HOROWITZ: OK. Having the impersonal order is very good. The healthiest thing is the thing Marx attacked: that things are in the saddle and ride mankind. You don't want people in control. It's just what the founders said. You know we all get frustrated because of the...we don't have one man-one vote, we have a Senate that's undemocratic, one Senator can hold up legislation, we've got a Supreme Court they've got lifetime jobs they can fuck with anything, every Leftist wants a parliament, they want the general will to decide-that's the most dangerous thing you can have.

HICKS: Now wait a minute. You're saying the Founders deliberately didn't want the people to rule? Then what was....

HOROWITZ: You've got to read this leftist liberal whatever you want to call him, Richard Hofsteader, wrote a book called the American Political Tradition...an essay on the founders. They were very conservative. But almost anything you read on the Founders will tell you, they were very conservative. Their view was democracy is what Churchill said, the true conservative theme, "democracy is the worst possible system except for all the rest.

HICKS: Yeah I've heard that....

HOROWITZ: A healthy distrust of public passion. Hitler was fucking elected.

HICKS: Now actually wait a minute.

HOROWITZ: ...[or] When Josef Stalin died! Now think of Stalin, every family in Russia had somebody that disappeared at some point, and when he died, a thousand people were trampled to death at his funeral, that's how loved he was. People have their heads up their assholes. I'm sorry, but this is what the Conservative view is. OK, you have a healthy disrespect for the popular will.

HICKS: Then who rules? Is it just an aristocracy? Wasn't this country founded on a breaking with the aristocracy and this radical idea that we did not need to be dominated by a Catholic Church that controlled knowledge?

HOROWITZ: No no no, it's not an aristocracy. It's a brilliant idea, that the people are sovereign, but their sovereignty is mediated through institutions that restrain or delay things that make it harder to make radical changes, so that they have time for their passions to cool and their reason to take over. They have these terms, the passions and the interests, in the 18th Century. ...The point is this. When I look at poverty today, I personally think that the Left has done an unbelievable damage to poor people. I hold Frances Fox Piven responsible for the destruction of the black family. Before this stupid welfare system was put into place, 75% of black kids had two parents, now in the inner city, it's 20%. 80% of kids are born out of wedlock. If you have a child that's brought up by a single parent, female-headed household, it is 6 times more likely to be poor, regardless of race. So, that's why I'm a Republican, when the Republicans said the system isn't working, because that's the way they talk, "it's not working" and they're idiots because that's the way they talk instead of it's a fucking racism that's destroying poor people, instead of talking that way they said, "it's inefficient, it doesn't work,"...they were called Nazis for doing it. That's the political battle in America today, you have the Democratic Party which has set up incredible destructive programs

HICKS: Hold on a second, how can you say the Democratic Party is this leftist party when Bill Clinton did the most extreme welfare reform?

HOROWITZ: Well he didn't. Bill Clinton has confused a lot of people. That's exactly right. He was faced with Dick Morris saying sign this bill or you're going to lose the election. I learned this on the left. There were people like you and me who really believed what they were saying. And there were people who didn't believe it or they considered themselves so elevated that they didn't pay attention to it. I mean we were very anti-elitist, so there should be no leaders. But people like Tom Hayden made themselves leaders even while people were preaching, "no leaders."

HICKS: But actually that wasn't what you were preaching, because you guys were Marxist-Lenists, and Lenin believed in the vanguard party, so....

HOROWITZ: No no I wasn't really into...I never joined any of the Marxist sects for that reason.

HICKS: But hell, you met with the KGB.

HOROWITZ: I did, though I didn't know it.

HICKS: Well hold on a second. If someone could deconstruct that moment, and say, you got an envelope. You knew it was full of cash.

HOROWITZ: Yes sir.

HICKS: You took it home, opened it and

HOROWITZ: I was terrified!

HICKS: and counted it and...

HOROWITZ: I didn't count it and...if it was fifteen THOUSAND dollars I would have been terrified!

HICKS: So your point was....

HOROWITZ: I believed Leninism caused a lot of damage, I believe...analytically. I wrote a book called Empire and Revolution, I thought that the Bolsheviks understood the world. I thought the Marxism they had was the correct interpretation, but in terms of actual political parties, I was not a Leninist. I had a lot of people trying to recruit me into Leninist parties, including the Fourth International. And it's because of the...I had read so deeply in Deutscher and Trotskyist literature...to me that was Trotsky's big failing, that he was a Leninist. But um, anyway, that's very sectarian but sure...I felt... Mao's ideas I felt...well it doesn't really matter. There's always people in organizations who are opportunists, who are socio...personally I think he's a sociopath.

HICKS: Who?

HOROWITZ: Clinton.

HICKS: You might be right.

HOROWITZ: And he took advantage of the moment. The point is the Party, the Democratic Party, still is, to this day, they consider a terrible sellout what he did. But it doesn't matter, it really doesn't matter when the Democratic Party speaks, it's always about redistribution, of course from your point of view, from the point of view of someone who is a vanguard leftist, they're a bunch of hypocrites. I understand that. But their model is still that. "If we give poor people money, they'll be better off." In FACT, we gave people money, we made them worse off.

HICKS: I'm definitely going to look at your data, the things you said earlier about single parent families, I want to look into that some more.

HOROWITZ: You need to take time out. You need to familiarize yourself with what real conservative arguments are. The leadership of the anti-affirmative action movement, that leadership all comes from the Left. When you read Thernstrom's book, America Black and White, it will show you that the Thernstroms are very much New Leftists, who, like myself, still believe in what we were saying in 1963, who feel that the movement has betrayed itself. But they are also social scientists, their book is full of the kind of data which gets people like me looking at this from another vantage. Really their book is about affirmative action, and it shows that Blacks were moving up much faster before affirmative action, which is counter-intuitive.