2. The thing is, while Jaffa's scholarship on Lincoln (primarily Crisis of the House Divided) & his attacks on neo-Calhounites (in many polemics) are great, Jaffa himself was a slippery political actor willing to make alliances with dubious characters.
-
-
Show this thread
-
3. George Kateb noted this early as 1965, pointing out contradiction between Jaffa's Lincoln celebration & his work as Goldwater speechwriter (since Goldwater opposed Civil Rights Act). Can also be seen in Jaffa's friendship with neo-confederate M.E. Bradford.
Show this thread -
4. Jaffa & Bradford engaged in a lengthy polemical exchange on Lincoln in American Spectator in 1980s which is worth revisiting as the seedbed for alot of this stuff. Jaffa (Lincoln as embodiment of American democracy at peak) vs. Bradford (Lincoln as tyrant).
Show this thread -
5. The thing about the debate is that even though Jaffa & Bradford argued fiercely on Lincoln, they both repeatedly insisted they agreed on everything else. Jaffa explicitly endorsed Bradford's failed bid to be head of National Endowment for Humanities.
Show this thread -
6. Jaffa/Bradford exchange shows how moot Jaffa's scholarship was to his practical political project of building coalition of right-wing Republicans. Intellectually pro-Lincoln but willing to make common cause with neo-Confederates. His own version of the Southern Strategy
Show this thread -
7. For more on Jaffa and devolution of West Coast Straussianism into Trumpist apologia, you can listen to a discussion I had with
@willwilkinsonhttps://jeetheer.substack.com/p/podcast-the-deep-roots-of-gop-extremism?r=bh54&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source= …Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
-
-
A lot of wars are best understood as analogous to mafia wars. "The racket" is a given; it's just a question of who runs the territory. U S. Civil War was a liminal case; it's like there was one gang that didn't want forced-labor sweatshops in the territory, & it won partially.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
-
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.