The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism

by Michael Kimmage

The Conservative Turn tells the story of postwar America’s political evolution through two fascinating Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers. Born at the turn of the twentieth century, they were college classmates who went on to intellectual prominence, sharing the questions, crises, and challenges of their generation.

A spy for the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Chambers became the main witness in the 1948 trial of Alger Hiss, which ended in Hiss’s conviction for perjury. The trial advanced the careers of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy and marked the beginning of the Cold War mood in America. Chambers was also a major conservative thinker, a theorist of the postwar conservative movement.

Meanwhile, in the 1940s and 1950s, the literary critic Trilling wrote important essays that encouraged liberals to disown their radical past and to embrace a balanced maturity. Trilling’s liberal anti-communism was highly influential, culminating politically in the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

Kimmage argues that the divergent careers of these two men exemplify important developments in postwar American the emergence of modern conservatism and the rise of moderate liberalism, crucially shaped by anti-communism. Taken together, these developments constitute a conservative turn in American political and intellectual life―a turn that continues to shape America’s political landscape.

Genres: American History, History, 20th Century

440 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2009

Reviews

[J. Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much more enjoyable than most history books I've come across, and making me tremendously more knowledgeable about mid-twentieth century politics than I've ever been before, this book is an interesting examination of the evolution of the American view of Communism by examining the parallel careers of Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers. Trilling is a complicator of the liberal intellectual mindset such that by the end of his life he was being suspected as a conservative (he's a great writer who you should read) and Chambers is a fascinating dude I'd never really heard of, but he sounds like the type of tortured anti-materialist attempted realist/ moralist I could get behind.
This is a good one.

[Roger Lohmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not exactly a page-turner and very uneven. In fact, I put it down several times not intending to go back, but I did and it was worth it.

If you are (or were) a liberal anti-communist, born after about 1940 and living in the U.S., you were probably influenced by Lionel Trilling whether or not you realized it. Kimmage offers some useful insights, his connection to leftist circles in the 1920s, his (and others') "conservative turn" away from communism in the wake of the Moscow Trials and all the other horrors of Stalinism, and the subsequent decline of intellectual leftism in the U.S. during the 1940s and 1950s. Kimmage is also quite insightful about the seemingly tortured and duplicitous life of Whitaker Chambers, including his ties to Richard Nixon, Joseph McCarthy and others.

This particular ideological history is much more relevant than the shallow leftism of the 1960s in understanding the contemporary politics of American "conservatism", and the divide between blue states and red states.