Why the Jaffaites Lie About American History

From Claes G. Ryn’s extraordinarily insightful new book, America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire, pp. 114-115(Transaction Publishers, 2003):

“[T]he new Jacobins are interested not so much in the actual historical origins of America as in turning America into a vehicle for their ideological cause. The view that America is a revolutionary power is propounded by professor Harry Jaffa, who insists that America’s political and social institutions must be seen as constituting a sharp break with the Western past. Jaffa writes, “The Founders understood themselves to be revolutionaries, and to celebrate the American Founding is therefore to celebrate revolution . . . . The guiding principle of the Founding, Jaffa asserts, was equality.”

“[T]his highly tendentious portrayal of the United States is suggestive of an intense ideological commitment and a willingness to disregard historical fact in order to create the right ideological pedigree for America. To view the United States as the product of a revolutionary tide sweeping away the old West and as being founded on the [French] revolutionary idea of equality is, to say the least, philosophically and historically forced. This interpretation of America’s origins and characteristics shows a strong desire to have America be something quite different from what its history made it.”

“[M]any Straussians engage in elaborate intellectual contortions. What other philosophers may see as rather transparent confusion, they prefer to regard as well-nigh superhuman philosophical sophistication wholly beyond the grasp of the hoi polloi, the masses” (p. 33).

“By taking the Founding out of its historical and philosophical context and twisting it in the Jacobin direction, American principles can be presented as a rejection of the old Western world,” i.e., classical liberalism (p. 117).

“What is often offered as a moral tonic for American democracy thus includes a Jacobin passion for equality and virtuous unity that is likely to add to the push for uniformity and central control” by the state (p. 119).

“Because the ideology of virtuous empire envisions not only American world dominance but the remaking of the world in its image, it is a recipe for conflict and perpetual war” (p. 9).

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo