On Rick Perlstein’s recommendation, I’m listening to Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century by Daniel Oppenheimer (February 2016). The book examines the process by which six major political figures of the last century rejected their leftist views and embraced conservatism. Oppenheimer wants us, left or right, to consider how we come to believe what we do and how we come to reject it.
The first installment reflects on the path that led Whittaker Chambers away from his years of dedication to the Communist Party’s vision of human improvement to becoming its staunch enemy. Chambers’ first intimation of Stalin’s purges left him questioning his communist “faith.”
I heard this passage Tuesday. Oppenheimer writes:
In 1937, Chambers finally decided to read an anti-Soviet book. The one he found, I Speak for the Silent, couldn’t have been better chosen to erode what was left of his faith. Its author, Vladimir Tchernavin, was a former scientist with the Soviets’ state fishing agency—a man of hard facts and clear-eyed reason—and the book was an unrelenting, unsentimental account not just of Tchernavin’s own descent into the Soviet prison system, but of the absolute corruption and almost comic folly of the Soviet government.
It was as if Lenin, fifteen years after The Soviets at Work, had returned from the dead to survey the dry facts of the government he created, only to discover that everything was the inverse of what he’d promised. Not justice but crass opportunism was the logic of the system. Not efficiency but disorder reigned.
Chambers had never been impressed with the quality of the people in the American party, or with the wisdom of the party’s strategies, but he had consoled himself with the assumption that in the Soviet Union things were better. And even if it wasn’t perfect over there, it was at least an imperfect system guided by high-minded leaders and a vision of justice. The Soviet government of I Speak for the Silent was devoid of anything resembling high-mindedness.
There were decent, intelligent souls in Tchernavin’s Soviet Union, but almost without exception they were being shaken down, jailed, or executed. They were the victims of the idiots, thugs, manipulators, and sociopaths who were in charge (who were in turn always victimizing each other).
If one believed what Tchernavin wrote, and by this point Chambers did, there could be nothing left of the communist dream. Cruel necessity was something that Chambers could tolerate, as long as he didn’t look at it too closely, but if Tchernavin was right, then there was nothing at all in the Soviet Union to justify any of the cruelty. The whole thing was a fraud. It was the corruption of the modern world distilled into a putrid essence. It didn’t ennoble people; it debased them. It didn’t dissolve alienation; it exacerbated it. Neither Tchernavin nor Chambers knew, at the time, how many millions of people had died of starvation and disease as a result of the economic policies and practices of the regime, or how many millions more would die in the prison system from which Tchernavin and his family managed to escape. Such possibilities were implicit, however, in what Tchernavin described: a system that had gone insane.
I don’t need to itemize the parallels.
Courtesy of MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Tuesday night, a reference to a 2015 New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza. The far-right Freedom Caucus formed in 2015 made its mark stirring the pot on the Republican side of the aisle. Rep. Devin Nunes of California once described T-party members of Congress as “lemmings with suicide vests.”
Online media, however, eventually stoked the GOP base’s hunger for red meat and shifted the focus of Republican electeds away from legislating to what Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) over the weekend characterized as performance art and grifting. Nunes in 2015 told Lizza:
“I used to spend ninety per cent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter, such as, ‘I really like this bill, H.R. 123,’ and they really believe in it because they heard about it through one of the groups that they belong to, but their view was based on actual legislation,” Nunes said. “Ten per cent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that’s out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head.” The overwhelming majority of his constituent mail is now about the far-out ideas, and only a small portion is “based on something that is mostly true.” He added, “It’s dramatically changed politics and politicians, and what they’re doing.”
It certainly changed Nunes.
Their voters wanted conspiracy theories and culture wars? Republicans would oblige. Their voters want a spray-tanned, racist con man, a xenophobic, celebrity “tycoon” and tax cheat with a will to power and no interest in governing? The GOP would oblige. Nunes would oblige. He would become one of the most brown-nosing of Donald Trump’s sycophants. Now Nunes is leaving Congress to run Trump’s propaganda machine, a new grift formed, no doubt, to aid Trump’s ascension to dictator in 2024. To what else would a narcissist with too much and never enough aspire?
And here we are like Chambers and, one hopes, like a remnant few American conservatives who cling to their tattered ideals of what America is supposed to represent. A happy few, perhaps too late realizing the perils and potential American carnage ahead. But perhaps also not too inert and too late to fight back.
Absolute corruption. Almost comic folly. Crass opportunism. Politics debased. Not the best but the worst in charge: idiots, thugs, manipulators, and sociopaths. Alienation among the people not alleviated but exacerbated for political gain. People suffering and dying as a result of the cruel policies and practices of the regime. A system gone insane.
What could totalitarianism look like in the U.S.? Christiane Amanpour asked “The Handmaid’s Tale” author Margaret Atwood.
“It would have a lot of God in it,” Atwood predicts. “It would have a lot of American flags in it.”
And George Washington, don’t forget.
And it would have a lot of ‘let’s get back to the old days’ in it,” Atwood continued, asking, “When were those old days and what was going on in them?”
Chambers recoiled in horror at how Stalinism revealed the ideology to which he had dedicated himself to be a lie. The only recoil left on the American right comes from the butt of an AR-15.