Federal Judiciary

Witness the Counterrevolution -- By: Interview

‘St. Augustine instructed that our love is our weight, best exemplified by the overwhelming remorse he experienced at the death of his beloved mother, Monica. If so, the weight of Chambers's love was directed towards liberating men from the worship of ideological gods.' So writes Richard M. Reinsch II in his first book, Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary. Reinsch's look at Chambers argues for his impact on the Cold War era and for his continued relevance today. A program officer at the Liberty Fund, Reinsch talks to National Review Online's Kathryn Lopez about Chambers, the book, and some NR history.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: How was Whittaker Chambers a counterrevolutionary?

RICHARD M. REINSCH II: He states that effective opposition to Communism will not come from modern liberalism and that political freedom can only be understood in light of the Christian reading of man's nature and destiny. I think the most interesting aspect of Chambers's writing, which goes beyond Witness, is his sense that modern liberalism, the inevitable output of the continental Enlightenment as he sees it, appeals to the same desiccated humanism that informs Communism. However, in appealing to a similar anti-theist humanism as Communist ideology, modern liberalism was unable to articulate a positive response to the Communist system. Inherently, modern liberalism discounts man and does not tell the truth about who he is. Remember John Paul II's words in Havana in 1998, when he told Cubans that they were more than Marxists told them they were. A similar sentiment is found in Chambers's writing.

#ad#LOPEZ: Chambers famously said he left the winning side for the losing side. You're all about that. How are we the losers? Didn't we win the Cold War?

REINSCH: That's exactly it; the statement was so manifestly wrong. Obviously, in retrospect, Chambers, like Solzhenitsyn, overlooked the reserves of liberty and spontaneity that were still present in liberal democracies. Chambers also failed to grasp the superiority of free markets. He was, however, not alone in these failures.

Consider the following anecdote. In November of 1952, Chambers was hospitalized in Baltimore after a heart attack and met a Passionist monk named Father Alan. Chambers asked him whether it was too strong a statement to say that the West was doomed. Fr. Alan's response was quite revealing: 'Who says that the West deserved to be saved'? Implicit in this answer was the notion that nothing was guaranteed to the West, because it had jettisoned its foundational truths. Chambers's idea was that the West had adopted a materialism comparable, in many respects, to the intrinsic workings of Communist ideology and was therefore unable to engage in the deep metaphysical and religious reflection necessary to renew itself. We won the Cold War, but much of our confusion remains with us. There's another reason why triumphalism is a strange response to our Cold War victory, and that is our demographic winter. Is a civilization that vanquishes its foe but can't even reproduce itself one that has the answers correct?

LOPEZ: Is that what the tea-party is about, at least in part?

REINSCH: The tea-party movement, which is certainly one of the best political developments for conservatism in decades, will, I hope, continue to wage war for the first principles of constitutional government. It is a manly attempt to reclaim the ground of self-government. I think the parallel with Chambers's boldness is that the tea partiers want the truth; they want to tell the truth and be told the truth.

We forget, but when Chambers stepped forward and told the truth about Hiss, he knocked the bloom off the rose of American progressivism. It really was the first time that an American conservative was able to deeply resonate with the American people about the challenge progressivism was issuing to constitutional government. I think the tea-party movement builds on this Chambers moment and sees the severe material deformations that have resulted from progressivism since then.

#page#LOPEZ: What exactly are the 'strange and jealous gods of the West'? Are they the same today as when Chambers protested them? 

REINSCH: These are the gods of our own making that certain intellectual leaders in the West began to construct once the tragic dimension of life was dismissed. Chambers is brilliant on this point in his essay 'Faith for a Lenten Age.' He moves through the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sören Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr to recall man's dichotomies and the existential torment man must face. Chambers's judgment was swift: There are no Promethean shortcuts. He saw modern liberalism urging man to believe himself beyond original sin and rushing headlong towards perfection, but for Chambers, the pursuit of perfection is disastrous, because it relies on an anti-theist and ultimately anti-human humanism. Ideology constructs upon reality a system that removes man from his existential limitedness; no longer conceived as a being between two eternities, a denatured man assumes godlike status, projecting truth on empty matter and demanding its transformation. Thus ideology compels obedience from all competing understandings of the human predicament.

#ad#LOPEZ: How important is God -- and in particular the Cross -- in the life and thought of Chambers?

REINSCH: Much of what Chambers does is really incomprehensible without his conversion to Christianity; his understanding of Christianity is total and existential, and, as I argue in the book, he sees himself as a victim-soul in his manifold witnesses. He decried the comfortable decadence of mainline American Protestantism, and he was right; look at those churches today. The differences for Chambers were original sin, pride, and anxiety: These were the parts of man that Christianity spoke to in a way superior to any other set of ideas. (Of course, Christianity is not an idea.)

I think his best thoughts on Christianity's meaning are in his description of his confused state after leaving the Communist underground: 'What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind -- the luminous shroud it has spun around the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God.'

LOPEZ: You compare Chambers to St. Augustine. Isn't that a bit much?

REINSCH: I'm not arguing that Chambers bears the same significance as St. Augustine. The comparison is that both men intended for their religious conversions to be exemplary. Also, both were converting away from what they regarded, correctly I think, as intellectual heresy. This cognitive unlearning was a tremendous part of the conversions of both. They didn't merely shed their respective errors -- they shed vital parts of their self-understanding.

Chambers also came to understand Augustine's notion that love is our weight. We become what we love. This is why intellectual error is so disfiguring to man.

#page#LOPEZ: Would Chambers recognize the Left of today?

REINSCH: In certain respects, yes. The Left of today has obviously shed its belief in the necessity of comprehensive planning -- although Donald Berwick's speeches, assuming they are representative, cause us to reconsider the conventional wisdom. But the Left certainly retains an existential belief in planning.

