . . which demeans the indefinitely creative and transformative powers of humanity,”^[176] just as the “maturity journey” tends to narrow others’ rhetorical capacities. Horowitz’s development is toward determined, absolutist ends in which speech can do little.

In early twentieth-century “generational” discourse in the United States, some scholars have observed a point when many young people “introduced psychological notions of care and understanding to intergenerational relations.”^[177] Illuminating this historical pattern, political converts can combine their narratives with psychological, identity-focused experience to yield a third form of inductive rhetoric.

Extrapolating One’s Self: Psychological Experience

With relevance to deliberative matters, Horowitz merges a language of psychological experience with the political conversion narrative. RS constructs a conversion from “structural” and “sociological” ways of thinking and acting to a new “individual” and “psychological” orientation to personal and political life. The 1960s and the Left are considered a disorder, and the author grounds his new knowledge in the experience of being “mugged by reality”^[178] —so that unlike liberals, he has moved from the world of “ideas” and unreflective “abstractions” to inductive, “concrete living” and “worldly” concerns.

Just as the maturity device appropriates a language of “progress” from the left, psychological experience employs features of feminist rhetoric toward conservative aims. Feminists have promoted shifts from abstract thought toward more experiential bases of knowledge.^[179] Much of the 1960s was about “experience,” and autobiography is a medium well suited to such individualistic, narrative communication. As Horowitz notes, since “all the books I had written on my own were abstract and analytic, their style unsuited to the autobiographical task,”^[180] the medium of choice reinforces a psychological rhetoric involving a conversion from an impersonal old life to a personal new one.^[181]

From writing the Marxist Free World Colossus to biographies of the Rockefellers, Kennedys, and Fords, as well as conservative books such as Dangerous Generation, Horowitz retrospectively applies the psychological experience standard to all his writings. After toggling between abstract and concrete ways of writing,^[182] he applies conversion language in stating that “finally, I had found a narrative voice capable of introspection, and realized that I had arrived at a point in my life where I felt a sense of completion in the themes that had shaped it.”^[183] The narrative voice and reflexive ability (“capable of introspection”) are attributed to the bifurcated, directional “sense of completion” wrought by the conversion form. Like a new religious initiate, he feels lost at first but then finds his way. Dropping his former “Marxist filter” where “the narrative we constructed, and the psychological portraits we drew, were so much window dressing for the important message about the System,” Horowitz converts to “the biographical enterprise.”^[184] These individualistic emphases may also explain why so many of these narratives have been told by left-to-right converts, since the Right is generally where local and libertarian language has more resonance.

The biographical voice itself becomes a powerful persona throughout the work. This voice urges the author to come to terms with the memory of his parents after their deaths—“the biographer insisted.”^[185] Horowitz relates that in his former writings, “I was too tentative in my authorial voice,”^[186] but later in RS states that in writing his first biography, “the narrative voice was authoritative.”^[187] This move is both descriptive and persuasive, since Horowitz associates the shift to a biographical mode of writing with the view that individualism is best in public matters. Combining these personal claims with the conversion form permits little space for both sociological and biographical-narrative modes to work together; instead, they exist as sides of a dichotomy, charted between the past and present.

The story joins a rhetoric about experience with the language of popular psychology, so it is no coincidence that Horowitz’s best-selling biographies of the Rockefellers, Kennedys, and Fords have been labeled “pathographies” by some, “because of their focus on social and emotional dysfunction.”^[188] In writing biographies, Horowitz admits, “I was not used to thinking in psychological terms.”^[189] But he increasingly finds utility in analyzing social life from this perspective, making attributions of others, such as the “rage rolling inside him came from psychological layers so deep that he himself had lost contact with them.”^[190] When his mother was dying, Horowitz explains that the worst part was watching her psychological deterioration.^[191] He even labels his political conversion a “psychic fission.”^[192]

Psychological language bears on the convert’s claims to see more truly and deeply into the nature of human activity. Horowitz views causes for problems like a clinical psychologist. Statements in the book often begin with the explanation, “at some deeper and more psychological level.”^[193] Originally he, his parents, and the political Left were in a state of “denial” over the true implications of their political convictions,^[194] and after being unfaithful to his one of his former wives, Horowitz asserts that there was probably some psychological reason for his adultery.^[195] Extending the disease metaphor, Horowitz, too, argues that “I had been given insight into the psychology behind such malignant [New Left] politics.”^[196]

Like Horowitz’s rendering of the Left as childlike, this psychological rhetoric erases opponents’ communicative abilities and absolves Horowitz from having had any control over actions from his previous life as a radical and liberal. The author attributes Marion Rockefeller’s radicalism, for instance, to forces that were “more psychological than political.”^[197] RS attends less to the reasons for liberal and radical activities than the deep urges beyond communication that drive such efforts. Just as Podhoretz’s conversion narrative reduces the Left’s speech to primal biological impulses rather than freely chosen actions,^[198] Horowitz’s terms reduce others’ messages to inflexible psychological motives and mere expressions of subconscious drives. Noting historical precedents for such language, Berger writes that “the translation of religion into psychological language has been very popular in America.”^[199] Like the other devices, the text links the abnormal psychology of the Left with fate but makes agency a quality of conservative conversions. Horowitz cites many conservative activists and everyday workers who were, for example, “self-made.”^[200]

Some scholarship finds that “a dominant feature of right-wing discourse concerning the ‘culture wars’ is the appropriation of liberal discourse for its own, contrary purposes,” especially in antiabortion rhetoric, where “the purpose of debate is conversion.”^[201] In Horowitz’s story, the purpose of debate is to extend conversion, and the purpose of conversion is not to debate—with a language of “choice” affording an opportunity to make only right choices. Horowitz explains that the tenants at Sunnyside, the Marxist community where he grew up, showed him that the people he knew were “helpless” and lacking in any ability to exert control over their lives.^[202] On the other hand, as a political convert to conservatism, Horowitz begins to gain “control” over his own.^[203] Despite statements focusing on the choices that people have in life, across the narrative it becomes apparent that choice can be found only on one side of the conversion divide.

Similar to the other resources, psychological experience interacts with the conversion form to fashion a civil-religious rhetoric that makes the Left fanatical. Among many examples, RS concludes that the Left treats as idolatry an idea that people can be gods and create utopias on earth.^[204] Having its head in the heavens, the Left cannot possibly hope to address real human problems. Yet Horowitz subtly draws from religious texts and the conversion form to maintain a thin threshold of generalized faith across the narrative. In fact, as with Breaking Ranks, one problem that RS hopes to address is the opinion that “our second thoughts were a religious conversion—therefore irrational and dangerous.”^[205] Through civil-religious rhetoric, the author grounds his new political beliefs in down-to-earth terms while naming the Left a “political religion.”^[206] RS gets to have the best from both worlds, advancing and submerging religiosity throughout the narrative to make broad appeals.

