The Infuriating Sam Tanenhaus Strikes Again

The first six or so paragraphs are simply a longwinded, and rather vacuous, introduction explaining how he came to write his Chambers biography. The middle section is mostly a coherent and useful exposition on how Chambers was right and Hiss and his defenders wrong. And how Chambers was never forgiven for the damage he had done to liberalism by bringing down one of its heroes.

But then things begin to go astray as Tanenhaus finally settles into his thesis: that today's debate on the War On Terror, like the Cold War before it, is dominated by radical ideologues on the right who are too taken with Manichean and apocalyptical visions in contrast to those sensible centrists who see the gray and nuance involved. This might not be clear given his lengthy ramblings about Chambers. But those familiar with Tanenhaus know that he is not writing simply to poke those odd leftists who refuse to admit that Hiss was guilty. No, he is setting up Chambers to attack Bush and present day conservatives.

Tanenhaus posits three phases for Chambers’s life: radical leftist and communist spy; reluctant witness turned conservative Cassandra; and finally wise liberal and enemy of "rigid dualism." It is this later category that is most suspect and which is the weapon used to bash Bush. Tanenhaus essentially argues that Chambers, unlike the political right of today, outgrew his messianic streak.

Tanenhaus:

This [the usefulness of Manichean dualism"] was the lesson absorbed by American conservatives in their prolonged moment of ascendancy, which looks now to be ending. The movement's first national experiment with the politics of polarizing choice came in the presidential election of 1964, and the results were disastrous. But four years later Richard Nixon, who until Chambers's death remained his friend and in some sense his disciple, succeeded in shattering the postwar consensus by rallying a "silent majority" of God-fearing, law-abiding citizens to seize the whip from the unbelieving elite--the people who (in Nixon's view, not entirely wrong) had never forgiven him for exposing Hiss. Another master of divisiveness, Ronald Reagan, posthumously awarded Chambers the Medal of Freedom, and more than once startled aides by reciting passages of Witness from memory. The book's tonalities are likewise audible in the scripts that Reagan wrote for his popular radio addresses in the 1970s, when he was mounting his run at the presidency, and also in his notorious formulation "the evil empire," derived from Chambers's description of communism as "the focus of the concentrated evil of our time."

First note that Ronald Reagan is described as a "master of divisiveness." Odd how he was able to achieve one of the largest landslide victories in American history by being so divisive! This is another typical trope of liberal "centrists" like Tanenhaus - that conservatism never wins because it is attractive or true, but because it divides and conquers or somehow tricks otherwise good people into voting that way. Ironically, eventually these same divisive leaders are brought back to show how far the right of today has strayed from its roots (see the rehabilitation of Barry Goldwater and the media converge during Reagan’s funeral for examples).

Tanenhaus uses this as a bridge to the real point of this whole essay: while Chambers outgrew this fanaticism, today's conservatives are still trapped in an ideology of us against them, of “rigid dualism” and “immovable absolutism”:

Chambers, unburdened by intellectual discipline, also 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. He ardently opposed the arms race, which struck him as a dangerous provocation. Most interestingly, he came to see that the theology of Americanism was empty. Nations, in his evolving view, must scrub themselves before they sought to cleanse the souls of their enemies. "It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization," he wrote to Buckley in 1954. "It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than to snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flower pot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth."

Meanwhile, the Manichaean Chambers remains a large presence on the right. In July 2001, the White House of George W. Bush, eager to polish its ideological credentials, paid homage to Chambers by holding an event in commemoration of his hundredth birthday. The speakers included William F. Buckley Jr. and Robert Novak. The president did not attend, but two of his speechwriters, Michael Gerson and David Frum did, a fact that resonated some months later when, following Al Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, Gerson and Frum composed the phrase "axis of evil," which christened the new counter-jihad.

By then it was plain that "the war on terror" would be fought in the terms Chambers had spelled out in his bleakest phase, the lonely period following the Hiss case. His heirs had settled on an immovably absolutist course, inspired by the dark vision projected in Witness: "In this century, within the next decades, will be decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole world is to become free, or whether, in the struggle, civilization as we know it is to be completely destroyed or completely changed. It is our fate to live upon that turning point in history." Substitute "Islamo-fascist" for "Communist" and it is depressingly clear how little has changed.

First of all, it most be noted that Chambers didn’t become a “liberal” late in life. In fact, Chambers never claimed to be a conservative and instead insisted on calling himself a man of the “Right.” In his political writing after the Hiss case he was always relentlessly pragmatic. Like James Burnham and William F. Buckley (for the most part) Chambers advocated supporting the most conservative electable candidate; and for a strategic aim of guiding the country rightward and avoiding the socialist temptation. Arguing that Hiss should be allowed to have a passport and that America should avoid ignoring decay at home while fighting communism abroad hardly makes him a liberal. As to the arms race, it was that “master of divisiveness” Ronald Reagan who ended it (admittedly with not a small amount of conservative grumbling). Is Reagan a liberal too?

