Jaffa’s Big Lie Exposed Once Again

Of all the myths and superstitions about American history that have been concocted by Harry Jaffa and his fellow Straussians, the biggest one is the bizarre and ahistorical notion that the Declaration of Independence is an anti-secessionist document. Jaffa has admitted that all of his writings on the topic of Lincoln are effectively nothing more than a repetition of The Great Centralizer’s own slick political rhetoric, including his perversion of the meaning of the Declaration. I recently ran across a particularly clear explanation of this in a 1997 book by Michael Lind entitled Hamilton’s Republic (p. 121):

“There was not a single element of the Jeffersonian program — states’ rights, agrarianism, strict construction of the federal constitution — that Lincoln, as a Whig and then as a Republican politician, did not reject with passion. Nevertheless, he realized that if the Republican party was to be more successful than the failed Whigs, it had to recruit Democratic voters . . . who idolized Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Lincoln’s solution was to turn Jeffersonian rhetoric against Jefferson’s own Southern Democratic political heirs, by a kind of intellectual ju-jitsu. Lincoln’s Jefferson was little more than the author of the Declaration of Independence, which itself was reduced to the phrase “all men are created equal.” “Although the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement arose from the moral fervor of Northern Protestants and had no significant roots at all in Jefferson or Locke’s secular natural-rights doctrines, Lincoln pretended that the antislavery movement was a natural development of Jefferson’s Enlightenment belief in human equality. What is more, like a mathematician demonstrating a topological inversion, Lincoln turned the Declaration of Independence, a manifesto of secession, into a symbol of Unionism, arguing that the preservation of the Union was necessary to achieve the goal of the Declaration: equality. This was sophistry of the highest order. Thus did Lincoln, one of the most cunning debaters in American history, enlist Jeffersonian rhetoric for Hamiltonian ends.” (emphasis added).

And Lind is a Lincoln worshipper: His latest book, What Lincoln Believed, labels The Great Emancipator as “America’s Greatest President” because he went to war to impose on America the Hamiltonian, mercantilist agenda (Lind worships Hamilton even more than Lincoln). The sole purpose of the Claremont Institute is to perpetuate this type of Lincolnian sophistry in the service of nationalism and imperialism (Check out its web site to find out how you can donate to a propaganda campaign in support of the never-ending war in Iraq).

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11:26 am on August 1, 2005