In case you’ve ever wondered about Stephen Miller’s histrionic performance of anger and disdain, here is a brief explanation.
In 1971, David Horowitz edited a volume of essays, Isaac Deutscher: the man and his work, conceived as a tribute to Deutscher, who had died in 1967. Deutscher had been one of Horowitz’s mentors.
Horowitz died in April of this year. Deutscher wrote Horowitz’s obituary 75 years ago in a review of The God That Failed published in 1950 and republished five years later as “The Ex-Communist’s Conscience” in Heretics and Renegades and other essays.
The review begins with a joke:
IGNAZIO SILONE relates that he once said jokingly to Togliatti, the Italian Communist leader: ‘The final struggle will be between the communists and the ex-communists.’ There is a bitter drop of truth in the joke.
Deutscher cites Silone again later in the essay:
…irrational emotionalism dominates the evolution of many an ex-communist. ‘The logic of opposition at all costs’ says Silone, ‘has carried many ex-communists far from their starting-points, in some cases as far as fascism.’ What were those starting-points? Nearly every ex-communist broke with his party in the name of communism. Nearly every one set out to defend the ideal of socialism from the abuses of a bureaucracy subservient to Moscow. Nearly every one began by throwing out the dirty water of the Russian revolution to protect the baby bathing in it.
Sooner or later these intentions are forgotten or abandoned. Having broken with a party bureaucracy in the name of communism, the heretic goes on to break with communism itself. He claims to have made the discovery that the root of the evil goes far deeper than he at first imagined, even though his digging for that ‘root’ may have been very lazy and very shallow.
David Horowitz’s trajectory from the radical left to the radical right and Deutscher’s prescient commentary on the mundaneness of that trajectory are important for understanding the bizarre demeanor of Horowitz’s disciple, Stephen Miller.
Miller has appropriated the characteristic traits of the renegade without ever having experienced belonging to the creed he has “broken” with. That is to say, his “bitterness” and “sense of betrayal” is an affectation. He is pretending to have the same feelings as his mentor had. But without the life experience.
