I have some serious disagreements with Larry Arnhart — not so much about evolution, but about the lessons we should draw from it — but I think this is (typically) really worth reading.Two quick points: One I’m not sure how fair he’s being to Steve Hayward, but Steve can take up that battle. Second, I think one of the things that Arnhart leaves out of his absolutely correct observation that Wilson was an admirer of Lincoln’s is the question of why Wilson liked Lincoln (he may do so elsewhere). Wilson, the most racist president of the 20th century, admired Lincoln because he was a centralizer and uniter — like Bismarck (whom Wilson also admired). Today’s conservatives for the most part — Harry Jaffa is surely an outlier [woops: see update below]– admire Lincoln for the philosophical content of his profound moral convictions but look on Lincoln’s resort to heavy-handed statism as a lamentable but necessary recourse. Today’s liberals feel the same way about the convictions, but don’t much mind the statism. The story with the Progressives is a bit different. Obviously, many Progressives admired Lincoln for ending slavery. But they also admired his willingness to use state power to impose his vision. That was certainly the case with Wilson who hardly considered the Union’s victory a moral triumph at least with regard to slavery and Reconstruction. In other words, the conservative case for Lincoln depends heavily on his ends, while the Wilsonian Progressive’s case for Lincoln depends largely on his means. This, it seems to me, is an important point because it shows how adaptable Darwinism is to very different agendas.
Update: I need to clarify. A reader writes:
You said: “Today’s conservatives for the most part — Harry Jaffa is
surely an outlier — admire Lincoln for the philosophical content of his
profound moral convictions.” How is Jaffa an outlier? He is in fact the
leading admirer of Lincoln’s morally based political philosophy that
there is, and he has been since the late 50′s or early 60′s when he
published “Crisis of the house Divided. ”
Me: Yes, I know this. What I meant to say and garbled in my haste is that Jaffa was untroubled by Lincoln’s role as a centralizer and his use of state power. Of course, Jaffa is a champion of Lincoln’s moral philosophy, so much so it leaves him untroubled by the unfortunate, but necessary, aspects of Lincoln’s legacy.