There’s an ice cap slowly, ominously, making its way over New York City.
Figuratively speaking, of course. Ex-Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers uses this chilling glacial metaphor to describe the socialist sympathies engulfing America—an ice cap, leveling and consuming everything in its path.
Born in 1901, Whittaker Chambers was an ex-Soviet spy turned patriot informer in the early Cold War period. He exposed the communist subterfuge of Alger Hiss, a prominent American politician and UN official, and in doing so met with unexpected pushback from the American public and then Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Chambers first attributed the pushback to disbelief and partisan politicking, but soon came to realize that what actually bothered so many Americans about his exposé of Soviet espionage was the growing admiration of many American liberals and socialists for Stalin and the Soviet Union in the 40s and 50s. In his memoir, Witness, he writes,
“The simple fact is that when I took up my little sling and aimed at Communism, I also hit something else… the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation for two decades.”
While there have been plenty of critics of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist policies, Whittaker Chambers, having been a Soviet spy, understood from firsthand experience the relationship between self-professedly non-violent democrat socialism of a Mandani and the revolutionary violence endemic to all forms of Marxism.
The catastrophic repercussions of socialism all stem from the fact that socialism aims to supersede God through utopian aspirations and insistence on equity as the highest form of morality. In his memoir, Chambers wrote that while the act of breaking with the communist party itself was “organizational,” the act of breaking with communism was “personal, intellectual, and religious.” He contrasts Marxism’s push for equity through government intervention with the Judeo-Christian political philosophy upon which Western notions of limited government are founded with a simple question: “Faith in God or Faith in Man?” Socialists, Chambers argues, have chosen the latter, placing their faith in man’s ability to enact profound societal change through the eradication of class. Today, the fervent rhetoric of the so-called democratic socialists and the excitement around Mamdani’s victory in NYC echo this quasi-religious devotion to man’s ability to reform society.
When citizens look to political systems to provide for their needs and ensure their wellbeing, that political ideology naturally becomes the foundation of their happiness and purpose; it serves a religious end (think of the evangelistic fervor of human rights arguments for increased welfare spending). Socialism’s promises to promote equity and restore affordability have become, in Chambers words, the secular “faith” in which many Americans’ hope for the future, morality, and sense of purpose, rest.
“Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible,” Chambers writes. He goes on: “religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom, the soul dies. Without the soul, there is no justification for freedom.” When social reform takes the place of deeper metaphysical and religious sensibility, human inspiration, among other things, suffers. As he aged, Chambers came to the unwanted realization that the Soviet Union could produce no great artistic accomplishments. “Why is it that thirty years after the greatest revolution in history, the Communists have not produced one single inspired work of the mind? What is our lack?” Chambers concludes, “Now in my despair, I asked at last: can it be God?” Art and rich intellectualism—the soul of civilization— degrade under the suffocation of socialist overreach and its unwavering faith in Man.
Moral sensibilities likewise suffer. Chambers writes that “religion begins at the point where reason and knowledge are powerless and forever fail—the point at which man senses the mystery of his good and evil, his suffering and his destiny as a soul in search of God.” It is no surprise that in places like NYC where crime is thought of as more akin to a public health issue than a moral one that crime continues to grow. Equity and social reform cannot solve crime plaguing societies in desperate need of a transcendent moral framework in which each individual comprehends the “mystery of his [own] good and evil.” This kind of society, as implicit in the definition of all things transcendental, can only ever be employed at the personal and religious level, not via the bureaucratic and governmental sphere.
How, then, did Chambers escape the grip of Marxism, to which he had devoted his life and safety in becoming a Soviet spy? Art and beauty, in the form of a literary character and the birth of his first daughter, brought Chambers to a religious awakening that unleashed a new understanding of human nature and the importance of liberty. In Victor Hugo’s novel Les Miserables, a French bishop’s choice to offer ex-convict Jean Valjean a second chance sets in motion a complex tale of intense suffering and sacrificial love, played out through revolutions fought and lost, class struggles, prostitutes and orphans redeemed— a tale of tribulation, of romance, and of religious conviction. Throughout this tale, Les Miserables in many ways juxtaposes the administration of secular/worldly law with the ministrations of faith and redemption. He wrote that Hugo’s novel, “taught me justice and compassion, not a justice of the law, or, as we say, human justice, but a justice that transcends human justice.” The bishop in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables impressed upon Chambers genuine compassion for human suffering, driven by religious conviction, and the importance of divine notions of justice and mercy.
The novel’s nuanced portrayal of the fallibility of man also troubled Chambers enough to make him question the feasibility of socialist notions of reform and to instead seek after transcendent notions of right and wrong. “The Bishop’s view of human fallibility,” he humorously writes, “fixed mine and made it impossible for me to ever be a puritan.” This idea that religion and individual conviction can best minister charity in a fallible world convicts Chambers so much so that he muses that Hugo’s Bishop’s “view of the world” left a “permanent, indelible impress on me…no doubt, the Bishop was invisibly present still when I broke from the Communist party.” He would convert to Christianity shortly after witnessing the birth of his first daughter, and he would recall the bishop’s words to the convict Valjean: “Jean Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that 1 am buying for you. I withdraw it from dark thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”
With his newfound faith, Chambers’ comprehension of the importance of ordered liberty took shape. His conversion offered a distinctly Christian understanding of the mutual relationship between religion and liberty: “It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom,” he wrote. Only a free—and freely religious—society can fully exercise the soul’s potential. Freedom, coupled with religious devotion, offers the best hope for the creation of a society which, like Victor Hugo’s Bishop, shies away from neither the real suffering of mankind nor the reality of man’s capacity for evil and corruption. Only through profound liberty does a society venture to wrestle with the deepest questions of existence; of good and evil, of the things that—like the birth of a child—transcend the material and reach out toward God.
Plenty of pundits have decried the dangers of the NYC mayor-elect’s socialist leanings. But Whittaker Chambers not only eloquently exposed the perils of Marxist ideology decades before it took hold over much of the American political landscape, his stunning conversion from communist Soviet spy to Christian patriot reveals an alternative path. Political arguments didn’t win over Chambers. And rehashing the long list of failed socialist undertakings likely won’t win over New York City denizens. When one is motivated by the quasi-religious promises of socialism, political logic falls flat. It’s not merely then that NYC has embraced an impractical and economically catastrophic policy, it’s that NYC has embraced—whether consciously or in the misguided pursuit of affordability—an idolatrous religion.
Instead, New York City needs God. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who used a novel and a newborn baby to awaken the intellect and rapture the heart of a once ardent Soviet spy.
NYC needs the church. The kind of church that takes care of the widow and orphan and meets spiritual and physical needs with genuine Christlike compassion.
NYC needs beauty. She needs art that brings onlookers to their knees. Not art of the nihilistic post modern flavor, but the kind of breathtaking, awe-inspiring art that draws one to ask, “could man alone have made this?”
NYC doesn’t need a history lesson, it needs a revival.
