Was Burnham’s opposition “oversimplified,” as many critics charged? Doubtless it was. But it was also right in essentials and was, moreover, a salutary corrective to the naive—and therefore deluded—advice of good-hearted liberals. Burnham understood with searing clarity two fundamental facts. First, that communism was an expansionist ideology bent on world domination. And, second, that its triumph would entail the destruction of every liberty, intellectual as well as political, that we in the West held sacred and yet (perilously) took for granted—above all, “the absolute value of the single human person.” Communism, Burnham saw, was opportunism elevated to a position of absolute power. Unchecked, no human good, not even the commitment to truth, can withstand its assault. Anyone who has leafed through Marxist-inspired writings will remember attacks on “mechanical logic.” But this, Burnham notes, is at bottom an attack on “the rules of objective inference and proof, the rules that permit us to test for truth and falsity.” The alternative, what is called “dialectical logic,” is simply a device that declares “whatever serves the interest of communist power is true.”
In terms of foreign policy, the fight against communism required neither appeasement—appeasement was merely a prelude to capitulation—nor containment—containment was merely appeasement on the installment plan. What was required was a concerted campaign to undermine, to roll back, the communist juggernaut. In domestic terms, the fight against communism had to begin with the recognition that communists used and abused democratic freedoms in order to destroy them. Their aim was the subversion of democracy. Therefore, Burnham argued, their capacity to subvert must itself be subverted. In the end, he thought, this meant that communism would have to be outlawed. In the near term, it required that serious restraints be placed upon communist sympathizers and agents. Would this be a violation of their civil rights—the right to free speech, for example? Doubtless it would. But, Burnham argued,
Democracy in practice has never, and could never, interpret the right of free speech in an absolute and unrestricted sense. No one, for example, is allowed to advocate, and organize for, mass murder, rape, and arson. No one feels that such prohibitions are anti-democratic. But why not? Why cannot some purist tell us that any restriction whatsoever is, logically, counter to the absolute democratic principle of free speech?
Burnham’s point was that because “Communism, in democratic nations, makes use of free speech in order to abolish free speech,” its own right of free speech had to be curtailed. (Burnham stressed later that great care would have to be taken to avoid lumping real communists together with “socialists, liberals, honest progressives,” and other “legitimate” critics and reformers.)
Burnham’s point, as pertinent today as when he uttered it, is that free speech cannot be understood in isolation, but only in the context of that which makes it possible, that is, in the context of democratic government and the functioning social community that supports it. “The principles of an organized society,” he argued,
cannot be interpreted in such a way as to make organized society impossible. . . . Any individual right or freedom is properly extended only to those who accept the fundamental rules of democracy. How . . . could any society survive which deliberately nursed its own avowed and irreconcilable assassin, and freely exposed its heart to his knife?
The publication of The Struggle for the World happened to coincide with President Truman’s speech announcing what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, according to which the United States sought to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This coincidence garnered a great deal of publicity—much of it negative—for the book. It also aroused the interest of the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency. Burnham, recommended by his Princeton classmate Joseph Bryant III, worked as a consultant to the Political and Psychological Warfare division (which Bryant headed) of the Office of Policy Coordination, a semi-autonomous covert branch of the agency. He took a leave from New York University—to do “research,” the university explained—and moved to Washington.
Perhaps Burnham’s greatest contribution while working for the CIA was to help found the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This organization, covertly funded by the CIA, was established to provide a liberal but also anti-communist alternative to the communist-controlled propaganda initiatives for “peace and friendship.” The liberal element of the Congress cannot be overemphasized: this was an effort to win over the liberal intelligentsia—forgive the pleonasm—to the cause of anti-communism. Accordingly, in 1950 at the Congress’s inaugural conference in Berlin, patrons and speakers included Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, Benedetto Croce, Karl Jaspers, Jacques Maritain, Herbert Read, A.J. Ayer, Ignazío Silone, Sidney Hook, and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Burnham was one of the few hardliners. In his talk, Burnham directly tackled “neutralism” (what we have come to call “moral equivalence”), the “denunciation on equal terms of American and Soviet barbarism.” Burnham admitted the demotic nature of American pop culture. But tawdriness was better than tyranny: Coca-Cola might be bad, he said, but “not quite in the same league with Kolyma,” the Soviet labor camp.
Burnham’s tenure with the CIA (which, we tend to forget, was and is a deeply liberal institution) came to an end over the issue of “McCarthyism.” Burnham was ambivalent about the Wisconsin senator: he was not, he explained, a McCarthyite but an “anti-anti-McCarthyite.” He understood that anti-McCarthyism was often “a screen and cover for the Communists and . . . a major diversion of anti-Communist efforts.” Reflecting on the phenomenon after McCarthy’s death, Burnham noted that
McCarthy became the symbol through which the basic strata of citizens expressed their conviction . . . that Communism and Communists cannot be part of our national community, that they are beyond the boundaries: that, in short, the line must be drawn somewhere. This was really at issue in the whole McCarthy business, not how many card-carrying members were in the State Department. . . . The issue was philosophical, metaphysical: what kind of community are we? And the Liberals, including the anti-Communist Liberals, were correct in labeling McCarthy the Enemy, and in destroying him. From the Liberal standpoint—secularist, egalitarian, relativist—the line is not drawn. Relativism must be Absolute.
Burnham’s stand on McCarthy precipitated his deportation to political Siberia. Overnight, this influential public commentator became persona non grata. Philip Rahv, his colleague at Partisan Review, put it well: “The Liberals now dominate all the cultural channels in this country. If you break completely with this dominant atmosphere, you’re a dead duck. James Burnham had committed suicide.” The irony is that Burnham, so astute about the workings of power, should have become a casualty of this skirmish: one might have expected him to negotiate the battle-field more cannily.
It was National Review that rescued Burnham and provided a home for his intellectual energies and a platform for broadcasting his insights in the final decades of his career. “Every aspect of the magazine interested him,” William F. Buckley, Jr. recalled at the magazine’s twenty-fifth anniversary banquet. “Its typography—just for instance.” But also its coverage of culture, the length of its book reviews, and, above all, its stance with respect to America’s foreign policy. Burnham saw with ferocious clarity that, as he puts it in the present volume, civilizations generally collapse because of internal failures, not attacks from outside. “Suicide,” he wrote, “is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.” Contemplating the expansionist threat of Soviet communism, Burnham warned that “The primary issue before Western