Rooted in the Nation: Whittaker Chambers’s Agrarian Conservatism
Conservative political action can, in fact, be a bulwark of counterrevolution. This is why Whittaker Chambers was a “conservative of the heart,” even if he did not consider himself a “conservative of the head.” In the final analysis, he was a witness to the permanent things.
Whittaker Chambers refused to call himself a conservative.
In his letters to William F. Buckley, the ex-communist turned informer often expressed discomfort with the new orthodoxy National Review was forging. In a missive dated Christmas Eve, 1958, for instance, Chambers declared he had “almost nothing in common” with either the fusionist Frank Meyer or the traditionalist Russell Kirk. What’s more, he considered their debate “an irrelevant buzz.” Men with a disposition to preserve, Chambers believed, did not grasp the “total reality” of the Cold War crisis America faced.
Chambers preferred to identify as a “man of the Right” or a “counter-revolutionary.” “We are in the middle of a universal earthquake,” he wrote to Buckley. “If we survive it, then there will be something to reflect on. It is perfectly clear that we may not survive. At that point, I lose interest.” The West faced an existential crisis, and Chambers wanted to direct all its efforts to overcoming revolutionary ideology.
Chambers’s discontent with “movement conservatism” would probably resonate with many on the Right today. The old fusionist formulas have lost their luster, and young people especially are seeking “postliberal” solutions to the problems of a modern society. As the crisis heightens, conservatism just does not seem to be enough. Chambers, however, was perhaps more genuinely conservative than his correspondence with Buckley suggests. Especially with regard to his farm, rural life, and his neighbors, his writing exhibits a deeply conservative streak that tempered his counterrevolutionary zeal. Modern politics may be an existential struggle between freedom and tyranny, but the local provided Chambers a shelter against the gale of revolution.