Critically, an individual’s direct, unmediated view of experience generates insights in an inductive political conversion. Converts play a special role in public affairs as people who have weathered the times; as the author asserts, “the secret of good judgment? Experience”^[207]—just as experience led him to conservatism.^[208] On the other hand, Horowitz once married a woman who was hostile toward experience.^[209] Departing from Podhoretz’s conversion rhetoric in which ideas are primary, experience dissociates mere ideas from reality. With the maturity theme, an exacting binary is drawn between naïve and mature, empirical thinking—attacking Marxists for their “ideas”^[210] and for being “Platonists inhabiting a reality that was separate, and that could not be refuted by events.”^[211] Yet the Platonic charges are ironic, as the conversion form underscores Platonic themes through sentences in RS such as “I emerged from the shadows to the world of reality,”^[212] employing “experience” in an equally evangelical fashion.

In turn, the experience-based rhetoric serves Horowitz’s university project. Far from the minds of airy professors in the ivory tower, Horowitz claims a hardheaded, practical look at public affairs. Different from a typical religious conversion narrative, political transformation is cast in terms of discovering earth rather than the heavens. Horowitz’s time as a Marxist had made him “unworldly,”^[213] since Marxists forgo sensory experience in favor of ideas.^[214] He faces the cold, hard facts of reality in an inductive manner, finding himself “constantly blindsided by events.”^[215] This language assumes that the world’s events simply speak for themselves, requiring little interpretation. “Ideas” are so divorced from reality that they are variable and hence unproductive. Personal experience and earthly “reality,” however, present themselves to human beings as simply factual.

Others are enlisted across the narrative to heighten the conversion form’s dichotomy between experienced and inexperienced people. The author’s previous orientation used to be future focused and intellectual, while one of his former wives was always centered on life, the present, and concrete, external events.^[216] She makes the author increasingly aware of a world outside himself and of how harsh abstract arguments could feel,^[217] justifying a turn to concrete, narrative terms. When he was seventeen, a girlfriend accuses Horowitz of being too obsessed with analyzing rather than living in experience.^[218] As a result, Horowitz realizes that in his old life, “I was still innocent of any real experience.”^[219]

Here, again, Horowitz appropriates feminist discourses, implying that activists’ idea that “the personal is political”^[220] applies to conservatism. Feminist standpoint theorist Nancy Hartsock argues that Marxist political theories miss the material experiences of women’s lives. While women’s experiences tend to be concrete, men often live in far more abstract, Platonic worlds. Hartsock claims that this is partly due to differences in bodily experiences such as menstruation. Men tend to go about their lives more separated from the external world and others than women, for whom intimacy and connection are more familiar.^[221]

The conversion narrative further employs a type of “consciousness-raising” rhetoric. Richard Gregg describes consciousness-raising as a “struggle for a resurrected self” that worked parallel to 1960s movements’ activism.^[222] In groups, it is a procedure for sharing personal experiences to establish “new psychological orientations for those involved” and to “create new political values.”^[223] As Karlyn Kohrs Campbell identifies, consciousness-raising is “dialogic and participatory” in a way that “speaks from personal experience to personal experience.”^[224] A critical difference between Horowitz’s rhetoric and this kind of process is that consciousness-raising involves a collaborative journey between communicators. The conversion narrative promotes one’s isolated arrival at preestablished truths, which are deep (i.e., reason is replaced by psychological impulses), directional rather than inquiry-based, and simply beyond human beings in interaction.

In Horowitz’s case, the conversion narrative is a discovering of internal and external essences to be adhered to rather than the sharing and co-creation of political truths, which evade directional necessities and preordained results. A key problem, then, is that Horowitz offers a deductive, deontological politics in the guise of an inductive, experiential language. The use of experience-based language may be read as a way of engaging a wider audience for conservative appeals (and as a civil-religious strategy attempting to avoid fundamentalist or overly rationalist overtones), just as support for feminism has galvanized U.S. audiences in the past. Since 1980, women have voted more consistently for Democrats than for other candidates in presidential elections,^[225] an issue to which RS may be responding. The appropriation of feminist language is akin to what Roland Barthes has described as second-order semiological systems. By hiding the ideological origins of key terms in public discourse—both where they came from and the reasons for their use—histories and voices that might have provided critical alternatives to present claims can become muted.^[226]

Ultimately, the conversion form reconfigures 1960s rhetoric in cynical terms. By stripping the social and activist intentions of feminist and other language from its bases, RS crafts a rhetorical vision where possibilities for change are limited to psychological, individualistic boundaries that admit little access to or from others. As Horowitz argues, “it was no longer the world I had to change, but myself.”^[227] Ironically, Horowitz’s newfound respect for experience, empirical reality, and the events of the external world are positioned with messages that put political engagement primarily within the self. At the same time, this rhetoric fails to account for the experiences of others, which do not necessarily need to be validated but might at least be addressed.

We know that Horowitz was instrumental in creating terms for the Right such as “compassionate conservatism.” The use of liberal/radical language partially softens hard-edged conservative connotations. Conservatives are known for their support of harsh punishments for criminals, for example.^[228] Using liberal/radical language can co-opt publics for whom the situational language of experience resonates. The prominence of concepts such as “generations” and “youth” in the history of U.S. public discourse relates to gender issues, as “both terms have been male discourses.”^[229] Through the conversion form and psycho-experiential resource, generational rhetoric can be framed in more feminine terms to create a broader appeal, while retaining traditionalist themes invoking masculine connotations.

Some RS reviews affirm the book’s use of psychological rhetoric. Concerning this “introspective autobiography,” one reviewer writes that “the book’s candid explanation of the psychological roots of first communism and then the New Left are very enlightening.”^[230] Bernard Chapin, too, affirms the book as “a psychological study of the progressive mind.”^[231] A number of other responses confirm the realism asserted in Horowitz’s rhetoric. Martin Asiner resonates with Horowitz’s “raw human experience” and how he “survived and thrived to warn the current generation.”^[232] Praising RS’s inductive emphases, one reviewer finds it “a rare odyssey: Someone who rethinks their political beliefs from the ground up. . . . This is the most interesting political odyssey stor[y] since Whittaker Chambers’ ‘Witness.’”^[233] One blogger writes that “when confronted by a reality he couldn’t deny, Horowitz refused to retreat into the world of pretty ideas,”^[234] while another states: “I say thank goodness for those all-too-few such as Horowitz who speak from a position of experience.”^[235]

One writer says that “Radical Son is full of harrowing personal detail . . . but the book’s real importance lies not in its anecdotal revelations or even in its political message but in its embrace of a chastened realism, a modesty not personal but metaphysical.”^[236] Note how the “chastened realism” is confirmed by a “metaphysical” message, affirming the text’s civil-religious overtones. Another reviewer asserts that “no book I have read in the last 20 years affected me more profoundly than did Horowitz’s autobiography Radical Son, both in terms of helping to understand the destructiveness of the utopian impulse, and also in getting a perspective on the 60’s and the Vietnam era.”^[237] Kent Worcester is more ambivalent: “at times, the rhetoric gets out of hand . . . certainly hyperbolic—but the book provides a useful corrective to overly idealistic treatments of the politics of the 1960s.”^[238]

Some reviews rebuke the author’s device. Jonathan Yardley writes that the book is about “a self-administered therapeutic process that does not, on the evidence presented here, appear to have worked.”^[239] One reviewer argues that “this book is a Freudian analyst’s dream” and “hilariously awful.”^[240] Tim Lieder asks, “[W]hy do most people talk psychology about Horowitz? Because his self-righteous idiocy is the same no matter what political stripe he wears.”^[241] Ultimately, by combining the conversion form with a rhetoric of psychology, individuality, biography, and experience, psychological experience puts little faith in reason and reasonability, future change, and, at base, communication.

