Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps/ (Yet Another New Republic/New York Times Edition)
It seems ungrateful--like complaining about the quality of free ice cream--to complain about Sam Tanenhaus writing in the New Republic and raising the ghost of Whittaker Chambers to curse George W. Bush. But still...
The stupidity! It burns!
Sam Tanenhaus writes that Whittaker Chambers was in his last years a far-sighted and flexible intellectual, a premature reality-based critic of those who saw American foreign policy as the Last Battle beneath the Hill of Megiddo itself:
The End of the Journey: The result [of Bush] was that the actual dangers we faced from militant Islam were blurred into a generalized atmosphere of apocalyptic crisis. Essential distinctions, and the wisdom with which they were made, were lost.... George W. Bush's worldview is precisely the one that Whittaker Chambers outgrew. It is a punishing irony, and one can imagine all too easily how Chambers himself would have greeted it: with the sly half-smile of a melancholy man who knows better...
The evidence that Whittaker Chambers "outgrew" his worldview of apocalyptic crisis? Here is what Tanenbaum says:
[Whittaker] Chambers, unburdened by intellectual discipline... came to recognize the folly of the rigid dualism he had espoused so vividly. He was in fact among the first on the right to interpret the death of Stalin in 1953, and the subsequent rise of Khrushchev, as signaling a new phase in the "twilight struggle." In yet another of his volte-faces, the most unexpected of all, Chambers refashioned himself into a liberal in his last years. He became a defender of civil liberties (including Hiss's when he was denied a passport) and of the Keynesian policies promoted by John Kenneth Galbraith...
I grant Chambers's (lifetime--not late-acquired) commitment to civil liberties, but the "defender... of Keynesian policies promoted by John Kenneth Galbraith" appears to be a truly howlingly bad misreading of a 1959 National Review article, "Foot in the Door"(1). And on the death of Stalin as a signal that it is time for detente--well, let's turn the microphone over to Chambers, writing in 1956:
From Life, April 30, 1956: What the new [post-Stalin] Communist strategy envisages is the mounting, on a world scale, of a vast "partisans of peace" movement. Its formations will be the popular front... [but it will go] far beyond popular fronts, which however manipulable [by the Communists], have manifest limits.... [A]ll that is necessary to change the weather is for the Communist blizzard to stop freezing men's hopes.... [T]he tactical problem for Communism... [is] that of the wind and sun... competing to make a man take off his overcoat. To make the man--the West--take off his coat [his defenses against Communism], it was only necessary for Communism to let the sun shine.... [H]itherto, Communism could not let the sun shine [because of]... the person and official mythology of Josef Stalin. He personified those memories which... scarify the mind of the West with respect to Communism....
[T]he ice is going out, the ice that froze and paralyzed the messianic spirit of Communism during the long but (in Communist terms) justifiable Stalinist nightmare. Communism is likely to become more, not less dangerous....
Communism has not changed.... Communist aggression against the West will not end... [but take] new, subtler, massive forms whose disintegrating energies are beamed first at specific soft spots around Communism's international frontiers and far across them.... With the smashing of the dark idol of Stalin, Communism can hope to compete again for the allegiance of men's minds.... What [Khrushchev's] 20th [Communist Party] Congress [of 1956] meant to do, and may well succeed in doing, was to make Communism radioactive again...
Memo to Tanenhaus: "new phase" does not mean "detente."
Why do writers like Tanenhaus write such things? Why do magazines like the New Republic publish it?
(1) Here is what I mean: Tanenhaus in the New Republic says that the late Chambers is a "liberal" and a "defender" of Galbraith. Tanenhaus in his Whittaker Chambers says that the late Chambers was "stimulated by the Keynesian heresies of John Kenneth Galbraith." Chambers himself--in the work cited by Tanenhaus--says only: "So, perhaps, of necessity the State must soon be into the Business of Education, as the witty and bracingly arrogant Professor J.K. Galbraith assured us, only the other day, that it must..."
Quite a difference from the first to the second and the second to the third, no?
Let's give Tanenhaus the microphone:
"In yet another of his volte-faces, the most unexpected of all, Chambers refashioned himself into a liberal in his last years. He became a defender of civil liberties (including Hiss's when he was denied a passport) and of the Keynesian policies promoted by John Kenneth Galbraith...."
This appears to be a rewrite and a substantial strengthening of Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers p. 506, the only mention in the book's index of what Chambers thought of Galbraith:
Chambers was stimulated by the Keynesian heresies of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society. "There will be no peace for the islands of relative plenty," Chambers wrote in NR, "until the continents of proliferating poverty have been lifted to something like the general material level of the islanders." This, though Chambers did not say it, had been the summary objective of the New Deal...
Note that Tanenhaus has gone from claiming that Chambers was "stimulated" by Galbraith and an unwitting fellow-traveler of the New Deal to saying that Chambers "defended" Galbraith and was a liberal.
But that is simply not so. We find something quite different than an endorsement of Galbraithian liberalism if we chase Tanenhaus's footnotes and go to the National Review archives, to Chambers's 1959 article "Foot in the Door" (reprinted in the Teachout-edited volume, Ghosts on the Roof):
Chambers starts the article by saying that he is going to talk about George Washington University's attempts to use television as an educational tool, as a way of thrusting "a formidable foot into the Closing College Door." What is this "closing college door"? It is this:
"[T]he voice is that of the Education Lobby.... Willie... in his high school graduation togs... is fated to go forever un-higher-educated. For--a Delphic voice warns us--by 1984... secondary school graduates will be besieging the gates of campuses, quite futilely, since college facilities will be totally inadequate....
"It takes no great wits to guess what we are supposed to do next: shake out what is left of our lank wallets while we pressure our legislators... to syphon federal taxes into higher education. Parents are not, apparently, presumed to be educated (or natively bright) enough to perceive that federal aid to education is their own tax-ravaged and inflated dollars fed into academic tills by other-directed and coercive means.
"Perhaps it shall come to this. But let us not delude ourselves.... [T]his is the Total State that is dawning, more or less everywhere, through under various softening and dissembling names and forms, on various impressive pretexts or necessities. But it is not deemed expedient that we should grasp what age it really is.... So, perhaps, of necessity the State must soon be into the Business of Education, as the witty and bracingly arrogant Professor J.K. Galbraith assured us, only the other day, that it must.
"But must it?..."
That's the sole reference to Galbraith in the article. And then Chambers is off and running on how TV will allow America's 1950s-scale universities to meet educational demands.
A couple of pages later Chambers pauses to summarize:
"I am not suggesting, of course, that televised education can replace... Harvard.... I am not suggesting... that televised education is coming tomorrow; or that it is a cure-all.... I am only saying that the need is great... that, in television, a means to meet the need, at least in part, appears to be at hand; that it is comparatively inexpensive and need not involve the State....
"One of the beneficent side-effects of the crisis of the twentieth century... is a dawning realization, not so much that the mass of mankind is degradingly poor, as that there will be no peace for the islands of prosperity until the continents of proliferating poverty have been lifted to something like the general material level of the islanders.... [T]he world is...degradingly ignorant--and by no means only in Africa. Unless the general level of mind is raised at the same time as the level of material well-being, and not too many steps behind, we shall all risk resembling those savages whom, within living memory, civilizers introduced to the splendor of top hats and tight shoes... leaving unredeemed the loin-cloth of their middle zones..."
This feels to me like a classic Inigo Montoya moment: if Tanehaus thinks that this late Chambers piece is an example of mid-twentieth century "liberalism", then all I can say is this: that word--"liberalism"--I do not think it means what Tanenhaus thinks it means...
