2/ announced his campaign in the summer of 2015. So we almost found out. I suspect the answer is that yes, he would have ended up full MAGA, red hat and all. I’m no Jaffa expert but I did spend two or three months in 1989 talking to him almost every day. I was a research …
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3/ assistant that summer at a place called The Salvatori Center, a small think tank affiliated with Claremont McKenna College where I was a research assistant for Jaffa and the founder of the center and I think the first president of CMC a guy named a George Benson.
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4/ I was mainly there because it was something to do near my home but also because I was very into everything about Abraham Lincoln and I’d been put on to the straussian/Jaffa stuff by one of my high school teachers. In any case, Jaffa was a very charming guy and we talked …
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5/ about Lincoln and natural rights a lot. Some of the stuff seemed hard to figure. Once he told me that we could be pretty sure homosexuality violated natural law since it was one of the few things that Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Aquinas agreed on. In any case …
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6/ the best reason to think that Jaffa would have been a hardcore Trumper is that so many of his students turned out to be. Not conclusive. But certainly indicative. And how would he have justified it? Well, I think like everyone else: Democrats are super bad, are …
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7/ a threat to the nation’s founding principles, a lot of hand waving and … well sometimes the disease is so bad you need strong medicine. And that’s Trump. I could imagine him making some analogy to Lincoln needing to limit habeas corpus to save the Union.
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8/ This is really the path to Trumpism for all these guys. The other side is worse. And that justifies Trump. Also, MAGA. Of course, what makes all of this so comical is that these guys present themselves as being the custodians of the constitution and The Federalist …
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9/ Papers are treated as something like their bible. And if you’ve actually read The Federalist Papers you’ll know that maybe half of them are about Donald Trump. And they don’t like him. But people find a way to get to where they want to go. Thoughts
@HeerJeet ?9 replies 20 retweets 125 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @joshtpm
Yeah, we can't know for sure whether Jaffa would be a Trumpist but we do know his students almost invariably have, so that's a tell. But more suggestive is also Jaffa's history of aligning with the most rightwing part of GOP coalition (Goldwater, Moral Majority).
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Replying to @HeerJeet
the moral majority stuff, which Goldwater himself hated, sort of tells the story. He could basically sign on to anything if it moved things in the right direction. And that really answers the question.
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Just recalled that it's probably worthwhile to revisit the the exchanges Jaffa had with ultra-paleo-con Mel Bradford, who compared Lincoln to Lenin. Jaffa & Bradford disagreed on Lincoln but agreed on just about everything else & Jaffa thought Bradford should run NEH.
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Not really relevant to the thread but on Lincoln and Lenin… Harry Turtledove, the SF writer, has an alternate history where the South wins the Civil War. One of the books in the series has Lincoln, not assassinated, leading the Socialist Party in the 1880s.
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