Brad DeLong: 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 Tanenhaus 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", and "Communism is likely to become more, not less dangerous" does not mean that the Cold War is winding down.
Why do writers like Tannenhaus write such things? Why do magazines like the New Republic publish it?