Conclusion

One idea that has circulated in public is that, “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”^[242] Stories like Radical Son attempt to strike a middle position between these lines, but ultimately in the service of one ideology. Numerous points can be drawn about Horowitz’s messages.

First, the reflexivity resource and conversion form create a special epistemological ability for self-criticism and awareness that detach the convert from public reasoning and reasonability. Horowitz claims an ability to see into the true nature of things and know more than others, given his construction of a unique mental faculty. Relative to public deliberation, this revisionary ability begins and ends with the self, asserting one’s righteous, linear path to self-validated truth. Overall, the conversion form and Horowitz’s understanding of reflexivity involve a self-perfected rhetoric that bypasses human exchange as a route to knowledge and insight.

As a rhetoric of open-mindedness, reflexivity downplays the traditionally dogmatic attributes of the conversion form. A problem is that the political conversion narrative is fine with choice, so long as the right choice is made. Process values that may be ultimate values for liberals can be appropriated by conservatives; but when such values are located within deontological frameworks, they serve foregone conclusions.^[243] The political conversion narrative similarly deals with a product/process issue in its construction of open-mindedness as good, so long as it leads to absolute political truth. Thus, while deliberation scholars such as Seyla Benhabib argue that deliberation creates a reflexive orientation that gives individuals an “enlarged mentality,”^[244] RS features a type of reflexivity rhetoric that works toward opposite ends.

The appropriation of tolerant language has implications for public civility. Stephen Olbrys finds dangerous “the manipulation of the language of academic freedom to achieve singular ends,” especially when advocates use claims to two-sided debate as a mask for advocacy and “pen themselves into their own tribe’s enclaves and never test ideas and beliefs against alternatives.”^[245] My analysis suggests that converts embody two-sided debate but co-opt sides in a way that closes communicative space for deliberation and further learning. Some public reactions to RS imply that the political convert is, indeed, seen as embodying all sides of a public discussion.^[246] On its surface, Horowitz’s rhetoric asserts a reflexivity that speaks to the author’s desire for fair deliberation. But examining how argument operates in Horowitz’s attacks against the university system, Henry Farrell finds that he concocts

I would add that Horowitz uses the conversion form to double-code his rhetoric in a totalizing manner. The political convert can be everything to everyone, using a language of tolerance and civility while employing an argument form with little deliberative space.

Under the conversion form, reflexivity becomes a directional journey and foregone conclusion. Horowitz’s generational rhetoric seeks to absolve conservative politics in a way that forgoes the possibility of ending up in different places. This time-based rhetoric therefore creates a gradual vision for knowledge production; deliberative encounters can do little to produce knowledge; only knowledge inductively generated over the course of decades has lasting value.

This time-based assumption helps Horowitz deal with possible objections about political flip-flopping. Changing one’s views, or “flip-flopping,” can constitute a lack of political consistency and balance.^[248] Paradoxically, Horowitz implies that as long as converts flop to the right side, these charges can be avoided. The conversion form’s religious history and undertones also come in handy here, absolving one’s political sins so that a grand change can be justified. Along with the double-coded, civil-religious discourse, the political convert’s efforts can be interpreted as being at the center and the periphery of societal influence. Converts are framed as experienced leaders at the forefront of public affairs and marginalized, countercultural advocates.

Ultimately, the political convert’s reflexivity has a stopping point. Horowitz weds reflexivity to the linear conversion form, presenting readers with only one political turn from which ensuing events are to be interpreted. The political conversion involved a period of deliberation, but the author’s political understandings are now firm, which goes against the endlessly reflexive standard that the narrative asserts. The second thoughts rhetoric effaces the possibilities for “third thoughts” and more. “Second thoughts” communicates an open-mindedness that is ironically unidirectional, with readers asked to take only one self-reflective turn. Overall, being able to turn and have second thoughts does not mean that knowledge has been attained, that second thoughts are necessarily more reliable, or that some distinctive mark should be attributed to the convert.

Second, the conversion form and maturity resource interact to make political transformation an experiential, naturalized matter of “growing up” that is beyond deliberation. A rhetoric of growth toggles ambiguously between one’s biological and political development, naturalizing the convert’s choices as parallel to his or her development as a human being—so that one’s beliefs can be seen as potentially dissonant or accordant with human nature. A deliberative problem is that the inductive conversion narrative looks to one’s a priori status as a human being before his or her actual arguments, dismissing the latter under the attributions of the former. The child/adult device, in particular, makes one’s political conversion seem normal and inevitable, with childhood terms offered less for deliberative encounter than as a motivist discharge of others’ actions.

These maturity terms appeal to both the “strict parent” and “nurturant parent” frameworks that George Lakoff says lie at the heart of U.S. liberal and conservative worldviews.^[249] Horowitz’s maturity resource meets these metaphorical demands by presenting the political convert as an experienced adult who can put the nation’s youth on the right path. This explains how and why Horowitz was the political activist to invent terms such as “compassionate conservatism” for the Republican movement, which simultaneously appeals to the strict traditionalist and nurturing care frames. The conversion form contributes to this double-coded rhetoric, with the convert straddling old and new paradigms in a way that transcends and incorporates both.

In drawing simple divides between children and adults, the conversion form tends to evade broader data and histories. Julia Vitullo-Martin critiques the selective history in RS, such as Horowitz’s “odd ignorance of the civil rights movement.” In its rush to cast the 1960s as a terrible decade, she claims that the book misses the

Others have also called Horowitz’s memory about the 1960s into question.^[251] As noted, Horowitz omits Watergate, Iran-Contra, and many other events that transpired between the 1960s and 1990s. These omissions complicate the narrative’s claim to reflexivity.

Maturity and growth rhetoric appropriates concepts such as “progress” and “progressive” from the left toward absolutist ends. RS urges that progress is more a matter of growing up and getting with the predetermined program than much else. In this vision, drawing a dichotomy between old and new is more than a simple lifestyle choice; it is a path to the balanced, right-minded development required of every human being. In so doing, the political convert employs a curious paradox between change and continuity, using a rhetoric of conversion to establish political permanence.

Public deliberation involves a general adherence to the belief that the future can be changed through symbolic action,^[252] but the conversion narrative creates a mature rhetoric that is anything but forward-looking. Horowitz says that human beings have no saving future that can change their nature.^[253] Since we cannot save ourselves in any way, why bother trying to create change in the world? To the author, the inability of politics to reach utopia necessarily curbs future feats. Concurrently, since the opposite of growth is atrophy, death, and decay, others who hold contrary views are dead to the potential for rhetorical exchange. Without the possibility of being informed by other beliefs, values, and attitudes, the discourse crafts a vision for political resignation rather than engagement.