#ad#Chambers would recognize the Left's fundamental disloyalty to the dignity and nature of man, as well as its great confusion about liberty, its objects and purposes. The inability to think through the implications of biotechnology, human sexuality, and the issues underlying the culture of death remain with us, and they pour out of the Left's confusion about man.

LOPEZ: The Right?

REINSCH: Oh, sure. However, one of the most perplexing things about Chambers, at least to me, is how few of the Right's certainties he shared. (This comes up in his correspondence with William F. Buckley over the prospect of his joining National Review.) Appeals to a purist capitalism left Chambers uninspired. He also thought that Frank Meyer, Frank Chodorov, and Russell Kirk -- these early conservative lions -- were too abstract from political realities. They wanted to roll back the state, undo the New Deal, return to another era, whereas Chambers was more pragmatic. For him, politics is not a direct moral judgment or preference for the good, but is an attempt to think coherently about the goods we have put in common. He's almost Aristotelian in this regard. He understood the complexity of political reality. I think he anticipates the Reagan coalition and the need conservatism had for such a grouping in order to exercise power in a modern republic.

LOPEZ: What does the Republican revolution of 1994 have to do with Chambers and your book?

REINSCH: I note the '94 revolution at the beginning of the book because it was a central part of my early political formation. Being on a college campus in its aftermath was exciting; its final undoing in the years of George W. Bush led me to this book. I thought politics was the summum bonum of conservatism. I was wrong.

I wrote the preface of the book in the early days of Obama, when the problems and weaknesses of American conservatism stood revealed, and I kept thinking that conservatism makes its arguments too often from a utilitarian standard or with rather crass appeals to middle-class comfort. We don't see into the heart of democratic man at this moment and understand the full scope of our problems. Chambers understood these problems well.

#page#LOPEZ: What lessons might Chambers offer in 2010, should Republicans win?

REINSCH: I'm not sure Chambers gives definite answers in this regard. I think he has a broad understanding of conservatism as creating spaces for liberty to flourish. Chambers thought the Taft-Hartley Act was critical in this regard, because it defanged labor unions, allowing for freedom of contract and the mobility of labor to still happen in certain states.

#ad#LOPEZ: How significant was his relationship with Bill Buckley to his thought and life?

REINSCH: Chambers remarked to his wife that Buckley was a 'man born not made.' He held him in high regard. I think it fair to say that Chambers was probably a part of Buckley's own political learning, even though Buckley seemed to discount this in later years. Buckley moves away from an Albert Jay Nock–style libertarian philosophy because of Willmoore Kendall, but also because of Chambers, who, I think, was his conscience on political matters in the 1950s. This isn't to say that Chambers said it to Buckley and out it came, but that he was an anchor. Their correspondence on the broken West, the bruiser Joseph McCarthy, the Catholic Church in Poland and Hungary, and the direction conservatism needed to take indicates that a substantial conversation occurred between these men.

LOPEZ: Can one read your book without having read Witness?

REINSCH: Sure. I hope it leads people to Witness, which remains one of the best American autobiographies. The intensity, the literary and philosophical allusions, his understanding of modernity, of man -- these things make it timeless.

LOPEZ: Why is your book relevant to hard-working Americans who don't work in politics or media? After all, they don't have a ton of time.

REINSCH: We must be citizens. It presents the complete Chambers, provides pointers in the right directions for those who want more, and locates us as Americans in a different way from what many conservatives write.

LOPEZ: How can a policymaker or candidate benefit from your book? 

REINSCH: How can you govern if you don't know the men and ideas that profoundly shaped our present? If you want to understand the follies of planning, then you should read Hayek, of course, but also Chambers. He offers psychological and spiritual insights that go to the bleeding heart of your opponents. So, heed him before you go on the hustings.

LOPEZ: How long did it take you to write Whittaker Chambers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary?

REINSCH: A year and a half.

#page#LOPEZ: What is your favorite of Chambers's writings?
 
REINSCH: An essay he wrote on the classically trained performer Marian Anderson, entitled 'In Egypt Land.' Anderson was a brilliant performer who experienced segregation as a black woman in the 1940s and 1950s, which led her to perform Negro spirituals, to keep time with the deprivation imposed by Jim Crow laws. Chambers notes that this kind of problem will never be solved by the law alone, but only through forgiveness and self-limitation. The essay is Chambers at his best.

#ad#LOPEZ: What is your favorite of Chambers's pieces for NR?

REINSCH: The Rand takedown. Commissioned by Buckley, Chambers's essay 'Big Sister Is Watching You' serves notice that Rand's vision in Atlas Shrugged, while capable of being seen as a heroic depiction of entrepreneurs responding to collectivism, involved a flattened humanism. In 1957, when the piece was written, conservatism was in flux; the battle for its center and for its commanding heights was not settled. Chambers put paid to the notion that the American Right would be defined by Randian rational egoism, which he regarded as a heresy: not wholly wrong, but wrong enough in its distortion and rejection of foundational truths.

For Rand, man was never truer to himself than when acting in pursuit of self-interest as Rand defined it; modern liberty, capitalism, and unbounded individualism were the markers of man's existential happiness. The clue for Chambers, apart from Rand's suffocating ideology, was the prominence of sexual adventurism and the relative absence of family and children in her writing. Chambers understood that love unlocks the real purpose of our being -- self-gift, not incessant self-interest, would reveal to man his own nobility and capacity for greatness.

The piece stands as a testament to Chambers's wisdom. He is the preeminent conservative.

LOPEZ: What's your most fun fact about Chambers?

REINSCH: He once climbed a fire escape in New York to see Calvin Coolidge.

-- Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on August 09, 2010 (boomark / email).