Cass Sunstein’s Unreliable Witness

But reviewing those columns (here and here), it does not take long to see that Sunstein fails to offer an accurate account of Chambers’s life and work, including Chambers’s landmark anti-communist work, Witness. As I’ll explain in detail, Sunstein utterly mischaracterizes Chambers, a deeply principled man with strong beliefs whom Sunstein paints as little more than a skeptic who was “not too sure” whether he “was right.”

This seems a habit for Sunstein who previously drew on caricature of Edmund Burke to construct a theory of “Burkean Minimalism” intended to do little more than deter conservative efforts to roll back liberal Supreme Court precedents. Whether Sunstein does this unwittingly or intentionally, he does no more justice to Chambers than he’s done to Burke.

In the first of his two essays on Chambers, Sunstein had argued that the Alger Hiss—Whittaker Chambers case, in which Chambers exposed a Communist conspiracy reaching the highest levels of mid-century liberal government in Washington, “explains” the modern Tea Party’s “suspicions” of liberal social engineering. The TWS Scrapbook already has skewered Sunstein’s diagnosis. (“If Sunstein thinks it’s damaging for the Tea Party to accuse liberals of having secret agendas, then he should tell his fellow liberals to stop harboring secret agendas.”) So has the Liberty Fund’s Richard Reinsch, who literally wrote the book on Chambers.

But Sunstein’s second essay on Chambers is even more frustrating. Invoking Chambers’s legendarily harsh review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Sunstein sets Chambers against Rand’s harsh ideology, and thus against modern politicians (such as Sen. Ted Cruz) who extol Atlas Shrugged today.

“For Chambers,” Sunstein writes (quoting phrases from the Atlas Shrugged review), “the problem is that Rand ‘deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites,’ depicting a world in which ‘everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly.’”

What, then did Chambers himself stand for? Sunstein explains:

“This is the conservatism of Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott and Friedrich Hayek,” says Sunstein (confirming once again Jonah Goldberg’s observation that, to liberals, “the only good conservative is a dead conservative”).

Then Sunstein suggests one more comparison for Chambers’s approach: “It endorses the view of Judge Learned Hand, who said at the dawn of World War II that the ‘spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.’”

Let’s give Sunstein his due. Yes, Chambers harshly criticized Rand for dealing “wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites,” for allowing her ideological obsessions to replace human beings, with all of their nuances and failings, with abstract shadows of true men and women.

But just as Rand reduced men to a small handful of premises and then filled them out with her own ideology, Sunstein does the same to Chambers: Drawing exclusively from a few snippets of Chambers’s work, Sunstein describes a man who resembles in no way the real Whittaker Chambers, the man who stood up to Communism and who wrote stirring defenses of Western civilization, not because of skepticism, but because of profound belief and certainty.

Indeed, that is the entire point of Witness: Chambers stood, much like Jonah (the biblical prophet who “fascinated” Chambers), against the tide of History, committed to God and to Western Civilization. As Chambers explained unflinchingly, in the book’s prologue:

And, he continued, in lines presaging his criticism of Rand:

Those convictions, not the skepticism of Sunstein’s caricature, were what caused Chambers to rise as a witness against Alger Hiss, and against Communism:

Moreover, what drove him to be a witness was the same “particular quality of my revolutionary character” (as he put it in a letter to William F. Buckley Jr.) that drove him to join Communism in the first place:

This is not to say that Chambers expected success; he was supremely pessimistic. Yet those doubts reflected not a lack of certainty that his cause was just, but a lack of faith in the West’s willingness to beat Communism.

That theme pours forth from not just Witness, but also his letters to young Bill Buckley (collected in Odyssey of a Friend), his letters to Ralph de Toledano (Notes from the Underground), and his last book, Cold Friday. As he explained to Buckley in 1954, two years after Witness and six years after he first testified against Hiss:

Again, Sunstein misses all of this. Chambers believed deeply in God, and in freedom. He believed in American capitalism, albeit to a much lesser extent. (And he held that belief despite the fact that capitalism is not inherently conservative: “I am a man of the Right because I mean to uphold capitalism in its American version. But I claim that capitalism is not, and by its essential nature cannot conceivably be, conservative.”)