RS does make a valid point about the need for empirical testing in the service of future design. Past experience is typically given presumption in debate.^[254] Compared with an unknown future, hindsight at least offers some knowledge and precedent for deliberation. A problem is that Horowitz uses the conversion form to dichotomize the Left and the Right on these matters—liberals are concerned only with a fantasy future, while conservatives remain properly concerned with the lessons of the past^[255]—when the two concerns are not mutually exclusive. Characterizing the Left as unconcerned with the past equally lacks fidelity. Much of the U.S. Left has concerned itself with centuries of bad policies regarding basic human rights on issues such as race,^[256] looking back in order to progress forward.

Last, the conversion form and psychological experience rhetoric draw lines between an old, abstract sociological worldview and a new, concrete narrative orientation. The personal becomes a locus for public engagement, and the bifurcated conversion form permits little room for both sociological and biographical-narrative modes to work together. The psychological, therapeutic language deepens the individualistic political vision by buttressing the convert’s claims to see more truly and deeply into the nature of human activity. At the same time, like Horowitz’s rendering of the Left as childlike, the psychological rhetoric reduces opponents’ actions to intransigent motives. Under these psychological layers, we are treated to, borrowing Kenneth Burke’s terms, a “procession of solemn, humorless caricatures” and the “slap[ping] together of various oversimplified schemes that reduce human motives to a few drives or urges or itches.”^[257] These fateful attributions are deepened by a civil-religious rhetoric making the Left religious, while Horowitz continues to draw from religious texts and the conversion form to maintain a thin threshold of generalized faith across the narrative.

Psychological experience additionally appropriates some aspects of feminist rhetoric toward conservative purposes, particularly standpoint theories and the language of consciousness-raising. These terms can appeal to wider audiences and mask the conversion form’s propagandistic emphases. Importantly, feminist language is divorced from its origins to serve a conservative cause that much feminist thought counters. Horowitz pulls from the resonance of these terms while occluding the feminist debates with which the terms are related. The conversion form tends not to place value upon the worth of communicative processes in coming to new political positions. In Horowitz’s case, we have a conversion narrative that is a discovering of internal and external essences to be adhered to, rather than generative political argumentation that avoids preordained, directional necessities.

One important final comment is warranted regarding the autobiography’s rhetorical strategies. We should be willing to give Horowitz the benefit of the doubt that he had a genuine change of heart based upon an examination of his earlier life experience. The deliberative problem with RS is that everybody can do that. Every person goes through processes of maturation—biologically, psychologically, and communicatively. But Horowitz’s rhetoric constructs these developmental standards through a conversion experience so that they become necessarily aligned with political positions. In personal or psychological terms, just as everyone undergoes changes that result in certain political positions (since there is a need for some footing, judgment, and certainty in life), people cannot engage only in reflexivity by itself, in perpetuity. Citizens have to land somewhere in their beliefs, carving out spaces for political affirmation and assent. Horowitz conflates the process of coming to new beliefs with an end state, however. In this sense, what Horowitz means by deliberation is communication about or toward a conclusion that one has already reached, with anything other than that seen as outside the scope of inquiry. Most politically active, culturally aware 1960s activists were going through the same process and were reflexively evaluating their experience of the 1950s to arrive at a different place.^[258] Yet Horowitz aligns this process singularly with conservatism, while attributing dogmatism to the Left.

Reflection and experience can certainly constitute good reasons in the public square, but they are not the only forms of knowledge. Part of maturity is seeing that one’s experience is also idiosyncratic; this knowledge needs to be tested against larger truths in the world. RS puts little faith in the testing of discourses. It is largely a “self-made” story that deflects engagement with others outside one’s own current perspective. Covering similar ground, Craig Martin finds that applying a distinction between one’s experiences and broader institutional claims to truth often “allows individuals to take their own local values and local hermeneutic (embedded of course in local interests and local battles), project them onto the world or interpret the world in terms of them, and as such mistake their creation for reality itself.”^[259] In other words, communicators can become blind to how much they are using their personal experiences to cover for everyone else’s. Likewise, Horowitz ends up caricaturing reflexivity, essentially saying, “I only remember those parts of my experience that lead me to where I am now, and I forget the other parts that complicate the picture.”

By tracing the cumulative interactions between the narrative’s rhetorical resources and the conversion form, I conclude that RS is a propagandistic text. Cotton Mather once remarked that “we our selves are the commentary.”^[260] There are perhaps few other communication strategies where fundamentalist selves and commentary come to align so closely as conversion rhetoric. Before moving to conclusions about what political conversion narratives contribute to our understandings of public discourse, it is worth pausing to consider a tale almost told. As a part of the same intertextual thread connecting Chambers, Podhoretz, and Horowitz, the next chapter covers a story that helps qualify our knowledge of the features and functions of political transformation rhetoric—in this case, by bypassing its seductions.

Notes

Horowitz, Radical Son, 376.

See Scott Sherman, “David Horowitz’s Long March,” Nation, June 15, 2000, www.thenation.com/article/david-horowitzs-long-march/, par. 9. Outside Horowitz’s press, other conservative authors have reflected RS’s second thoughts rhetoric. For example, conservative radio talk-show host Dennis Prager wrote a book called Think a Second Time (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).

Sanders Hicks, “Compassionate Communists and Cussing Conservatives,” Sanders
Hicks.com, www.sanderhicks.com/articles/horowitzint.html, 1.

Catherine Seipp, “Right Warrior,” National Review, April 15, 2005, www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.p?ref=/seipp/seipp200504150751.asp (no longer available), par. 15.

As one example, Sherman finds:

Horowitz has stepped into a new role: Republican Party theoretician. His pamphlet “The Art of Political War: How Republicans Can Fight to Win” is causing a stir on the right: Thirty-five state Republican Party chairmen have endorsed it, the Heritage Foundation sent 2,300 copies to conservative activists and House majority whip Tom DeLay provided copies to every Republican Congressional officeholder, with a cover note praising its contents. On April 5, Senators Arlen Specter, Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback, plus a dozen members of the House, hosted a soiree for Horowitz in Washington, at which $40,000 was raised for his activities. (Sherman, “David Horowitz’s Long March,” par. 7).

Horowitz, Radical Son, 443.

Ibid., 411.

Ibid., 377. Horowitz was also convinced by public figures such as P. J. O’Rourke, Irving Kristol, and Nathan Glazer. Charlton Heston “was another second-thoughter.” Ibid., 377, 429.

Ibid., 2. See also ibid., 401.

10.

Daniel Berger, “The Whittaker Chambers of Our Time,” Amazon.com, April 29, 2007, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par. 3.

11.

Sean Hackbarth, “Journey from Left to Right,” April 15, 2001, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par. 1.

12.

David (Joel) Horowitz, Biography Resource Center.

13.

David Horowitz, The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (New York: Hill & Wang, 1971).

14.

Jack E. White, “A Real, Live Bigot,” Time, August 22, 1999, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,29787,00.html, par. 5.

15.

“Interview with David Horowitz,” Chuck Baldwin Live, 1997, www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/horowitz.html (no longer available).

