Yesterday, I wrote about an essay Whittaker Chambers wrote in 1958 for National Review, and how it relates to America’s socialist agriculture policies. You can read that full piece here.
Coincidentally, over at Public Discourse, Michael Lucchese also wrote about Chambers yesterday. He references the same essay I did, “Springhead to Springhead,” in addition to several other works Chambers wrote. Lucchese concludes:
By refusing to obey the government agents, Chambers said, the farmers were taking a stand for property rights—one of the most basic principles of the American regime. “That principle is the inviolability of a man’s land from invasion even by the State, the right of a man to grow for his own use (unpenalized by the State) a harvest which his labor and skill wrings from the earth, and which could not otherwise exist,” he wrote. Nothing less than freedom was at stake.
Rejecting wheat allotments became a symbol of a larger fight for a way of life. Someday, looking back through time, Chambers writes, the memory of this action may “remind [us] of a continuity that outlives all lives, fears, perplexities, contrivings, hopes, defeats; so that he is moved to reach down and touch again for strength, as if he were its first discoverer, the changeless thing—the undeluding, undenying earth.” Thus, it was the conservative object of the farmers’ resistance that Chambers admired.
Conservative political action—that is to say, a politics aimed first and foremost at cultivating our roots and preserving the constitution of things—can, in fact, be a bulwark of counterrevolution. This is why Whittaker Chambers was a “conservative of the heart,” even if he did not consider himself a “conservative of the head.” In the final analysis, he was a witness to the permanent things.
Read the whole thing here.