Horowitz Redux
By 
Loomis left the wrong link to my review of “Party of Defeat,” so in the interest of completeness…
My first thought was “Have I read the book yet? Heh.” My second thought was “$1000. That sure could buy a lot of whiskey sours.” My third thought was “200. It could buy 200 whiskey sours, if I go to the right places. Maybe with a few Manhattans sprinkled in for variety.” My fourth thought was “Hey, it could even pay for whiskey sours that I’ve already bought, and that are still hanging around on my credit card balance.” It’s fair to say, then, that I found the offer appealing from the get go.
I immediately IMed Matt Duss, who told me that the offer had been floating around the DC blogging/journalism community for a while. Duss (and others) had given thought to taking the deal, but then decided that engaging with Horowitz would grant him too much legitimacy. This, I thought, was true enough; it was the reason that Horowitz was willing to pay an outrageous sum for lefties to review his book. He was trying to buy legitimacy. The point was to create the illusion that there was something in Party of Defeat that was worth engaging with, and consequently that David Horowitz was a man of ideas, rather than a thug and second rate polemicist. As such, engagement with the work as meaningful scholarship could be fundamentally dishonest, in that it accorded the book a level of respect greater than the typical bar bathroom scrawl.
Then again, I have debts no honest man can pay. There was a certain comfort in the recognition that Horowitz’ effort was transparent; taking the money to review the book was, in itself, subversive of the notion that Horowitz was a serious thinker. Of course, I would accept money to review a book that I had an interest in reading, but I would never read Horowitz were it not for the money. Indeed, had I initially been received the $500 offer that Frontpage is now making, I probably would have said “Thanks, but no thanks.” After all, such an offer would only have netted me 100 whiskey sours, which is hardly worth the effort.