David Horowitz (1) (1939–2025)

Horowitz's journey from radical to, shall we say, right of center really resonated with me. Like Horowitz, my best friend in childhood was a "red diaper" baby, a child of committed communists. Her family would take me along to political rallies, including one featuring Angela Davis, a Communist candidate for president. It was as if my friend Jenny was an exile in her own country--terribly estranged from America. At one point, both of us as eleven-year-olds had a crush on Captain Kirk--that show more is until her parents explained to her that Star Trek was evil American militarist propaganda. Even All in the Family was not to be tolerated--as my friend earnestly told me, her mother reminded her it made people "laugh at racism." Of course humor is a time-honored form of political dissent--but there was something so solemn, so religious about their form of Communism. Every year, even though they were nominally Jewish, they'd have a Christmas Tree, and at the top of the tree--I kid you not--was a red star and anchor. And when my Puerto Rican working-class family saved enough to move out of our crime-ridden childhood neighborhood, my friend denounced me as a traitor to my class.

So you can see why I strongly identified with Horowitz's life-story. It made sense of so many things remembered from my childhood. And Horowitz definitely had an interesting perch. He was the editor for a time of the New Left magazine Ramparts and rubbed shoulders with lots of Marxist personalities in Europe and America. His turning point came in his involvement with the Black Panthers when a friend was murdered by them. Even after that, it took a while before he emerged as an activist on the right. I can remember him describing how he felt he was finally at home in America. I suspect the same could not be said of my childhood friend. show less

According to his mother, Henry Ford was a "born mechanic." His father, brothers, and sisters were less charitable, for Henry would have every clock or toy with a wind-up mechanism in pieces, which he would then attempt to reassemble. He was an inveterate experimenter. Once, dissatisfied with his father's explanation of what would happen if he plugged up the hole on the teakettle when boiling water, Henry did so. The kettle blew up spewing boiling water and shrapnel into his cheek.

Peter show more Collier and David Horowitz retell these and other stories in The Fords: An American Epic. I had heard Collier interviewed about his new family history of the Roosevelts on Brian Lamb's Booknotes. I was intrigued so I ordered all of Collier's previous histories.

Ford was constantly tinkering with cars, and it is ironic that he made his name racing cars that broke all the existing speed records, though driving them scared him to death, convincing him, perhaps, that small, reliable, efficient, and safe cars were what he wanted to build. He was also a visionary who realized the enormous effect a cheap vehicle would have on the society. "The proper system, as I have it in mind, is to get the car to the people... just as one pin is like another pin when it comes from the pin factory."

Ford was not the inventor of the assembly line. It was actually the conception of several others, but he was the first to realize its potential. More significant was his early attitude toward his employees. Much to the consternation of his competitors, he doubled his workers' salaries at a time of labor unrest. The idea was not his, but that of James Couzens, his business manager. Ford had to be persuaded as to the amount ($2.50 to $5.00), but immediately Ford realized its benefits, for it turned his workers into immediate allies and part of the middle class, making them able to buy his product, which kept dropping in price. The reaction was mixed among the business community. The Wall Street Journal, in a classic statement of rapacity disguised as religion, editorialized that Ford's raises were "blatantly immoral, a misapplication of Biblical principles in a field where 'they don't belong."'

Another Ford innovation was his Sociological Department. Ford believed that he could renovate humans. He would hire ex-cons and other social misfits, believing that a good job could resurrect any soul. His "social workers" would visit the homes of his workers to paternalistically verify they were using their money wisely, investing, saving, educating themselves, and becoming better citizens. "I do not believe in charity, but! do believe in the regenerating power of work in men's lives."

The Ford family story reflects some of the benefits of a single-owner business: better focus, ability to plow more money into the company. That single-minded focus can also become an albatross, and so it was in Henry Ford's case. He refused to see the changes in American culture that no longer regarded the car as a mechanism to get from one place to another - a role the Model T fulfilled very nicely - but as emblems of status and comfort. Henry's son Edsel saw these changes, and as president of the company, tried to implement some of them, but a power struggle (not much of a struggle really with Henry holding all the cards) resulted. Henry fired Edsel's allies, and the result was bad feeling (and loss of market share to General Motors) that injured the company and family for years.

