Chambers and Trilling
At TNR.com, Damon Linklater writes an interesting review of Michael Kimmage’s book on Whitaker Chambers and Lionel Trilling, two thinkers whose mid-20th Century rejection of their early communism influenced the current American ideological marketplace. Linklater writes:
Until the mid-1950s, American conservatism was less a coherent ideology than an irritably reactionary mood: reflexively hostile to the federal government, staunchly isolationist, explicitly anti-modern, proudly agrarian, and incapable of distinguishing between communism and New Deal liberalism, which were treated as twin forms of modern tyranny. Thanks in no small part to Chambers—whose religiously inspired turn to anti-communism became a significant influence upon conservative ideology owing to his classic memoir Witness, his friendship with William F. Buckley, Jr., and his essays for National Review—mainstream conservatism eventually came to support the use of American power in the world and to accept the legitimacy of a strong (if strictly limited) role for the federal government in American life.
And:
Liberalism, meanwhile, faced very different problems in the immediate postwar years. Whereas liberals of the period recognized the threat posed by right-wing political movements both abroad and at home, they tended to be less concerned about the dangers of left-wing totalitarianism. Some of this indifference could be traced back to habits forged during the National Front movement of the 1930s, which encouraged every faction on the left—including liberals, democratic socialists, Trotskyists, and Stalinists—to join forces in opposition to the rise of fascism. But there was also a tendency among many liberals of the time to view the Soviet Union and its American supporters with a modicum of sympathy—as if a communist were merely a liberal in a hurry. Stalin’s means might have been execrable, but his ends, it was often thought, were admirable.
In his postwar essays on politics and culture, Trilling (and a few other brave souls among the New York intellectuals) sought to foster a form of liberal thinking that would be as immune to the lure of the far left as it was to the far right. The key, for Trilling, was to cultivate among liberals a spirit of openness to (as he famously put it in the introduction to The Liberal Imagination) “variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.” Far from leading to self-doubt and indecision, Trilling was convinced that liberalism would be invigorated by a confrontation with competing ideas, including conservative ideas, and that liberals who had developed habits of self-criticism would be more inclined to resist the Stalinism of the mind that prefigures and makes possible political totalitarianism in all of its forms.
-Jake
Related posts:
- My professor voted for McCain.
- Cato on Cato
- Will Tariq Ramadan destroy liberalism?
- Irving Kristol
- Islam between democracy and liberalism
ShareComments
Leave a Reply