What Tanenhaus is trying to say is that Chambers wasn’t a caricature of the far right. The problem is that few conservatives are despite liberal’s insistent portrayal of them as such. In the liberal world there are only two kinds of good conservatives: those that attack other conservatives (see the New York Times editorial page) and those that are far enough removed from today’s troubles as to seem harmless and/or useful in carrying out the first point.

And this is where Tanenhaus is headed. Echoing conventional liberal wisdom, he argues that after 9/11 Bush passed on his chance to lead from the center and follow the “the most measured strains of cold war policy.”

What makes Tanenhaus so infuriating is his ability to jump between sensible statements and fancier versions of the diatribes of the Bush hating far left. He starts out so promising but ends up in the same place. He can attack overly simplistic views of history and moral relativism:

THIS IS NOT to say that the lessons of the cold war are altogether inapplicable to the current struggle. Quite the opposite, and not only because we are now mired in a war that increasingly summons up all the worst memories of Vietnam. It is easy to overlook that Vietnam, horrific though the episode was, occurred within a broader global struggle in which the Western democracies ultimately prevailed. And it is equally easy to overlook, amid the catastrophe of Iraq, that the terrorist enemies we face are real--they are not figments, nor simply legions of the rightfully aggrieved, nor simply the victims (or the creations) of American overreach. To pretend they are, and to see the Bush administration as the sole author of our present troubles, is to become unwittingly complicit in the fanatical simplifications of those who mean to harm to us.

But he cannot help but find a way to blame Bush:
But this capacious internationalism was short-lived. It was replaced within a year by the suffocating unilateralism of the "Bush Doctrine" of "pre-emptive" license, with its promise, or threat, that henceforth the administration would "act, and act quickly, against danger," with armed forces "ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world." In theory, this seemed reasonable: what great power can afford not to have a well-prepared military? The problem began with the "haunted air" that Bush and company inhaled. They seemed to revel in reviving the panicky mood of the late 1950s and early 1960s--only this time the low-grade emergency has given us red and yellow "alerts," reckless announcements of thwarted terrorist "plots," however inconsequential, the brutal mistreatment of "enemy combatants," the illegal surveillance of American citizens.

Tanenhaus packs a great deal of insults and accusations into that one paragraph all without one bit of history or evidence. Odd how the Bush administration was “panicky” after terrorists had commandeered airplanes and crashed them into buildings and killed thousands of Americans. The rest of the litany is tiresomely familiar; enemy combatants are brutally mistreated; announcements of thwarted plots are reckless and exaggerated; American citizens are being illegally watched; Bush’s unilateralism is suffocating, etc.

In contrast to his study of Chambers, Tanenhaus offers nothing but accusations and empty rhetoric here. One minute he is repudiating the Bush haters and the next he is admitting that their complaints are valid. An interesting, if a little longwinded, musing on one of the Cold War’s culture clashes turns into a typical leftist screed.

In the end, Tanenhaus centrist posturing means little. Sure, he gets credit for admitting that Hiss was guilty, and for admitting that evil exists, but his visceral dislike of anyone associated with political conservatism in practice wins out over intellectual honesty.

The irony isn’t, as Tanenhaus claims, that Chambers would recognize Bush’s zealotry or ideology, but that Tanenhaus eschews nuance and measured analysis as he attempts to blame Bush for the same.

Perhaps Tanenhaus would have been better served cutting out the self-indulgent discussion of the intellectual journey prompted the writing of his book and explained how exactly our current national mood is similar to the panicky mood of the 1950’s and early 60’s. Perhaps it is different in DC or New York, but here in the Midwest things feel anything but panicky. Sure the news media over-hypes everything from thunderstorms to bomb scares, but should law enforcement not promote the fact that it is successfully thwarting plots not matter how small? Is Bush using the media to incite panic? Please, this is the stuff of the Democratic Underground.

Or perhaps Tanenhaus might explain how Bush’s suffocating unilaterlism is working in Asia where negotiation and diplomacy are dominant on issues ranging from nuclear proliferation to human rights.

Or maybe he could explain why brutally mistreated enemy combatants are better treated, fed, and housed in US military custody than they are in their home countries.

Or maybe he could explore how Orwell’s 1984 seems less relevant today that Huxley’s Brave New World.

Or perhaps he could explore how Bush’s foreign policy seems more influenced by Wilsonian idealism than Chambers’s melancholy fatalism. Or how Chamber’s emphasized the religious aspect of the struggle while Bush the political (exporting democracy) while going out of his way to avoid criticism of Islam.

The reason Tanenhaus avoids all of these meaty issues is because it would take the sting out of his neat trick. Using a hero of the Right to bash Bush is just too tempting. To bad it is also intellectually flimsy and dishonest but it is all too typical of Tanenhaus.