Radical Son : A Generational Odyssey by David Horowitz

Amazon.com
David Horowitz, onetime leftist radical turned Reagan Republican and current rider of the college conservative speaking circuit, has written a tell-all biography about his political transformation. What is most interesting about his book is not the dramatic change that transpires in his thinking--his idols go from Huey Newton to Irving Kristol, his Marx is exchanged for Hayek--but rather the fascinating way his mindset stays constant while he changes his political stripes. His dogmatism is a constant, his sense of himself as hero and martyr unrelenting. A righteousness that led him to embrace statist flavors of socialism as a youth feeds into his self-righteous condemnations as an adult. It is not difficult to see how the romantic self-absorption he once embraced could turn to self-importance with age. At times, his recriminations are painful to read: he blames his fellow radicals for his own lack of courage, uses his father as an excuse for giving up on his marriage (the first of three)--"Like his father, he was unable to become the master of his own life. I was not going to be like that... I wanted out," .and in the very next paragraph lays the blame on the culture he had helped create. By the time Horowitz describes his State Department field trip to Nicaragua to talk to the contras about the dangers of New-Leftism, or characterizes Christopher Hitchens as "a soldier in the radical army," his book has indeed become an interesting study in political psychology, but not in the way he had likely intended.

OxfordBooks.com / Oxford, MS

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