Whittaker Chambers tried to warn us
I recently read Sam Tanenhaus’s excellent new biography of William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative hero who, as the subtitle of the book acknowledges, was the voice and guiding light of the political “revolution that changed America.” The impressive, talented, and endlessly combative group of editors Buckley initially gathered around him when he launched his magazine National Review in 1955 were mostly ex-Communists, like the political theorist James Burnham and the former Fortune magazine editor Willi Schlamm. (Burnham’s brother Philip was part owner and a longtime editor of Commonweal. He fell out with the magazine in the 1950s over its criticism of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s demagogic red-baiting.) At that time, Buckley was eager to recruit Whittaker Chambers (1901–1961) to his masthead. Chambers, a former editor at Time, was an ex-Soviet spy, whose testimony before Congress and in court helped convict State Department official Alger Hiss of lying about his membership in the Communist Party and his own espionage activities for the Soviet Union.
Although they had become good friends over their shared anti-communism, Chambers initially refused Buckley’s overtures, judging his “radical conservatism” to be politically unrealistic. He had left political extremism behind when he exited the Communist Party. Chambers eventually changed his mind and joined the magazine’s editorial staff, writing a series of pieces over several years in the late 1950s. One of these was a notoriously devastating review (“Big Sister Is Watching You”) of Ayn Rand’s best-selling novel Atlas Shrugged. A significant number of National Review’s readers were sympathetic toward Rand’s libertarianism and enthusiastic celebration of capitalism, and thus outraged by Chambers’s demolition of her philosophical materialism and her reverence for wealth and power. What struck me most forcibly as I read the review was how Chambers’s analysis of Rand’s eccentricities was a remarkable forewarning about the crude materialistic worldview and political bullying we now see in the White House. Trump and his cronies are determined to reduce everything in our common life to the calculation of dollars and cents. As far as he’s concerned, the business of America is business, especially his own business.
“[Atlas Shrugged] consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it,” Chambers wrote. “Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house.” In Rand’s novel, a holy remnant of brave individualists and entrepreneurs has survived a revolution in the United States led by an army of “Looters,” who are bent on redistributing the wealth that rightly belongs to their more gifted and industrious betters (think Elon Musk and company). In the last line of the novel, Chambers notes, one of the survivors “traces in the air, ‘over the desolate earth,’ a sign of the Dollar, in lieu of the Sign of the Cross.” In some uncanny sense, Trump seems to be tracing just such a sign, as well as his own image, over the entire world.
As far as he’s concerned, the business of America is business, especially his own business.
I have not read Ayn Rand’s fiction, let alone her treatises on Objectivism, her philosophical system that attracted a cult following during her lifetime (1905–1982). I do recall watching a bit of the movie version of her earlier novel, The Fountainhead (1947), for which she wrote the screenplay. (Rand got her start as a Hollywood screenwriter after fleeing the Soviet Union in the 1920s.) As I recall, the movie—starring Gary Cooper as a brilliant and uncompromising architect, and Patricia Neal as a woman utterly besotted by his Übermensch persona—was über-preposterous. As Chambers argues, Rand’s writing “deals wholly in the blackest blacks and whitest whites. In this fiction, everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad.” Like the MAGA movement’s war on “enemies within,” Rand’s villains were “Left Liberals, New Dealers, Welfare Statists, One Worlders, or, at any rate, such ogreish semblances of these as may stalk the nightmares of those who think little about people as people, but tend to think a great deal in labels and effigies…. She bundles them into one undifferentiated damnation.”
Chambers attributes Rand’s leaden storytelling and vacuous philosophizing to her materialism. In her Godless world, mankind’s happiness lies solely “with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand’s words, ‘the moral purpose of his life.’” The pursuit of happiness, Chambers argues, inevitably is reduced to a pursuit of pleasure, and “then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity.” In our high-tech consumer society, such an ignoble understanding of human nature ineluctably leads to simplistic and dangerous political outcomes. “In the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them,” Chambers writes. “For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run the world in whose interest, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently.” Or as Donald Trump succinctly put it and many voters agreed, “Only I can fix it.”
Chambers became a chastened conservative once he recognized the inherently murderous nature of the Soviet regime. Yet he had a clear-eyed understanding of the temptations of those on the right as well as the left. That gave him the courage to denounce Rand, whom many conservatives thought of as a fellow believer and powerful ally. What is especially frightening in our own political moment is the refusal of Republicans to oppose Trump even when he is flouting long-cherished conservative principles and policies. As Trump eagerly embraces the role of Big Brother, his partisans remain silent. Their once-principled opposition to concentrated political power has given way to uncritical support for the Randian antics of a made-for-TV Übermensch.
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/chambers-ayn-rand-baumann-trump-paul-tanenhaus
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Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law
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Retotalising Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction to its History
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