At Breitbart.com, David Horowitz has written a piece called “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew.” I was thinking about that phrase “renegade Jew.” It occurred to me that someone, in the past, had been labeled “the renegade [somebody].” Who was it? Then I remembered: It was Horowitz himself. He was labeled “the renegade Horowitz.”
Two years ago, I wrote a series on David, on the occasion of a mammoth collection of his writings. Called “A Witness,” the series was in three parts: here, here, and here. In Part II, I touched on this renegade business. (I returned to it at the end of the series, in tribute to David.)
David was reared a Communist, but went the other way. In 1986, he wrote a piece for the Village Voice called “Why I Am No Longer a Leftist.” Let me now quote from my series:
The response to David … was not thoughtful consideration. Not many asked, “Does our old comrade have a point?” The response was furious, embodied in a piece for the Voice by Paul Berman called “The Intellectual Life and the Renegade Horowitz.” That word “renegade” was a high honor for David: It was what the Stalinists had called doubters and dissenters in the 1930s.
I admire David Horowitz for being a renegade against the Communists and the Left more broadly. I admire Bill Kristol for being a renegade right now, as Trumpism descends on the Republican party and the country. I’m with Bill. (And, on almost everything non-Trump, I’m with David. Always have been.)
The Renegade David Horowitz and the Renegade Bill Kristol