16.

Some of Horowitz’s other books include: David Horowitz, The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future (New York: Touchstone, 1998); Hating Whitey: And Other Progressive Causes (Dallas: Spence, 1999); Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001); Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (Dallas: Spence, 2003); Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004); The End of Time (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2005); and Indoctrination U: The Left’s War against Academic Freedom (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2007).

17.

David Horowitz, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2006); idem, “In Defense of Intellectual Diversity,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 10, 2004.

18.

Scott Jaschik, “Tattered Poster Child,” Inside Higher Education, November 29, 2005; idem, “Retractions from David Horowitz,” Inside Higher Education, January 11, 2006; David Horowitz, “Some of Our Facts Were Wrong: Our Point Was Right,” Front Page Magazine, March 15, 2005; Nicholas Lemann, “On Balance: At the J-Schools: The Case against Ideological Engineering,” Columbia Journalism Review 44 (2006): 16–17.

19.

See Duncan Campbell, “Right Turn,” Guardian, May 30, 2001; Jeff Jacoby, “Smear Victim Fights Back,” Boston Globe, September 2, 1999; Alex S. Jones, “A Painful Irony: The Media’s Moral Obligations,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 6 (2001): 3–7; Robert Stacey McCain, “Contrarian Controversy,” Insight on the News, November 15, 1999.

20.

John Gorenfeld, “Roger Ebert and Mohammed Atta, Partners in Crime,” Salon, April 12, 2005, www.salon.com/2005/04/12/horowitz_database/.

21.

Ibid., par. 8.

22.

David Horowitz, “Can There Be a Decent Left? Michael Walzer’s Second Thoughts,” FrontPageMagazine.com, 2002, www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=1011, par. 1.

23.

Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the ‘60s (New York: Free Press, 1989).

24.

Philip Abbott, “A ‘Long and Winding Road’: Bill Clinton and the 1960s,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9 (2006): 4.

25.

Nicolaus Mills, “Scornful of the ‘60s,” Christian Science Monitor, June 9, 1997, par. 1, 5.

26.

Edward Morgan, The 60s Experience: Hard Lessons about Modern America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 9.

27.

“Interview with David Horowitz,” par. 60; Mills, “Scornful of the ‘60s,” par. 9. In a study, Bernard von Bothmer finds that “between 1980 and 2004, liberals and conservatives used selective memories of separate portions of the ‘The Sixties’ (1960 to 1974) to gather voter support for candidates and justify policy positions.” While “liberals evoked the positive associations of ‘the good sixties’ (1960–1963) . . . conservatives called up the specter of ‘the bad sixties’ (1964–1974).” Bernard von Bothmer, “Blaming ‘The Sixties’: The Political Use of an Era, 1980–2004” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2007), abstract, par. 3.

28.

Jason D. Roberts, “Disillusioned Radicals: The Intellectual Odyssey of Todd Gitlin, Ronald Radosh and David Horowitz” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 2007), 245.

29.

Horowitz, Radical Son, 442. Linking conversion experiences and violence, William James once noted that “emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental arrangements.” James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 198.

30.

“Interview with David Horowitz,” par. 17.

31.

Tandy McConnell, “Introduction,” vol. 10 of American Decades, ed. Judith S. Baughman et al. (Detroit: Gale, 2001), par. 1.

32.

Ibid., par. 7, 2–6.

33.

Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Modern Library, 1954); Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations,” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952).

34.

G. Thomas Goodnight, “Generational Argument,” in Argumentation: Across the Lines of Discipline, ed. Franz H. van Eemeren et al. (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Foris, 1986), 134.

35.

Ibid., 141.

36.

Glenn Wallach, Obedient Sons: The Discourse of Youth and Generations in American Culture, 1630–1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 2.

37.

Philip J. Greven, “Youth, Maturity, and Religious Conversion: A Note on the Ages of Converts in Andover, Massachusetts, 1711–1749,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 108 (1972): 129; Stephen R. Grossbart, “Seeking the Divine Favor: Conversion and Church Admission in Eastern Connecticut, 1711–1832,” William and Mary Quarterly 46 (1989): 730.

38.

Horowitz, Radical Son, x.

39.

Wallach, Obedient Sons, 7.

40.

Ibid., 8.

41.

Ibid., 12; emphasis in original.

42.

George B. Forgie, “Father Past and Child Nation: The Romantic Imagination and the Origins of the American Civil War” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1972), 153.

43.

Wallach, Obedient Sons, 15, 13.

44.

P. Berger, The Heretical Imperative, 172, 64.

45.

Ibid., 128.

46.

Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 233.

47.

Ibid., 235.

48.

Out of 171 reviews of RS on Amazon.com, 71 percent gave it five stars. “Customer Reviews: Radical Son,” www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/dp/0684840057/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1516075847&sr=8–1&keywords=radical+son. One reviewer, Bnewell, claims: “I will forever frame my vision of contemporary politics through the lens David so masterfully created.” Another, Sane 54, asserts that “this is one of the most mind-altering things I’ve ever read. . . . [I]t makes utterly believable a thesis I would have formerly thought ridiculous.” Similarly, reflecting the autobiography’s conversion language, Knitwit says: “[T]hank you David for showing me the light at the end of the tunnel, instead of the tunnel at the end of the light.” Falcoff argues that “Radical Son is the most remarkable testament of its kind since Whittaker Chambers’s Witness, a book which it resembles in more ways than one.” Breitenbach, too, claims that RS is a “sensitive and forthright autobiography of a Sixties radical who later came to have second thoughts about his political philosophy.” Jerome R. Breitenbach, “Suggested and Nonsuggested Reading,” September 13, 2005, under “Politics and Current Events,” https://courseware.ee.calpoly.edu/emeritus/jbreiten/sugread.html, par. 6. Lewy praises Horowitz, who “bares these trials with Rousseau-like candor and fervor.” Guenter Lewy, “Radical Son,” National Interest 49 (1997), http://nationalinterest.org/bookreview/another-country-review-of-david-horowitzs-radical-son-a-journey-through-our-time-780, par. 3, 7. An academic finds that RS “is a sobering and moving account of America’s cultural revolution from the moral high points to the sociopathic low points. . . . Students need an alternative to the triumphalist narrative of the Sixties, and this is one of the best.” Mark Bauerlein, “An Anti-progressive Syllabus,” Inside Higher Ed, July 5, 2007, www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/07/05/anti-progressive-syllabus, par. 16. A blogger writes that RS “really woke me up about my own upbringing and gave me a compatriot.” Jonathan Adler, “When Michael Met David,” The Volokh Conspiracy, December 7, 2006, under “liberty,” par. 2 and “the rut,” par. 1, www.volokh.com/posts/1165502003.shtml. To Olson, this is “a document of the first importance for understanding the legacy of ’60s radicalism.” Ray Olson, “Radical Son: A Journey through Our Times,” Booklist, January 1, 1997, 813. Noting the generational theme, another reviewer says that it is “the foremost manual on how the 1960s generation completely destroyed this country.” Alwayscowgirl, “Horowitz Was Right,” Amazon.com, September 21, 2008, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057
/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par. 1. Comporting with Horowitz’s university project, another review explains that “it is necessary reading for those who wish to understand how the extreme left operated in the Vietnam era AND how the extreme left is operating today. . . . The renascent New Left described by Horowitz above resides in the colleges and universities of the United States.” RFLaird, “Archives,” May 9, 2004, Instapunk, www.instapunk.com/archives/InstaPunkArchiveV2.php3?a=83 (no longer available). One critic urges: “[W]hatever mistakes he has made—or continues to make—in life, he committed few of them in the shape and ring of Radical Son’s very affecting paragraphs.” Sanford Pinsker, “Still Crazy (or Fuming) after All These Years,” Georgia Review 51 (1997): 358.

