Worst American Birthdays, vol. 45

Few actors on the fringes of American politics have been so consistently insane as David Joel Horowitz, who commences his eighth decade of douchebaggery today.

Like the itinerant street prophets who descend upon university campuses each spring like an Old Testament plague of toads, Horowitz’s claim to relevance has always depended utterly on his status as a convert, as someone still atoning for the unpardonable errors of his youth. One suspects that he is unable to navigate the drive-thu service at Jack-in-the-Box without reminding the hapless window jockey that he, David Horowitz, committed treason in 1972 while working as an editor for Ramparts; that he, David Horowitz, was once a devoted companion of Black Panthers like Huey Newton; and that he, David Horowitz, eventually realized that his life had been mistakenly devoted to a struggle against all that was decent and right in the world.

Since his political conversion — tediously detailed in his sub-Proustian 1996 memoir, Radical Son — Horowitz has spent most of his time challenging what he regards as the most dangerous force in the contemporary United States: humanities professors who discourage their students with decadent fables about their homeland. In his new role as agitator against leftist indoctrination on American campuses, Horowitz has become a one-man Macy’s parade, a giant, cartoonish, inflatable fuck-up bobbing goofily down the street. Whether he’s toasting the unacknowledged blessings of chattel slavery, calculating the civilizational demerits of Native Americans, or sponsoring extended circle jerks like his “Islamo-Fascist Awareness Week,” Horowitz has apparently decided to atone for his years as a Panther fanboy by turning himself into the archetype of the stupid Whitey, an unselfconscious apologist for The Man. Meantime, Horowitz’s abounding intellectual dishonesty and his relentless capacity for self-promotion have earned him a “relevance” to the Right that he could never have enjoyed — but which he so clearly craved — from the Left. As political psychodrama, it’s quite frankly embarrassing to behold.