CAMARILLO, Calif. — For generations, the Horowitz family has cheered on the revolution.
Phil and Blanche were New York schoolteachers who belonged to the Communist Party, and dreamed of a socialist heaven on earth. Their son, David, went on his first march in 1948, at age 9. As a young man in the 1960s he helped create the New Left, which pushed for the rights of the oppressed and struggled to end the Vietnam War. David worked closely with the Black Panthers, who believed a violent uprising was at hand and they would help lead it.
David’s youngest son, Ben, sought his fortune in Silicon Valley, a generally liberal place that traces some of its roots to the rebellious spirit of the ’60s. Ben became a leading venture capitalist, investing billions of dollars in start-ups like Twitter and Facebook that seek to topple the status quo. His firm’s investment thesis is “software is eating the world” — as disruptive a vision of the future as the old Marxist dream of the state withering away.
And now David, after a political odyssey that took him from the extreme left to the extreme right, has a surprise last act that puts him once again in the thick of insurrection. His radical views on immigration, race, education, the duplicity of the media and the treachery of liberals have abruptly made their way to the center of power. If the Trump administration has an intellectual godfather, it’s David Horowitz.
Father and son are a snapshot of America at this moment, a politicized and polarized place full of competing revolutions. They live in different universes: one where President Trump is the answer, the other where he is the problem.
During Jeff Sessions’ confirmation hearings as attorney general in January, Democrats raised the issue of the long and admiring relationship between David and the nominee. Statements by David like “too many blacks are in prison because too many blacks commit crimes” were cited as evidence that Mr. Sessions kept unsavory company and had racist leanings.
A few weeks later, Ben gave a talk on “How to Start a Cultural Revolution” at a Silicon Valley conference. Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Haitian who led a slave revolt two centuries ago, Ben took his audience through the details of L’Ouverture’s unlikely success and what they could learn from it.
Blacks as criminals, blacks as role models — it’s hard to get further apart than this. Yet for a country that seems riven in two, the Horowitzes offer a measure of hope. They email, they talk, they get together for family celebrations. When David went to college campuses to denounce things that Ben believes in, Ben paid for his bodyguard.
To understand all might not be to forgive all, but it’s a start. David and Ben both said they have made a major effort to see where the other is coming from. While no one’s politics have changed, they realized they are not quite as far apart as it might seem.
“One thing we mostly see eye-to-eye on is that the most important thing is the ability of an individual to live his life and have an opportunity,” said Ben, 51. “How he went from ‘The way to do that is Communism’ to ‘The way to do that is Trump’ is amazing.” He laughed. “That’s where we’re not aligned.”
David said he is glad he never foisted his beliefs on Ben or his other children the way Phil and Blanche’s relentless adherence to the Communist doctrine pushed David into the cause long ago. If the revolution has a few less soldiers this way, so be it.
“I’ve come to the end of the story,” said David, 78. “I don’t mistake the life I’ve lived for the only life.”
It’s not that simple, of course.
“Sometimes people try to connect us on Twitter, which is always scary,” said Ben. “Someone will say, ‘Hey, aren’t you related to @horowitz39?’” That’s David’s handle on Twitter, where he says things like “Obama is an American traitor” and “Hillary killed four Americans in Benghazi.”
“I never reply,” Ben said.
In the horse country northwest of Los Angeles, it’s a glorious day. David Horowitz and his fourth wife, April, live here inside a remote gated community. There are two horses and, making a terrible racket, several dogs. Gardeners are working on the lawn.
“Don’t ask me if they’re illegal,” David said with a laugh.
The house is only remote physically. The computer in the other room is always calling, bringing forth updates, denunciations, the ongoing political spectacle. “How can you feel isolated when you’re connected all the time?” David asked.
He chronicled his family’s penchant for revolution in his 1997 autobiography, “Radical Son,” one of the most prominent of a long shelf of volumes. His first effort, “Student,” about the embryonic turmoil on college campuses, appeared when Kennedy was president. In 1968, he became an editor and writer for Ramparts, the radical magazine that nurtured and reflected the era’s unrest.
“The system cannot be revitalized; it must be overthrown. As humanely as possible, but by any means necessary,” Ramparts proclaimed in a 1970 editorial. David says he was the one who insisted on adding the “humanely” part.
Ramparts published Che Guevara’s diaries, went after the C.I.A. and offered a tutorial on how not to pay taxes. Its international editor was Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who fled to Cuba in 1968 after leading an ambush of Oakland, Calif., police officers. Thanks in a large part to Ramparts, the charismatic and photogenic Panthers soon embodied the notion of revolution for white radicals.
David found a political soul mate in Panther leader Huey Newton. He immersed himself in the Panthers’ home base of Oakland, raising money to buy a 35-classroom school that would be a showcase for the cause. Even for that freewheeling era, Ben had an unusual boyhood. It would shape his life, friendships, marriage and work. His best friend, who would later be best man at his wedding, was black. He was one of the few white kids on the Berkeley High football team. Every Sunday, he went to the Son of Man Temple, the Black Panther church in the auditorium of the school.
“I know all the songs from there,” Ben said, and as proof, started singing the old gospel hymn adopted by the Panthers, “We are soldiers in the army …”
David said: “Ben is practically black.”
Ben laughed when this was repeated to him, something he does frequently when talking about his father. “I hate it when my father talks, it’s ridiculous,” he said. But he acknowledged its broad truth.
In the Bay Area in the early 1970s, the revolution seemed at hand. Marcus Foster, Oakland’s first black superintendent of schools, was assassinated in November 1973. Three months later, Patty Hearst was kidnapped in Berkeley. In August 1974, Mr. Newton was arrested after the shooting of a prostitute and fled to Cuba.
When the Panthers needed someone to keep their finances, David recommended a white friend named Betty Van Patter. In late 1974, she disappeared. A few weeks later, her body was found in San Francisco Bay. Her head had been bashed. While the murder was never officially solved, David held the Panthers responsible and said Mr. Newton confirmed it years later.
The person he really blamed, however, was himself. The Panthers, he concluded, were thugs dressed up as revolutionaries, but the Left was too wrapped up in its dreams to be honest about it. David became unglued. He bought a sporty Datsun 260Z, had an affair, divorced his wife Elissa after nearly two decades of marriage and barely escaped with his life when a train smashed up the…