49.

Julia Vitullo-Martin, “Radical Son: A Journey through Our Times,” Commonweal, June 4, 2004, www.commonwealmagazine.org/radical-son; S. Hicks, “Compassionate Communists”; Jack Shafer, “David Horowitz: Sore Winner,” Slate, June 5, 1997, www.slate.com/id/1000016.

50.

See David M. Oshinsky, “Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey,” New Leader, December 16, 1996, 5–8.

51.

John Reilly, “World’s Oldest Red Diaper Baby Tells All,” JohnReilly, 1997, www.johnreilly.info/rsdh.htm (no longer available); Orrin Judd, “Orrin’s All-Time Top Ten List—Non-Fiction/Conservative Thought,” Brothersjudd, February 9, 2001, http://brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/969/Witness.htm, par. 16.

52.

Vitullo-Martin, “Radical Son,” par. 7; Pinsker, “Still Crazy,” 358; Robert D. Archer, “When You Get Down to It, Just Another Extremist,” Amazon.com, January 7, 2009, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr _acr_ txt ?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par. 1; Brad Fuller, “Two Poles of Ideological Extremism,” Amazon.com, January 1, 2000, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par. 1; Michael W. Lynch, “Capital Letters: Aging Radicals,” Reason, July 2000, www.reason.com/news/show/27760.html, par. 5.

53.

See, e.g., Burke, Permanence and Change; Golden, Berquist, and Coleman, “Secular and Religious Conversion”; Ch. Griffin, “The Rhetoric of Form in Conversion Narratives”; McGee, “Witnessing and Ethos”; Jasinski, Sourcebook on Rhetoric.

54.

While I agree with scholars such as Thomas Benson that autobiography synthesizes the fragmentation of one’s life experience, I do not think that it necessarily produces “a fully rhetorical action to which Being (and becoming), Knowing, and Doing contribute equally” (13). Horowitz’s rhetoric places knowing above being—an epistemological trumping in his conversion account. Thomas W. Benson (1974), “Rhetoric and Autobiography.”

55.

Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner, The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology, 322. Showing a common concern for self-referentiality, see also A. Johnson, The Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology, 255.

56.

Horowitz, Radical Son, 438.

57.

Michael Lynch, “Against Reflexivity as an Academic Virtue and Source of Privileged Knowledge,” Theory, Culture, and Society 17 (2000): 34.

58.

Ibid., 26.

59.

Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), 6.

60.

Orrin Judd, “Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey (1997),” BrothersJudd, January 27, 2001, www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/103, par. 1; emphasis added.

61.

This proposition bears similarities to Burke’s concept of “casuistic stretching.” Burke, Attitudes toward History.

62.

Horowitz, Radical Son, 273.

63.

Horowitz even labels his experience as between “old” and “new” lives, in terms of breaking himself into two parts and going back and forth between these lives until he could no longer keep them consistent. Ibid., 289, 290.

64.

Ibid., 400.

65.

Ibid., 399; emphasis added.

Ibid., 164.

Ibid., 337.

Ibid., 45, 46.

Ibid., 71.

Ibid., 297.

Ibid., 387.

Ibid., 427; emphasis in original.

73.

Ibid.

74.

Ibid., 428.

75.

Ibid., 370; emphasis in original.

76.

Ibid., 302, 307, 306. Elsewhere in the narrative, Horowitz makes reflective attentiveness to history a sine qua non of his political conversion, arguing that the Left simply did not care for the past. Later, he draws the conclusion that progressives are concerned only with a fantasy future, as opposed to conservatism’s proper reflections on the lessons of the past. Ibid., 337, 396.

77.

Ibid., 400.

78.

Ibid., 326.

79.

Goodnight, “The Liberal and the Conservative Presumptions,” 313.

80.

Ibid., 323–24.

81.

Horowitz, Radical Son, 425. See also ibid., 305.

82.

R. Lake, “The Metaethical Framework of Anti-abortion Rhetoric,” 494.

83.

Ibid., 494, 496.

84.

Horowitz, Radical Son, 44.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 440.

On “cosmopolitan communication,” see Pearce, Communication and the Human Condition, 167–206.

89.

Horowitz, Radical Son, 44.

90.

Michael Wallace, “Ronald Reagan and the Politics of History,” Tikkun 2 (1987): 17.

91.

See Fisher, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm,” 8.

92.

Branham, “The Role of the Convert in Eclipse of Reason and The Silent Scream,” 418.

93.

Horowitz, Radical Son, 374.

94.

Ibid., 113, 396, 361.

Ibid., 381.

Ibid., 368.

Ibid., 407.

On the language of “counterculture,” see Albert and Albert, eds., The Sixties Papers, 15–22.

99.

Reilly, “World’s Oldest,” par. 17.

100.

Oneida J. Meranto, “Commentary: The Third Wave of McCarthyism: Co-Opting the Language of Inclusivity,” New Political Science 27 (2005): 230.

101.

See Kosterlitz, “Bush’s Left Right-Hand Men,” 1304. See also Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

102.

On standpoint theory, see Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint,” in Discovering Reality, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (London: D. Reidel, 1983), 283–310.

103.

T. Bowell, “Feminist Standpoint Theory,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d., www.iep.utm.edu/fem-stan/, par. 1.

104.

C. Caldwell, “Renegade,” par. 15.

105.

Sanford Pinsker, “Coming Clean about the Late Sixties,” Partisan Review 65 (1998): 325, 326.

106.

James Bowman, “Radical Son,” National Review, March 24, 1997, 50.

107.

Tendays Komyathy, “‘Fusion and Unity—This Was the Cry of My Father’s Communist Heart,’ Writes Horowitz, ‘His Unquenchable Longing to Belong,’” Amazon.com, July 5, 2008, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horo witz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=d4p_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showView points=1, par. 1.

108.

Monaldo, “Radical Son,” par. 13; emphasis added.

109.

John Walker, “Reading List: Radical Son,” Fourmilog, March 16, 2007, www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/2007–03/000821.html, par. 6.

110.

Bonnie M. Parsley, “A Life Transformed by Truth,” Amazon.com, November 12, 2007, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/06 84840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par. 1.

111.

Johnny “Uncle Johnny,” “Introspective, Insightful & Intellectually Honest,” par. 1.

112.

Wes Wynne, “David Horowitz’s Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey,” www.contumacy.org/1BookRev.html (no longer available).

113.

