From Whittaker Chambers to George W. Bush

Excerpt from Sam Tanenhaus in The New RepublicNR, "The End of the Journey," July 2, 2007:

World War II, Chambers wrote, "simplified the balance of forces in the world by reducing them to two." This was more or less what most Americans, including American intellectuals, believed in 1952. But Chambers typically went further, embracing a Manichaean dualism, though even this had its Marxist angle. As a practiced revolutionary, he knew - as did Lenin and Trotsky, for all their fealty to "historical materialism" - that political movements rise to power not on the wings of theory but through the politics of irreducible choice.

This was the lesson absorbed by American conservatives 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 his death remained his friend and in some sense his disciple, succeeded in shattering the post-war 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."

The epithet "evil empire" distressed many in the civilized world when Reagan first uttered it in 1983. But he was speaking in terms the Soviet themselves understood; he gave voice to the binary theology that joined the two great powers in their death struggle. In the 1980s, and Chambersian absolutism was very much in vogue, the official view of the Reagan White House was that the Soviet Union was not only "permanently evil" but indestructible, growing in reach and in charismatic might even as the evidence oppositely pointed to a dysfunctional economy, a political spoils system rotten with corruption, republics seeing with ethnic patriots, satellite countries in rebellion. But when the collapse came, the Manichaean belief that America had singly "won" the cold war seemed vindicated. Our theology had triumphed. Even a conservative such Fukuyama, updating the dialect along Hegelian rather than Marxian lines, credited the triumph to "the realm of consciousness or ideas, since consciousness will ultimately remake the material world in its image." Since then Fukuyama has acknowledged that he and other neoconservatives were wrong.