Years later there is still the faint smell of cigarettes in the yellowed paper of a dozen or so books I took from a dead man’s library. He had a big library full of big ideas.
The man was Frank S. Meyer (1909-1972) a prominent American born Jewish communist who before leaving the Left, held leadership roles in the movement in the United States and the UK. His books had remained on shelves and boxes in his home for decades after his death and the institute where I worked was the welcome home for his, as well as, the libraries of other dead luminaries of the immediate post-war conservative movement.
While many of Meyer’s books were important in some way, rare editions or things signed to him by historical figures, a lot were simply exotic or esoteric with no practical place in the institute’s collection. (A man’s library is an intimate reflection of the man himself, something to note when someone eventually will be culling your shelves.)
Among the expected heady tomes and classics there was an abundance of paperback spy novels and Westerns…Le Carre, Louis L’Amour and the like. Of particular interest to me, but not to the institute however, were the books “in between.” These were the jarring and daring authors unfit for popular consumption because what they were saying was inconvenient and off-script or because what they wrote was too upsetting to contemplate and people waved away.
Blessed Are the Losers
Like a lot of disillusioned first generation communists, after WWII Frank Meyer publicly broke away from communism and, as it says on the jacket of one of his own books, “devoted the rest of his life to reconsidering the foundations of political and moral life.”
Meyer is one of the post-WWII thinkers worth taking time to familiarize yourself with, notably because he is the principal architect of Fusionism, which was an attempt to fuse together traditional and social conservatism with right-libertarianism. His reasoning for wanting to do this is more important than the tenets of how this new way would work. Good idea or not, his thinking greatly influenced the political landscape.
He, like several other top tier communist defectors (James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers, especially), brought a level of insight into how true believers on the Left think and see themselves that “cradle conservatives” didn’t appreciate then and still don’t grasp today. There is generally a failure on the Right to truly understand the deeply personal, spiritual, and psychological configuration of the mind and emotions of the committed leftist. The political Right has never been able to produce the legions of followers with the all-in zeal which the Left has dependably and consistently been able to create.
Why this is so and what to do about it was a great gift of the communist defectors. They made it clear that the West’s civilizational fall was imminent and that the Constitution alone would not be a sufficient blueprint for rebuilding (let alone as a defense) any more than would the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Westminster Confession, or free market principles. Instead, what was needed was a complete ideology, one that integrated the political, theological, cultural, and economic requirements that a robust civilization demanded. Anything short of that would not be capable of fighting the timeless gnostic forces that fuel the Left.
Whittaker Chambers underscored this sentiment when he said, “I know that I am leaving the winning side for the losing side, but it is better to die on the losing side than to live under communism.”
The accounts of the defectors also laid bare for the first time another profound truth: what we call the Left is a political label and merely a disguise, like a cheap suit. Inside this suit, however, is an intelligent form that is animated by an ancient malevolent spirit that changes as necessary across the ages to battle for the soul of a people but desires control of the world.
Fifty years since Meyer’s death, we see this spirit transforming again as it leaves “The Left” to possess a new but as yet unlabeled new skin suit, a Global Technocratic Great Resetting Moloch.
All of this is religious language and each of the communist defectors abandoned leftist ideology not because they believed in the American Way or because the Right had a better ideology (it doesn’t have one) but because they first had a religious conversion (Meyer and Burnham became Catholic, Chambers a Quaker). These jaded former atheists saw the true nature of the struggle, and then as now, it is between good and evil. Again, they understood that a rightest ideological wedding of faith with politics was the only thing potent enough to defeat the inverted religiosity of the Left.
Breaking the Spell
Reading Meyer’s books, and others from the first half of the 20th century in particular, I can tell you that ours is a stupid generation. Partly because too many are literally not capable of digesting what is printed in books of substance, but also because important ideas across many disciplines that authors expected their readers to be familiar with are now utterly unknown. These gaps dangerously compound into a spell of invincible ignorance.
These are strong and harsh words but they are provably true. No one is to blame, and all are to blame. We all are willingly but irresistibly swept along on an outrageous torrent of information, distraction, and meaningless noise that would terrify a sane man 100 years ago.
The practical result is that we are condemned to a type of civilizational amnesia, oblivious to the profound insights and lessons from even the recent past. We know nothing of the explicit warnings from these eye-witnesses nor their explanations for how ruin, betrayal, and evil operate. And if presented with the ideas, we have regressed in the ability to comprehend.
