According to David Byrne’s recent biography of James Burnham, Burnham insisted at the end of his intellectual career—and this is a quote from Burnham—that “political man . . . is seldom a rational animal. Confronting a political issue, most of us try to present our point of view with a respectable overlay of rational-sounding rhetoric, but you can still hear the drumbeats throbbing underneath.”
Burnham went from being a Marxist to becoming one of America’s most hardline anti-communists. According to Byrne, he “insisted that deeper irrational forces” guide the political writer.
Byrne observes that in 1931 Burnham met a “vivacious young woman” named Martha Dodd, and they were engaged to be married. The engagement was broken off in early 1932 as Dodd had been having an affair with another man—“it seems Dodd never took Burnham and their engagement too seriously.” Shattered by this experience, Burnham turned to Marx.
I was reminded of this episode in Burnham’s life and his comment about political speech recently as I was thinking about what’s become of the NeverTrump right. The “drumbeats throbbing beneath” the “rational-sounding rhetoric” applies so well to them. They are driven by something other than politics. Some are jilted lovers, some have daddy issues, and some resent their ejection from the powerful kids’ lunch table—first by the Left and then by Trump.
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