R. Coleman, “Coming Home,” Amazon.com, October 22, 2004, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews0684840057ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie
=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par. 1; emphasis added.

114.

Judd, “Radical Son,” par. 5.

115.

Elektrophyte, “Remarkable,” Amazon.com, June 23, 2005, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par.1.

116.

Leonard Bushkoff, “60s Radical Still Shuns Moderation,” Christian Science Monitor, April 7, 1997, 13.

117.

Jeff Coulter, “Why I Am Not a Right-Winger: A Response to David Horowitz,” New Political Science 20 (1998): 97, 98; emphasis added.

118.

Ibid., 99, 110.

119.

Lynch, “Against Reflexivity,” 42; emphasis added.

120.

Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 12.

121.

Ibid., 9.

122.

Horowitz, Radical Son, 440.

123.

For example, Horowitz explains that his political growth involved acting more conservatively than his radical colleagues while he was a member of the New Left, since his family life kept him from being overly radical. Ibid., 171.

124.

Ibid., 103; emphasis added.

Ibid., 410.

Ibid., 279.

Ibid., 33.

McGee, “Witnessing and Ethos.”

129.

For a brief history of progressives and terms of progress in politics, see William J. Kelleher, Progressive Logic: Framing a Unified Field Theory of Values for Progressives (La Canada, CA: Empathic Science Institute, 2005); William G. Anderson, “Progressivism: An Historiographical Essay,” History Teacher 6 (1973): 427–52.

130.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N. H. Keeble (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

131.

Adam Jentleson, “Sen. Lamar Alexander David Horowitz,” Center for American Progress, April 18, 2006, http://thinkprogress.org/2006/04/18/alexander-horowitz, par. 6.

132.

Wayne Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 25.

133.

Horowitz, Radical Son, 3.

134.

Ibid., 444.

135.

Ted G. Jelen, “Political Esperanto: Rhetorical Resources and Limitations of the Christian Right in the United States,” Sociology of Religion 66 (2005): 303–21.

136.

Horowitz, Radical Son, x.

Ibid., 118.

Ibid., 171.

Ibid., 45.

Ibid., 206.

R. Lake, “Order and Disorder in Anti-abortion Rhetoric.” See also Jean Goodwin, “Three Faces of the Future,” Argumentation and Advocacy 37 (2000): 75.

142.

Horowitz, Radical Son, 381.

Ibid., 445.

Ibid., 191.

Ibid., 381.

Ibid., 18.

Ibid., 32; emphasis in original.

Ibid., 394–95.

Ibid., 25.

Ibid., 52.

Ibid., 396.

Ibid., 47.

Ibid., 59.

Finn, From Death to Rebirth, 254.

155.

Ibid., 261.

156.

Horowitz, Radical Son, 173.

Ibid., 80.

Ibid., 168.

Ibid., 414.

Ibid., 446; emphasis added.

161.

“Children,” Bible.com, n.d., www.bible.com/search/bible?page=1&q=children&version
_id=1.

162.

1 Cor. 13:11 [KJV], BibleHub, n.d., http://bible.cc/1_corinthians/13–11.htm; emphasis added.

163.

See “Luke 15:11–32” [KJV], Biblegateway.com, n.d., www.biblegateway.com
/passage/?search=Luke%2015:11–32&version=KJV. In the autobiography’s conclusion, Horowitz sits with memorabilia from his father and discovers, tellingly, “what turned out to be my father’s posthumous gift of healing to his prodigal son.” Horowitz, Radical Son, 435.

164.

There is an allusion toward and citation of the Old Testament biblical figure of David provided at one point in the autobiography. Ibid., 33.

165.

Ibid., 445.

166.

See Domke and Coe, The God Strategy.

167.

Horowitz, Radical Son, 432.

168.

A Customer, “More Proof that ‘Liberalism’ Is So Much Let’s Pretend,” Amazon.com, August 31, 1999, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-
reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par. 1; emphasis added.

169.

Bowman, “Radical Son,” par. 1.

170.

Ibid., par. 7, 9.

171.

“Speaking of Sidney Blumenthal,” New Criterion 15 (April 1997), www.newcriterion.com/issues/1997/4/speaking-of-sydney-blumenthal, par. 4.

172.

Jenny M. Hatch, “I Have Come Full Circle,” Amazon.com, December 23, 2003, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1.

173.

Dave Duffy, “Confessions of a Former Liberal,” Backwoods Home Magazine, 1998, www.backwoodshome.com/articles/duffy50.html, pars. 15, 1.

174.

Paul Rosa, “Covenant Son,” New Prospect Church, March 2, 2007, www.newprospectchurch.org/sermon1.html (no longer available).

175.

^{Justin Raimondo, “David Horowitz, Crybaby,” Antiwar.com, January 5, 2004, www.antiwar.com/blog/2004/01/05/david-horowitz-crybaby.}

176.

^{J. Coulter, “Why I Am Not a Right-Winger,” 115.}

177.

^{Wallach, Obedient Sons, 154, 157.}

178.

^{Often quoted, Kristol once said that “a neoconservative is a liberal who has been
mugged by reality.” Kristol, Reflections of a Neoconservative, 75.}

179.

^{See, e.g., Karen A. Foss, Sonia K. Foss, and Cindy L. Griffin, Feminist Rhetorical Theories (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999); Cindy L. Griffin, “Rhetoricizing Alienation: Mary
Wollstonecraft and the Rhetorical Construction of Women’s Oppression,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 293–312; Carol Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political,” in The “Second Wave” and Beyond, 2006, http://scholar.alexanderstreet.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=2259 (no longer
available); Bonnie J. Dow and Mari Boor Tonn, “‘Feminine Style’ and Political Judgment
in the Rhetoric of Ann Richards,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 286–302.}

180.

^{Horowitz, Radical Son, 423. Horowitz further shares that his father frowned upon his biographies, thinking
that his son should write books about the world economic crisis. Ibid., 285.}

181.

^{Ibid., 439, 270, 258.}

182.

^{Ibid., 216.}

183.

^{Ibid., 423.}

184.

^{Ibid., 316. See also ibid., 113.}

^{Ibid., 435.}

^{Ibid., 139.}

^{Ibid., 317.}

^{Randall Rothenberg, “Ad in Campus Papers Stokes Protest, but on Wrong Issue,” Advertising Age 72 (2001): 26.}

189.

^{Horowitz, Radical Son, 282.}

^{Ibid., 336.}

^{Ibid., 371.}

^{Ibid., 218.}

^{Ibid., 50.}

^{Ibid., 3, 11–12, 46, 254.}

195.

^{Ibid., 175.}

196.

^{Ibid., 335. RS was published in the 1990s, when President Clinton also used much therapeutic rhetoric.
Abbott, “A ‘Long and Winding Road,’” 7.}

197.

^{Horowitz, Radical Son, 212.}

198.

^{See Burke, “(Nonsymbolic) Motion”; K. Campbell, “The Ontological Foundations of Rhetorical
Theory.”}

199.

^{P. Berger, The Heretical Imperative, 105.}

200.

^{Horowitz, Radical Son, 394, 411.}

201.