Think what you will of the sincerity of the communist converts to the American Cause, they were candid about a great many things and today the people most capable of receiving their wisdom have no idea they even existed, let alone the gravity of what they have to say.
But, we can pleasantly change this. Seek out, support, and, more importantly, read the resurrected works from independent publishers like Antelope Hill or even new small efforts like Mystery Grove. They and others are preserving important ideas that will be invaluable to jumpstarting civilization post whatever comes after the present age.
Stay tuned for highlights from the forgotten libraries of the dead men of letters.
‘Cause down in Alabama, you can run, but you sure can’t hide.
I do not think the Right can ever induce the zeal of the committed Leftist. As you note, the Communists who converted did so to Christianity, but not to mainstream Protestantism. Nowadays, with the ongoing decay of both Protestantism and Catholicism, the only refuge might be Orthodoxy.
Of course there is Islam. It does induce a deep zeal and inspire activism. It might well be the only antidote to Leftism.
PS. When I was in college in the early 60’s, Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer,” was required reading in my polisci course. It still has relevance.
Bob….Hoffer’s book is absolutely still relevant and I’d put it on the required reading list for Our Side. We miss the importance of personality types that are attracted to particular movements and also how childhood trauma for many is predictive of one’s adult politics.
What makes Islam mostly resistant to leftism is what also makes it concerning to the West: Islam has evolved into a complete ideological construct that not only accounts for religion, but has something to say about economics, culture, and even science. It proves the point the a fully built out ideology is the only thing that will be able to resist the assault from a hostile ideological threat. The Amish have retained their strength because they’ve explicitly connected the faith to all aspects of communal life.
Orthodoxy has many strengths indeed and even functioning as a “hospital” for Christians as we struggle through this crisis, it should be supported and encouraged.
The Constitution died when the South was invaded and will not function again until we are free. It will then only function if we are the same people, not the reconstructed clowns of clownworld. It is ours and ours alone, it is not fit for others, you can’t just randomly pick people and say be free, that doesn’t work. There would be no Communism in America if there was still an America, which is a people, not an arbitrary line on a map. We are a race and nation apart, we wrote OUR Constitution, not everyone else’s. We must organize and we must fight as a people, the very reason the right does not produce the zeal you see lacking is because the American right are an ideology contrived and headed mostly by closet Marxists in the Republican Party called “conservatism” they not only are not of our people, they hate us.
The left doesn’t produce zeal, they create mobs of parasites, a horde incapable of existing on their own because their ideology is based on hating others, it is not zeal, you cannot ascribe that to them anymore than you would describe a rabid dog as being passionate about his work. It’s not zeal.
People and their true identity are where actual zeal comes from and we have plenty of that, if not numbers. We are waiting on organization, the articulation of our identity to our people and a coherent path forward for us to reclaim our home and be free. It has to come from our people, for our people. An ideology will never produce zeal unless it is rooted in a people’s identity and is a production of those people based on their identity, a cultural production not a political one, certainly not one crafted in New York city by the Party of Lincoln. Without an identity worth fighting for then you will be subsumed into the horde of leftistism, which I would prefer to dying for a bunch of Yankees in their Florida condos, so they can squeeze one more day of life from us and our sacrifices.
By our people, for our people or get used to the apathy.
Conservatism (whatever that means, these days) is more akin to a castle, sitting there with guards in the parapets, trying to protect some villagers from constant attacks from hostile outside forces; whereas, the Left is an actual movement, like the destructive swarming hordes of Genghis Khan. A movement, like the Left, does not have to “make sense”, but it does have the advantage of actual movement. You cannot defeat a Genghis Khan from a defensive position, but must meet him with equally committed troops on the field of battle. The Right has, for many years, been infiltrated and watered down so that no such passionate movement/strike force is created. In fact, it has retreated to the deepest parts if the castle keep. Trump seemed to be a glimmer of hope, but he turned out to be just another backstabbing, steam valve, fake.
Yes, nobody has ever won a purely defensive anything. One thing though, you do not meet the horde head on, they just import new people like they did during the first invasion. You have to identify the head of the snake and point the horde at them. We are so disorganized that we couldn’t point at ourselves to having our own history curriculum for our children.