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The Middle of the Journey and the End of the Line
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15228 |
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BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1989 |
3,473 Words |
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Alexander Bloom
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It became a rite of passage in the years after World War II for former thirties' radical-intellectuals to write about their connections to and abandonment of the Left. This form of literary passage into mainstream American society has been resurrected--along with a good deal more of fifties rhetoric--by Peter Collier and David Horowitz in Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties. I have argued elsewhere (including THE WORLD &I [October, 1986]) about the connections between the issues raised by contemporary neoconservatives and by fifties' liberal anticommunists. With this book, Collier and Horowitz are not only trying to align their ideas with Irving Kristol's and Norman Podhoretz's, they are lining up the patterns of their lives.
The last chapter of Destructive Generation, "The Middle of the Journey," takes its name from Lionel Trilling's novel of the simultaneous rejection of radicalism and coming to middle age of a group of thirties radicals. Trilling's identification as a neoconservative has always been a matter of some debate: Some claim him, others steadfastly reject his inclusion. What is striking is that it is not Trilling's later writings on culture--the ideas usually identified with neconservatism--that draw Collier and Horowitz. It is this 1947 novel. Collier and Horowitz see themselves in the "middle" of their own journey, rejecting their sixties radicalism and coming to terms with their own middle age.
According to the dual coordinates of age and politics, Collier and Horowitz have gone from lower left to middle right. They intend their book to show the intellectual rationale for their rightward movement; how they became the infamous "Lefties for Reagan." In the end, however, their book is probably more about the other path they have traveled, what was involved for them personally as they moved along the ascending line of age.
There is a secret heart in Destructive Generation. This is not really a book about rethinking a decade. It is the effort of two ex-radicals to come to terms with their pasts, their own fathers, and their country. Despite its rhetorical excesses and strident politicizing, in the end it is the image of maturity that Collier and Horowitz want us to come away with. That they seek to develop these personal arguments by employing a political sledgehammer is the book's biggest failing. All its other serious faults--distortion, exaggeration, sensationalism, repetition--fall beneath this major problem. This is a book about personal lives masquerading as political analysis.
The 'Right' Choice
In the sixties, Collier and Horowitz made relatively significant names for themselves as editors of Ramparts, the San Francisco based popular magazine of the New Left. In addition, Horowitz was well known for works important to emerging revisionist thinking coming our of the New Left, particularly Empire and Revolution and Free World Colossus. In more recent years, they have hit the best-seller lists with biographies of the Rockefeller, Kennedy, and Ford families. In political circles, however, their most famous movement occurred in 1985, when they published "Lefties for Reagan" in the Washington Post Magazine. Widely reprinted, this article marked the most notable apostasy from New Left to New Right. Collier and Horowitz followed by sponsoring a "Second Thoughts" conference in 1987, which brought such neoconservative bigwigs as Podhoretz, Kristol, and Hilton
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