^{Randall A. Lake and Barbara A. Pickering, “The Anti(Abortion) Public Sphere,” in Arguing Communication & Culture, ed. G. Thomas Goodnight (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 2001),
480, 481.}

202.

^{Horowitz, Radical Son, 39.}

^{Ibid., 324.}

^{Ibid., 415.}

^{Ibid., 360.}

^{Ibid., 44.}

^{Ibid., 430.}

^{Ibid., 429.}

^{Ibid., 289.}

^{Ibid., 87.}

^{Ibid., 400.}

^{I borrow from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of Republic here. Plato, Republic, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), 1132–55.}

213.

^{Horowitz, Radical Son, 99.}

214.

^{Ibid., 88; emphasis added.}

^{Ibid., 50.}

^{Ibid., 170.}

^{Ibid., 216, 204.}

^{Ibid., 88; emphasis in original.}

219.

^Ibid.

220.

^{On the origin of the phrase “the personal is political” in relation to the 1960s (especially
the feminist movement), see Hanisch, “The Personal Is Political.”}

221.

^{Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint,” 283–310.}

222.

^{Gregg, “The Ego-Function of the Rhetoric of Protest,” 81.}

223.

^{James W. Chesebro, John F. Cragan, and Patricia W. McCullough, “The Small Group Technique
of the Radical Revolutionary: A Synthetic Study of Consciousness Raising,” Communication Monographs 40 (1973): 136, 137.}

224.

^{Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women’s Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Communication Studies 2 (1999): 131.}

225.

^{Celinda Lake and Matt Price, “Snapshot: The Women’s Vote, 2008,” Ms. Magazine, Spring 2008, www.msmagazine.com/spring2008/reallyWant_celindaLake.asp.}

226.

^{Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972), 129–42.}

227.

^{Horowitz, Radical Son, 289.}

228.

^{George Lakoff, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).}

229.

^{Wallach, Obedient Sons, 8.}

230.

^{A Customer, “An Extremely Perceptive and Well Written Book,” Amazon.com, May 2, 1997,
www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684
840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par.1.}

231.

^{Bernard Chapin, “Thank God for His Journey,” Amazon.com, August 6, 2007, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/06848
40057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par. 4.}

232.

^{Martin Asiner, “Radical from Both Sides,” Amazon.com, February 21, 2009, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1,
par. 2.}

233.

^{P. McGuinness, “A Genuinely Profound Autobiography,” Amazon.com, July 11, 2004, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1,
par. 1.}

234.

^{Neo-neocon, “More from Radical Son,” http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com/2005/06/more-from-radical-son.html, par. 4.}

235.

^{Kenneth Sohl, “Out from Under the Rock,” Amazon.com, March 20, 2006, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1,
par. 1.}

236.

^{“Speaking of Sidney Blumenthal,” par. 5.}

237.

^{“Horowitz—the End of Time,” Wizblog, May 20, 2005, www.danwismar.com/archives/wizblog/003685.html.}

238.

^{Kent Worcester, “Radical Son: A Journey through Our Times,” Library Journal 121 (1996): 108.}

239.

^{Jonathan Yardley, “Strife with Father,” Washington Post, February 9, 1997, X03.}

240.

^{A Customer, “Hilariously Awful,” Amazon.com, December 11, 1999, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1,
par. 1.}

241.

^{Tim Lieder, “Hmm,” Amazon.com, May 10, 2000, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=
UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par. 2.}

242.

^{James Tilley, “Political Generations and Partisanship in the UK, 1964–1997,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 165 (2002): 121. Tilley incorrectly attributes this statement to Winston Churchill,
as do many others. See “Quotes Falsely Attributed to Winston Churchill,” International Churchill Society, n.d., www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/quotes-
falsely-attributed/. Apparently, John Adams and Francois Guizot, among others, had
a hand in the statement’s origination. Fred Shapiro, “John Adams Said It First,” Freakonomics,
August 25, 2011, http://freakonomics.com/2011/08/25/john-adams-said-it-first/.}

243.

^{See R. Lake, “The Metaethical Framework”; idem, “Order and Disorder.”}

244.

^{Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference, ed. idem (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 71, 72.}

245.

^{Stephen G. Olbrys, “Dissoi Logoi, Civic Friendship, and the Politics of Education,” Communication Education 55 (2006): 358, 363, 367.}

246.

^{M. Capps, Jr., “Great Book for Understanding the Counter Culture,” Amazon.com, December
7, 2004, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-
reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par.1.}

247.

^{Henry Farrell, “Why We Shouldn’t Play Nice with David Horowitz: A Response to What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts,” Crooked Timber, June 11, 2007, http://crooked
timber.org/2007/06/11/why-we-shouldn%e2%80%99t-play-nice-with-david-horowitz-a-re
sponse-to-what%e2%80%99s-liberal-about-the-liberal-arts/#more-5963 , par. 23.}

248.

^{Slain, “So . . . He Is a Flip Flopper?” Amazon.com, July 3, 2007, www.amazon.com/Radical-Son-Generational-David-Horowitz/product-reviews/0684840057/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_
acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1, par. 1.}

249.

^{George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant! (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004).}

250.

^{Vitullo-Martin, “Radical Son,” par. 8, 12.}

251.

^{Hicks finds that Chambers is selective about the Black Panthers’ history—failing to
mention that it was monitored by the FBI, speeding its organizational decline. S.
Hicks, “Compassionate Communists,” 1. Shafer takes issue with Horowitz’s assertions
about how “Democrats supported the Black Panthers and progressives funded them, and
that the Panthers turned out to be murderous swine. This is news? It’s the conventional wisdom . . . [that Horowitz] didn’t go public with his suspicions about the Panthers until he co-wrote
a March 1981 feature in New West magazine. That story came three years after New Times
magazine printed its July 10, 1978, expose of the group.” Shafer, “David Horowitz,”
par. 2–4; emphasis in original.}

252.

^{Asen, “Toward a Normative Conception of Difference in Public Deliberation.”}

253.

^{Horowitz, Radical Son, 276; emphasis in original.}

254.

^{Thomas A. Hollihan and Kevin T. Baaske, Arguments and Arguing (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2005); Goodnight, “The Liberal and the Conservative Presumptions,”
304–37.}

255.

^{See Horowitz, Radical Son, 396, 356, 360.}

256.

^{See Edw. Morgan, The 60s Experience.}

257.

^{Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, 299.}

258.

^{See Edw. Morgan, The 60s Experience.}

259.

C. Martin, “Williams James in Late Capitalism,” 186.

260.

^{Cotton Mather, Successive Generations: Remarks upon the Changes of a Dying World, Made by One Generation
Passing Off and Another Generation Coming On (Boston: B. Green, 1715), 1; emphasis in original.}

Political Conversion as Generational Induction

Horowitz’s Life and Times

Radical Son as Deliberation

Perfecting the Form: Horowitz’sRhetorical Resources

A New Reflective Ability: Reflexivity

Crossing Personal with Political Development: Maturity

Extrapolating One’s Self: Psychological Experience

Conclusion

Notes

Political Conversion as
Generational Induction

Perfecting the Form: Horowitz’s
Rhetorical Resources