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Home » New book on political changers by Daniel Oppenheimer

New book on political changers by Daniel Oppenheimer

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Cornflour” has alerted me to a new book on political changers (left-to-right), a subject very dear to my heart. It’s by Daniel Oppenheimer, and it’s called Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century:

In Exit Right, Daniel Oppenheimer tells the stories of six major political figures whose journeys away from the left reshaped the contours of American politics in the twentieth century. By going deep into the minds of six apostates””Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Christopher Hitchens.

As you can see from the description, Oppenheimer’s focus is somewhat different than mine, although there’s some overlap. He seems to be intereted mostly in the movers and shakers who underwent political change, whereas although I’m interested in them (and have already written about some of them) I’m also extremely interested in the ordinary people (like me!) who did something similar. In particular I’m interested in studying the process of political change itself. How does it happen, and why? What are the commonalities? What are the differences?

I have not read the book, and definitely plan to do so. But my impression from the interview is that Oppenheimer seems to have more of a biographical interest in these people rather than an analytical one in the phenomenon as a whole. He seems to come to it more as storyteller and chronicler rather than as scientist or semi-scientist. This is a fine approach, as far as it goes. I like stories and biography, and I would imagine these are fascinating, but I’m actually more interested in what we can extrapolate from the stories.

I also listened to this interview with Oppenheimer about his book. He himself is a leftist, raised a leftist, but with intermittent doubts and questions, but so far he has resisted a personal political change. Here’s the author’s webpage.

Comments

New book on political changers by Daniel Oppenheimer — 13 Comments

  1. He has an interesting blog. They want to change the name of Robert E. Lee high school. Have you noticed how the lefties always want to rewrite history? It’s like the old USSR where they were always rewriting history and they joked, the future is always certain but the past is always changing.

  2. Ray:

    Yes, I noticed that.

    And it would be one thing if Robert E. Lee was some sort of foaming-at-the-mouth evildoer. But anyone who knows anything about the man knows that he was an extraordinarily complex and conflicted figure, and reducing him to some sort of simplistic villain is nonsense, IMHO.

  3. “reducing him to some sort of simplistic villain is nonsense”

    All part of shaping the narrative neo. Revising history is an ongoing, never to be finished project. The end justifies the means.

  4. I wouldn’t say that Hitchens left the Left.

    More accurately (as many have said of themselves), the Left left him.

    He finally caught on to their general insanity and murderous totalitarian sympathies, of which he wanted no part.

    (Or maybe I should say, “of which he no longer wanted any part.”?)

    Simply put, he could no longer live with the lie that the “evil empire”—the USA—was always unrepentantly evil and never a force for good.

    Or perhaps, as a true contrarian, he simply got tired of their pig-headed, knee-jerk, adolescent view of the world.

    Or maybe he just grew up.

    Finally.

  5. Neo:
    “…the ordinary people (like me!).”

    Don’t be so modest, young lady. You are far from ordinary. We wouldn’t be here if you were “ordinary’.

  6. Chambers ideological metamorphosis as chronicled in his masterpiece “Witness” was a major influence on the change in worldview of this collegiate socialist way back when. If you have not read it you are depriving yourself of one of the most moving literary experiences of the last century.

  7. Maybe worth reading.

    It should be noted that Whitaker Chamber’s move from communist to anti-communist was not exactly the same as going from being a Republican to being a Democrat. Plenty of Democrats [Truman, JFK, LBJ] were anti-communist, they just weren’t as outrageous as McCarthy. Chambers also wrote a celebrated scathing review of Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged. So he was fairly intelligent.

    Hitchens, as he grew older, was more a contrarian than someone who adhered to left / right political posturing. It’s one reason I kind of liked him [and I’m left of center]. He hated Kissinger and that didn’t change. He also was skeptical [or was that hostile?] to one section of the right – notably Christian conservatives.

    Norman Podhoretz is an odd duck in my view because here is a guy who based his views on black people almost entirely on his childhood playground experience. His essay on “Negro’s” is very honest but sort of ugly. I’m not sure he ever was left of center. His parents sort of were.

    Reagan’s move from left to right was legit. I think Charlton Heston sort of did the same.

  9. MDL et alii — re Senator McCarthy, you might be interested in this book, Blacklisted by History.

    http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/231155.Blacklisted_by_History

    The long-awaited “Blacklisted by History,” based on six years of intensive research, dismantles the myths surrounding Joe McCarthy and his campaign to unmask Communists, Soviet agents, and flagrant loyalty risks working within the U.S. government.

    Evans’s revelations completely overturn our understanding of McCarthy, McCarthyism, and the Cold War.

    Drawing on primary sources–including never-before-published government records and FBI files, as well as recent research gleaned from Soviet archives and intercepted transmissions between Moscow spymasters and their agents in the United States–Evans presents irrefutable evidence of a relentless Communist drive to penetrate our government, influence its policies, and steal its secrets. Most shocking of all, he shows that U.S. officials supposedly guarding against this danger not only let it happen but actively covered up the penetration.

    All of this was precisely as Joe McCarthy contended.

    “Blacklisted by History” shows, for instance, that the FBI knew as early as 1942 that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the atomic bomb project, had been identified by Communist leaders as a Party member; that high-level U.S. officials were warned that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy almost a decade before the Hiss case became a public scandal; that a cabal of White House, Justice Department, and State Department officials lied about and covered up the Amerasia spy case; and that the State Department had been heavily penetrated by Communists and Soviet agents before McCarthy came on the scene.

    Evans also shows that practically everything we’ve been told about McCarthy is false, including conventional treatment of the famous 1950 speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, that launched the McCarthy era (“I have here in my hand . . .”), the Senate hearings that casually dismissed his charges, the matter of leading McCarthy suspect Owen Lattimore, the Annie Lee Moss case, the Army-McCarthy hearings, and much more.

    In the end, Senator McCarthy was censured by his colleagues and condemned by the press and historians. But as Evans writes, “The real Joe McCarthy has vanished into the mists of fable and recycled error, so that it takes the equivalent of a dragnet search to find him.”

    “Blacklisted by History” provides the first accurate account of what McCarthy did and, more broadly, what happened to America during the Cold War. It is a revealing expose of the forces that distorted our national policy in that conflict and our understanding of its history since.

  11. Beverly,
    The Communists had many boosters in the west. George Orwell said this about the English left-wing journalists and intellectuals. ‘Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.’

  12. Beverly Says:
    February 3rd, 2016 at 11:49 pm
    MDL et alii – re Senator McCarthy, you might be interested in this book, Blacklisted by History.

    http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/231155.Blacklisted_by_History

    … presents irrefutable evidence of a relentless Communist drive to penetrate our government, influence its policies, and steal its secrets. Most shocking of all, he shows that U.S. officials supposedly guarding against this danger not only let it happen but actively covered up the penetration.
    * * *
    Looks like the only thing that has changed is substituting Islam jihadis for communists.

    Hitchens, Orwell, and Chambers (probably others* as well) disavowed the Communist totalitarians, but IIRC they never discarded socialism as their guiding ideology.
    However, as Hayek demonstrated, socialism in any guise leads inexorably to totalitarianism, so not much is gained by stepping back from the edge without climbing off the platform completely.

    *Reagan sat down on a bench for awhile, but he still enlarged the government reach into private life.

  13. Pingback:A Tale of a Tail Gunner: Louis Falstein and “Face of a Hero” – II: Louis Falstein’s War in the Air… Before, During, and After – Excursions in Jewish Military History and Jewish Genealogy

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