Chambers stridently argued that communists, socialists, and progressives really couldn’t grasp “the differences between themselves.” An accusation that Hiss was a communist struck many progressives as an attack upon them because he was of their circles. How could a Soviet agent share their purposes?
Chambers answered by pointing to the rationalism of the modern liberal project, which believed that man’s mind could constitute and change man’s reality. The spirit of this vision moved in tandem with the communist faith.
The progressive shared the communist position that replaced right and wrong, good and evil, with “the morally corrupting distinction between ’progress’ and ‘reaction,’” as
Dan Mahoney articulates.
Chambers’ “Witness” argued that he was fighting for Western political freedom, but that freedom could not be defended by modern liberalism. Freedom, Chambers said, “is a need of the soul.” In “striving toward God,” he wrote, the “soul strives continually after a condition of freedom.”
