Political conversions are painful, like losing your religion or falling out of love. Illustration by Mark Pernice

The biggest story of the past fifty years in American politics has been the ascendancy of the right, and it’s a story of apostasy. At each stage of the conservative movement’s long march to power, crucial aid was provided by heretics from the left. Progressives recoiled from the New Deal and turned reactionary; ex-Communists helped to launch National Review, in the nineteen-fifties; recovering socialists founded neoconservatism in the sixties and seventies; New Left radicals turned on their former comrades and former selves in the Reagan years. Ronald Reagan, whose Presidency brought the movement to its high-water mark, was himself once a New Deal liberal. In the course of a lifetime, the prevailing political winds are westerly—they blow from left to right. Try to think of public figures who made the opposite journey: Elizabeth Warren, Garry Wills, and Joan Didion come to mind, and Kevin Phillips, the disillusioned Nixon strategist; more recently, the writer Michael Lind and the Clinton-hater-turned-lover David Brock defected from the right to the left. That’s about it.

The most common explanation is the one variously attributed to Churchill, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George: “Any man who is not a socialist at age twenty has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age forty has no head.” The move rightward is thus a sign of the hard wisdom that comes with age and experience—or, perhaps, the callousness and curdled dreams that accompany stability and success. Irving Kristol, the ex-Trotskyist who became the godfather of neoconservatism, quipped that a neoconservative was “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Most people are hardly aware of the shift until it’s exposed by a crisis, like a major political realignment that forces us to cross party lines. Even then, they want to believe that it’s the politics, not themselves, that changed. My maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, an Alabama congressman in the early decades of the twentieth century, began his career voting with the only Socialist in Congress and ended as a bitter opponent of what he saw as the federal overreach of the New Deal. In 1935, on the floor of the House, a Democratic colleague mocked him for reversing his position on public ownership of electric power. Fuming, Huddleston insisted, “My principles and myself remain unchanged—it is the definition of ‘liberalism’ which has been changed.” Or, as Reagan famously (and falsely) claimed, he didn’t leave the Democratic Party—the Democratic Party left him.

It’s like blaming your spouse for your own unfaithfulness. Political conversions are painful affairs, as hard to face up to as falling out of love or losing your religion. Or maybe harder. Religious faith, being beyond the reach of reason, doesn’t have to answer gotcha questions about a previously held position. There’s a special contempt reserved for the political apostate—an accusation of intellectual collapse, an odor of betrayal. When you switch sides, you have to find new friends. Political identities are shaped mainly by factors that have nothing to do with rational deliberation: family and tribal origins, character traits, historical currents. In “Partisan Hearts and Minds,” published in 2002, three political scientists made an empirical case that political affiliations form in early adulthood and seldom change. Few people can be reasoned into abandoning their politics.

In the twentieth century, the void left by the loss of religion was sometimes filled by totalizing political systems, and the result was a literary genre of confession that is as powerful and probing as the Augustinian kind. “The God That Failed,” published in 1950, compiled personal narratives by six former Communists and fellow-travellers, including André Gide, Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, and Richard Wright. Each one told a tale of coming of age in a world riven with crisis, finding meaning in Marxism, identity in the Party, and inspiration in the Soviet Union, gradually growing disillusioned, and finally breaking with Communism. In some cases, it was an experience akin to watching a former self die. It was nearly impossible for these writers to discover a new faith, political or religious, to replace Communism and its power to erase the sense of insignificance that awaits any sentient person.

Two years later, in 1952, came “Witness,” by the century’s most tormented ex-Communist, Whittaker Chambers. Daniel Oppenheimer’s sequence of biographical essays about six left-wing defectors, “Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century” (Simon & Schuster), begins with Chambers. This is Oppenheimer’s first book, but he writes with the assurance and historical command of someone who has been thinking about his topic for a long time. The colors of his own flag are hard to discern, which makes him a reliable guide. His sympathy goes to the candidly conflicted, the nakedly shattered. He wants to know why people come to hold the political beliefs they do. Stories of apostasy, he writes, “are worth telling because it’s during the period of political transition, when the bones of one’s belief system are broken and poking out through the skin, that the contingency and complexity of belief become most visible.” This quest is particularly relevant at a time when Americans are dug deep into two opposing trenches, and crossing no man’s land is a great way to get picked off.

Oppenheimer never quite answers his central question: “Exit Right” is more history than political theory and psychology. Its mini-biographies provide the author with enough thread to weave the larger story of the American left in the twentieth century, from the Daily Worker to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, from the House Un-American Activities Committee to “The Fire Next Time,” from Partisan Review to Ramparts, from Vietnam to 9/11. In addition to Chambers, there’s James Burnham, a Trotskyist philosopher of the nineteen-thirties who became a founding editor of National Review; Ronald Reagan, who started out closer to the mainstream than any of the others; Norman Podhoretz, who, in the sixties, took Commentary first leftward and then rightward with him; David Horowitz, the son of Communist Party members and a radical friend of the Black Panthers, until their violence sent him fleeing to Reaganism; and Christopher Hitchens, who belongs in another category, having never been an orthodox leftist and having never really fit with the new conservative friends of his final decade.

Among the six characters, there’s no recurring type, only a hectic impulse toward self-revision that is captured in a line from Clifford Odets’s play “Paradise Lost”: “We cancel our experience. This is an American habit.” But each tale of defection reveals a personal temper that makes these men passionately hostile to the politics of pluralism. They embrace new truths with the convert’s fervor and certitude—Oppenheimer’s “contingency and complexity of belief” is not for them. What they loathe most is liberalism.

Chambers’s tale is one of suffering and high drama out of Dostoyevsky. “Life is pain,” he wrote to his children in the letter that prefaces “Witness,” and “each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself.” For Chambers, politics was religious, a continual struggle between good and evil, and the only form of political commitment was absolute. His story has already been told extremely well twice—first in the morbid exaltations of “Witness,” then in Sam Tanenhaus’s magisterial biography, from 1997, both essential sources for Oppenheimer. Chambers was born in 1901 and grew up on Long Island, in a middle-class family whose chaos and decay gave the boy intimations of a wider illness in the modern world. His father, a half-closeted homosexual, was cruel to Whittaker; his mother was a loving but deeply neurotic woman; his brother was a future suicide. The Chambers house fell into disrepair, along with Whittaker’s teeth. Oppenheimer devotes a lot of space to Chambers’s early years, because they explain his flight into the encompassing arms of the Communist Party, in 1925. “It offered me what nothing else in the dying world had power to offer at the same intensity,” he wrote in “Witness”—“faith and a vision, something for which to live and something for which to die.”

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In 1932, Chambers became an agent of the Communist underground, and within a few years he was serving as a courier between a cell of officials in the Roosevelt Administration and their coarse, brutal Soviet handler, Boris Bykov, who could have come from Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.” While passing along microfilmed government secrets to the Soviets, Chambers, married and a father, was able to indulge his attraction to men. Cruising followed some of the same patterns as spying: “A large part of his job was to move in the shadows, to exchange meaningful glances with strangers, to take midnight ambles punctuated with intervals of purposeful loitering.”