Conservative Class Warfare
The Resurgence of a Forgotten Strain of Conservatism
For now, I can’t write directly in this newsletter about electoral politics—but I can write about political philosophy and political theory, and in ways that tend to shine a light on what is going on in our contemporary politics.
There is a strain of American conservatism that I hadn’t previously been aware of, which has come to the forefront in recent years. I would say it is a somewhat obscure theory, except that it was very influential in its own time and has become influential again, so it might be more accurate to say it was submerged—it never went away, it just wasn’t out in the open.
It was brought back to my attention a few days ago when a colleague sent me an excerpt from Whittaker Chambers’s notorious negative review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in National Review back in 1957. This might seem somewhat obscure, but it was a significant skirmish in the jostling of different ideological influences on the American right.
As we will see, it has a surprising relevance to today—and it’s probably not what you’re expecting.
Here is the excerpt from Chambers.
The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit…. Systems of philosophic materialism, so long as they merely circle outside this world’s atmosphere, matter little to most of us. The trouble is that they keep coming down to earth. It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.
One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “productive achievement” man’s “noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau…. [I]n reality,… by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship…. Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.
When I first encountered this review (about thirty years after it was written), I was mostly struck by how little Chambers understood about Ayn Rand’s novel—from getting plot points and character names wrong to missing major philosophical themes, such her rather pointed rejection of philosophical materialism. The review seems to be based on a rather hasty skimming of the novel, at most, rather than an actual attempt to read it, and his real complaint seems to be that Rand puts “man at the center of a godless world.” In other words, the whole thing is just “Atheist Bad.”
But in this passage, there is a theme I missed before. He creates a bizarre argument that Rand, as staunch an advocate of individual liberty as you could find, is somehow calling for dictatorship; the title of the review is “Big Sister Is Watching You.” The Orwell reference is ironic, since Chambers is the one basically arguing here that freedom is slavery.
But this passage indicates how he gets to that strange conclusion.
