I’m not even being snarky here. WTF does he mean? What is he trying to argue?
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Replying to @JoshuaMZeitz
he’s essentially arguing that liberalism’s historical successes are thin and rest on deeply illiberal govts, policies, etc. whether these args r right can be debated. His examples suggest a profound ignorance which gives little confidence in the argument.
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Replying to @joshtpm @JoshuaMZeitz
2/ Like most of what he writes, the tone, arguments, aspirations suggest a deep hostility to democracy/liberalism, which to his credit he makes no effort to deny.
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Replying to @joshtpm @JoshuaMZeitz
3/ With respect to the Civil War, worth noting this argument is taken more or less wholesale from pro-slavery Southern apologism.
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Replying to @joshtpm @JoshuaMZeitz
it’s bad bad history (know you guys know this)...bc the Civil War was NOT started as an abolitionist crusade, so like, what’s the religious civil war? The free soil movement? Anyway—all liberals are really authoritarians & as he said Obama’s Caesariam on DACA was the real fascism
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Maybe I’m misreading this, but not getting that Lincoln did not start out the war with the goal of abolitionism should get you a “nice try, no talking history in public for a decade” response. And I’m a big Lincoln fan!
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Replying to @TheToddSchulte @joshtpm
Northern evangelical voters/soldiers definitely infused their support for the war (and later, abolition) with Millennial fervor and meaning. But he’s cherry-picking or doesn’t understand the historiography. He’s echoing Avery Craven 70 years after doing so was fashionable.
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Those sentences are baldly provocative. They’re not close to being right, but they’re not entirely wrong either. (He might have charged FDR with proto-authoritarianism too—a classic right wing tropen.) So he generated a controversy which is what columnists are paid to do.
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Replying to @yeselson @JoshuaMZeitz and
FDR rounded up Americans and put them in camps. Lincoln was more 'authoritarian' only by comparison to his predecessors. He was less authoritarian under the circumstances of the war than Jefferson Davis was.
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Replying to @baseballcrank @yeselson and
of course! Internment camps very bad! Lots of very bad immigration stuff! His record should reflect this more! My point is that social security is a lasting liberal legacy and didn't require the same means as internment camps--which is counter to Douthat's whole point.
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I would disagree that the plainly dangerous parts of FDR's record can be surgically separated from his ideology & worldview, but as to Ross' point, he overstates re Lincoln but it *is* true that slavery was only ended by the sword. What-if-no-war is the harder question.
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