Peter Collier’s note: The basic facts of David Horowitz’s political odyssey, one of the most significant of the last forty years, are well known. A “red diaper baby” who grew up in what he has called the ghetto of communism, he became a leading Marxist “theorist” in the early 1960s and one of the godfathers of the New Left. But following America’s defeat in Vietnam, Horowitz began to reevaluate the damage those commitments had done to the country.
The Black Book of the American Left is the result of that concerted intellectual effort. It collects all of Horowitz’s conservative writings over the last thirty years—at once a sharp incision to the heart of the Left’s agenda; an exploration of routes conservatives might take in response to their permanent assault on America; and a unique trip log showing the evolving intellectual journey of one of our bravest and most original thinkers.
In Volume I of these writings, My Life And Times, Horowitz reflects on the years he spent at war with his own country collaborating with and confronting radical figures like Huey Newton, Tom Hayden and Billy Ayers, as he made his transition from what the writer Paul Berman described as the American Left’s “most important theorist” to its most determined enemy.
Preface to The Black Book of the American Left
By David Horowitz
The idea for these volumes came about as the result of a self-inventory undertaken to map the development of my political views over the last thirty years. This inquiry involved a survey of all the articles and essays I had written as a conservative, that is since the day Peter Collier and I published a cover story in the Washington Post Magazine announcing our “second thoughts” about the left and our departure from its ranks. These writings, which were assembled with the indispensable help of Mike Bauer, added up to more than 690 articles and essays, and a million and a half words. Some were lengthy considerations of “big” issues, others reactions to current events, and some were polemical responses to political opponents. But when I had looked over this body of work, I realized that virtually everything I had written was really about one subject: the American left.
[…]
