Since the 1980s, Horowitz, a former editor of the radical monthly Ramparts and co-author of best sellers about the Kennedys and the Rockefellers, has become a right-wing agitator, throwing stink bombs from the other side. Actually, he didn’t have to move that far, since the thinking of the extreme left and extreme right, as Hannah Arendt explained, is strangely similar. His Manichaean mind is largely out of fashion in a post-cold-war world; the only ramparts we watch are at ball games. But juicy targets remain: PC thinking has enjoyed a longer shelf life than it deserves. So Horowitz and his left-wing critics are keeping each other in business.
The 52 college newspapers confronted last month with his now infamous and intentionally inflammatory advertisement (titled “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea–and Racist Too”) were in a tight spot. If they published the ad and sparked protests, they would bolster Horowitz’s point about political correctness; if they refused the ad, they would bolster his point about the lack of free expression. Both happened, and the provocation succeeded brilliantly.
The ad, which reminds me of one of those tiresome rants supporting a NAAWP (National Association for the Advancement of White People), is detonating on campus this year. At Berkeley, students stormed the offices of The Daily Californian to demand an apology after the newspaper ran the ad. They got one. At Brown, student protesters threw away thousands of free copies of The Brown Daily Herald issue containing the ad. At Duke, hundreds demonstrated. Suddenly Horowitz, who constantly tells blacks to stop acting like victims, gets to play the victim himself. How infuriating.
The case is a carnival of such contradictions. The Wall Street Journal Web site and The Boston Globe were among those news organizations righteously editorializing that young college editors should run the ad. But spokesmen for the Journal and the Globe now refuse to say whether those newspapers would have run the ad themselves. Is that “left-wing McCarthyism” (Horowitz’s charge against the college papers)? Please. Newspapers, exercising their own freedom, routinely reject advertising they believe might offend the sensibilities of their readers. When asked by NEWSWEEK, several major papers, including the Baltimore Sun and the Seattle Times, said they would have rejected the Horowitz ad (NEWSWEEK is among several publications saying it would have run it).
So Horowitz is wrong to cry “censorship.” It would only be censorship if the government told him he couldn’t hand out his “Ten Reasons” on a street corner or publish it himself. But you have to hand it to the guy; he knows how to expose the distance we’ve traveled from those great Enlightenment words (wrongly attributed to Voltaire): “I disapprove of what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
For example, at a Brown faculty meeting, Lewis Gordon, chair of the Afro-American Studies program, suggested the seizure of the Daily Herald copies could be seen as valid civil disobedience against Horowitz’s “hate speech.” (Many of his colleagues, to their credit, strongly disagreed.) In a NEWSWEEK interview, Gordon dug himself in deeper. The distinction between free speech and hate speech, he insists, can be gleaned from the answer to the query: “Am I giving information or am I trying to stimulate a fight?” But the Horowitz ad didn’t advocate violence or use racial epithets (which can, in certain contexts, be construed as “fighting words”); the only struggle he wanted to stimulate was an intellectual donnybrook–exactly the kind of “fighting” that universities were founded to defend.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. At Yale, dorm counselors, with the knowledge of administrators, threw out copies of a conservative student publication sent into the freshmen dorms. (The university last year acknowledged error.) Dartmouth has faced a similar problem. American universities often forget that the best way to fight offensive speech is with more speech. It follows that the best way to handle the Horowitz ad is to run it right next to a full page or two of editorials and comments from the community denouncing it. But of course it’s much easier to take offense than to build an argument.
That’s especially sad because the argument against Horowitz’s racial agitprop is worth making. Remember, the ad didn’t deny the Holocaust or champion terrorism or say blacks were inferior; it defended the status quo–a country where the odds of reparations for slavery are about the same as David Horowitz getting invited over to Al Sharpton’s for Thanksgiving. Horowitz knows this, so his true point–beyond simple provocation–was something much more relevant to the national debate than reparations. The not-so-subtle subtext was that we’ve given “them” enough, and so should give up on addressing the continuing problems of race and poverty in America. If my old teacher were alive, he’d assign an essay on where Horowitz is right–and where he is profoundly wrong.