Ford had accomplished something no other major industrialist had he gained complete control over his company. He should have been on top of the world, but his sunny optimism disappeared following a libel suit he brought against Robert McCormick's Chicago Tribune. McCormick hadn't liked Ford's forays into peace activism - McCormick has been described as the greatest mind of the fourteenth century. During the trial, Ford was humiliated by the Tribune's attorneys who ridiculed his homespun manners. Ford never forgave the legal profession after that experience, and he withdrew even more from the public eye, now despising notoriety he had previously relished.

His myth continued to swell. "Henry Ford had become a representative American. He was a man of limited formal education, yet he had inspired something like mass hypnosis in the American heartland. lie stood for the populist values that grassroots Americans believed in, values which were increasingly under assault in the modern world."

The collapse of the Edsel is told in humorous detail. The Ford brothers were barely speaking to one another by that time, yet pictures were taken by the image-makers, showing them smiling and ostensibly happy. Another public relations wizard purchased 5,000 handcrafted fireworks from Japan that exploded and released a nine-foot scale model that floated to earth on a parachute. Evidently the front grill was considered by some critics to resemble female genitalia, so there were the inevitable jokes about the tail-fin bedecked Cadillac backing into an Edsel and producing an Edsellac.

The internal machinations, the battle between Henry Ford (the grandson) and Lee Iaccoca are spectacular, each building a power-base, with Iacocca, in particular, doing anything to wrest control of the company away from the Ford family. It is sad, however, to read of such flagrant disrespect for customers and the company's long-term future, while preserving and building one's own empire. Given the implosion of General Motors, one has to wonder how much worse they are than Ford. show less

Horowitz offers a remarkable and rare perspective by tracing a journey from Black Panther to conservative commentator. As such from his insider perspective, he has some hair-raising anecdotes from his direct knowledge.

This includes

* Huey Newton sodomizing Bobby Seale as part vengeful punishment in the gang-style organization.
* Maxine Waters actively supporting efforts to free apparent murdered Geronimo Pratt.
* The murder of Betty Van Patter.

Also, Horowitz while looking back a half century show more derides the subjects of his attack for being backwards looking:

What has the "civil rights" argument come to, when it cites discriminatory policies of the past to justify discriminatory policies in the present?

So, what does Horowitz want? He is apparently appalled at former radicals invited to give campus lectures. (I guess his former associations don't count, or he deserves a fresh evaluation not given to others.) He is generally abhorred by the apparent lack of conservatives in academia -- Maybe he want some kind of affirmative action in tenure based on political ideology? I am not really clear on it. I support a diversity of opinion, I am just not clear on the remediation suggested here.

For me, Horowitz is on firmer ground for his attacks on Clinton foreign policy and foreign influence. Having recently read Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped by Garry Kasparov, I can see a lot of missteps in Bill's decisions in Europe there. Here, Horowitz focuses on Chinese meddling and secrets stealing, including the murky case of Wen Ho Lee and more.

Reflecting on the book, I feel Horowitz is inviting me to consider the worst crimes of extreme leftists and by that judge "Progressives", whoever they are. This feels rather like judging all Conservatives by the actions of the January 6 Insurrectionists.

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The book title is a misnomer as it deals very little with Donald Trump himself and more to do with the Washington establishment and Democrats who follow the Breitbart political observation (actually a mere statement of opinion) that culture is the source of political power.

This book is notable as most of its citations are from the web and only a few from published works. The agenda spoken of in the book title is the conclusion of the book where several things are listed for Trump to do as show more soon as he takes office. Trump has done some of these, many were either ignored or tried and dropped after failure.

Although Horowitz is correct to say that Trump has the political deck of cards stacked against him and that progressives really do control the democrat party, a party of rank hypocrisy, Horowitz does not really understand the progressive philosophy, if you can call it that. His assessment is more of a disagreement rather than a philosophical destruction of the logical and practical structure of progressivism. Horowitz doesn't know that progressivism is a eclectic conglomeration of existentialism and deconstruction, blended with the ideology of white oppression.

This book was much better than I expected although simplistic as a view of what the future looks like. Horowitz's future of what America can be is merely dismantling what Obama has left behind and challenging the Democrats through not accepting the characterization which Democrats disseminate as Republican policy and ethical positions. Democrat progressivism is the supreme threat to successful transitions of Presidential Terms of Office which is how Horowitz judges our democratic Republic's vitality. show less