Daniel Oppenheimer’s Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century (Simon & Schuster, 2016) is a subtly interwoven examination of six writers and leaders: Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Ronald Reagan, Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, and Christopher Hitchens.

Each profile except Hitchens’ essentially ends at the moment when the subject makes his move. The Chambers chapter ends with a quotation from the Communist-turned-Christian: “I deliberately deserted from the Communist Party in a way that could leave no doubt in its mind, or anybody else’s, that I was at war with it and everything it stood for.” The Horowitz chapter concludes with a quotation from the radical-turned-conservative: “On Election Day, 1984, I walked into the voting booth and, without hesitation, punched the line marked ‘Ronald Reagan.’”

The Hitchens exception is poignant: Oppenheimer charts his decline and concludes that he “ultimately failed himself. He was too much the romantic, too much the contrarian, and too much the narcissist to chart out the ways that history might fail to conform to his desires.” True: From 2007 to 2010 I debated Hitchens once and moderated debates involving him twice, and each time he was articulate but also alcoholic, drinking during one of the debates and drinking heavily afterward. His self-medicating actions belied his confident rhetoric. It was sad.

Oppenheimer’s cliffhangers create poignancy but short the principles of the principals. We learn what they were against but little about what they were for: Chambers’ sad faith, Burnham’s managerialism, Podhoretz’s Judaism. The author existentially relishes the tension, writing, “It’s by putting ourselves—our highest ideals, our most atavistic impulses, our deepest loyalties—in conversation with the world, with vulnerability and conviction, that new possibilities open up.” True, but is our goal “to discover ourselves” or to discover what’s true?

Bookmarks

Oppenheimer would benefit from paying more attention to the power of religious belief, as would F.H. Buckley, author of The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America (Encounter, 2016). Buckley’s metaphors concerning the problem are excellent: “Our schools and universities are like the old Soviet department stores whose mission was to serve the interests of the sales clerks and not the customers. Why the sales clerks should want to keep things that way is perfectly understandable.” But at book’s end he appears to suggest that a parliamentary system could solve problems that our checks-and-balances government tends to punt—and that seems unlikely, since the problem is not our divided government but our divided hearts.

Buckley also expresses concern with inequality, but it’s not clear why: He notes that $9 a month buys entertainment options via Netflix, a $10 bottle of wine isn’t all that different from a $100 bottle purchased at a boutique wine store, a 6,000-square-foot house is unlikely to make a person happier than one a third of that size. Why the poor want to leave crime-laden streets and rat-laden lodgings is obvious, but middle-class covetousness is less endearing.

Jesse Yow’s Standing Firm: A Christian Response to Hostility and Persecution (Concordia, 2015) is a better book and offers good advice on distinguishing between differences of opinion, hostility, and persecution. We should keep in mind that the competition of worldviews is a contact sport. We should not scream about wolves when we’re seeing labradoodles. We should also remember that God is in charge: “Our individual decisions are not accidental, random events. We should not be taken by surprise when we run into hostility but should look at our circumstances as opportunities … and we should know that God has placed us there.”

Yow gives good examples from the Bible of how persecution created opportunities—and “God continues to place us where He would have us share His gospel.” —M.O.