And he believed in the Republican Party as the best means by which to achieve his goals in the political arena, as he explained in his letters to Buckley. As Buckley recounts in Rumbles Left & Right:

While Sunstein largely misunderstands Chambers, he is accidentally correct to tie Chambers to Burke. As Terry Teachout notes in the foreword to his collection of Chambers’s journalism (Ghosts on the Roof), Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was one of just four books that Chambers kept in the top drawer of his desk at Time magazine. Chambers’s work echoes Burke’s in some ways, not because they were both “Minimalists” in the vein of Sunstein and Learned Hand, but because of their deep commitments to principle. As Michael Kimmage writes in The Conservative Turn, Chambers and Burke “were all trying to conserve some spiritual principle from modernity.”

So why, then, did Chambers so harshly criticize Ayn Rand? Not because she believed in something, but because she believed in the wrong thing. Echoing the point he made at in the aforementioned prologue to Witness, Chambers wrote of Ayn Rand’s ideology that, “Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, . . . Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.” Chambers rejected Rand’s rejection of God and of the true foundations of Western Civilization. He rejected her attempt, and Marx’s attempt, to recreate Man in the materialist’s image.

Moreover, Chambers rejected Rand for believing in things the wrong way – that is, in an unobservant way, an ideological way that denied such facts as man’s fallen nature. (In that respect, Sunstein is correct to say that Chambers’s conservatism “engages with particulars.”) Chambers criticized Rand not simply for seeing some things in black-and-white, but for dealing “wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites.” That is, Chambers did not reject certitudes per se; Chambers was absolutely certain of some things, and in light of those absolute truths he rejected certitude where it did not belong, or where it was so plainly contradicted by real-life fact.

Perhaps this is best illustrated by one of the most famous passages in Witness, detailing the moment he lost faith in Communism after years in the underground, and found faith in God:

Thus, the facts before him caused him not merely to reject certainty (in Communism), but also to embrace certainty (in God), a certainty that became the premise for the rest of his life’s work.

Ironically, Sunstein’s narrow focus on a few lines from Chambers’s Atlas Shrugged review causes him to overlook Chambers’s lengthy writings on a subject much more directly relevant to modern politics: Chambers’s criticism of Senator Joe McCarthy and other Republicans who were insufficiently pragmatic in the political efforts.

Again, the point is not that Chambers was unprincipled, or that he urged Republicans to lose their faith in their ideals. Rather, he urged them to choose their battles wisely, always with an eye to political reality, in order to win democratic elections. He explained this, too, invoking Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, to describe the Republican Party’s need to craft positions responsive to the economic and social reality of the time:

Given what he saw as the settled realities of his time, Chambers denounced Senator McCarthy and his followers in the strongest possible terms (“For the Right to tie itself in any way to Senator McCarthy is suicide.”), despite the fact that Chambers agreed fully with the anticommunist principle that motivated them. Chambers rejected “political orthodoxy” (as he put it in yet another letter to Buckley), not because he doubted the principles at stake, but because he doubted the ability of the Republican Party and the then-nascent conservative movement to achieve their principles without some compromises in the political platform. He held open the possibility that the Republican Party and conservative movement might someday be able to pursue political orthodoxy. “But, unless I am greatly mistaken,” he urged, “that time lies on the far side of unimaginable changes” in American society.

Needless to say, such debates within the nascent conservative movement are in many ways similar to the fundamental debate now occurring among many Republicans, and among many conservatives. To what extent should we pursue ideological purity — and, correspondingly, to what extent should we compromise in order to accomplish something, or at least to live to fight another day?

In our time, as in Chambers’s, reasonable minds can disagree the ultimate balance that Republicans should strike among these prudential considerations. (William Buckley, who never shared Chambers’s pessimism, certainly disagreed with Chambers’s assessment of McCarthy.) But to disagree over practical judgments is not to lose faith in the underlying principle. Like Chambers, Republicans can be committed to principle yet calibrate their actions in light of political pragmatism. This does not foster a conservatism that “is not too sure that it is right,” as Learned Hand put it and as Sunstein would have it. Rather, prudential compromise, when necessary, shows confidence in one’s underlying principles: if complete victory is not possible today, then one must do what is possible to keep moving forward.

Sunstein closes his essay with an exhortation: “Go tomorrow, buy ‘Witness,’ and read it.” On that point, I am sure that Sunstein is right. We would all do well to read more Whittaker Chambers – more than just a few lines from his review of Ayn Rand.

Adam J. White is a lawyer in Washington, D.C.