Whittaker Chambers, in his autobiography Witness, writes about his days in the Communist Party prior to his disillusionment with it and his eventual rejection of that false vision of mankind, history, and the future. In it, he offers a portrait of one man by the name of Harry Freeman who was the perfect example of the Communist mindset. Here’s how he described him:
No matter how favorable his opinion had been to an individual or his political role, if that person fell from grace in the Communist Party, Harry Freeman changed his opinion about him instantly.
That was not strange; that was a commonplace of Communist behavior. What was strange was that Harry seemed to change without any effort or embarrassment. There seemed to vanish from his mind any recollection that he had ever held any opinion other than the approved one.
If you taxed him with his former views, he would show surprise, and that surprise would be authentic. He would then demonstrate to you, in a series of mental acrobatics so flexible that the shifts were all but untraceable, that he had never thought anything else.
More adroitly and more completely than any other Communist I knew, Harry Freeman possessed the conviction that the party line is always right.
Why did I select this portion of Witness to share today? Christians—conservatives—Republicans: Please think this through and see if you can find an application in our political life. I see one very clearly, but I hope you can come to the application without my having to be that specific.