CommentsVIEW FROM HERE--Whether we know it or not we are all plagued by a sentence in Barry Goldwater’s statement in his 1994 acceptance speech. Goldwater said:
“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
That phrase is attributed to Prof Harry Jaffa, Claremont Men’s College in Claremont, California. For political philosophers, it matters naught what Goldwater intended, as Goldwater had no understanding of Jaffa’s political philosophy. I know this to be a fact as in 1965 Prof. Jaffa told me and others at Claremont, that he had told the mucky mucks around Goldwater not to allow Goldwater to use that concept without first speaking directly with Jaffa. According to Prof. Jaffa, he not allowed to speak with Goldwater. Prof. Jaffa was still fuming in 1965 that Goldwater’s inner circle had closed him out.
The words which I personally heard from Prof Jaffa totally contradict other written accounts how that phrase ended up in Goldwater’s speech. Jaffa was adamant in 1965 that he had said Goldwater should NOT blindly use that concept.
When asked what he had meant, Prof Jaffa pointed to a guidepost in his book, Crisis of the House Divided. I bookmarked his reference but as I was overwhelmed by writing Esoteric Implications in Yehuda HaLevi’s Kuzari, I did not revisit the issue until last night. That is a 55-year hiatus.
Ignoring all that has been written in the intervening five and one-half decades, I dug out my copy of House Divided, and sure enough, there was the bookmark at page 331 next to “Liberty to all.”
The Perverse Nature of the Word Equal
When one word also means its antithesis, that word may be termed perverse in that its opposite meanings will lead to endless disputes among various factions. As Jaffa and everyone else knows, James Madison’s Federalist Paper #10 singled out factions as a constant and persistent danger to mankind’s wellbeing.
When Jaffa referred to “equal” and “equality,” he only meant that since all men are innately equal in their most fundamental and transcendent sense, “Liberty to all” should not be thwarted. Prof. Jaffa did not endorse dicing up the nation into competing, hostile factions as is done by Affirmative Action, White Supremacy or White entitlement (privilege doctrine), Identity Politics, etc.
As is clear from his views on Lincoln, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, “Liberty to all” is America’s soul. As Prof. Jaffa noted, when Lincoln began the Gettysburg Address in 1863 with “four score and seven years ago” which is 87 years earlier, he was referring to the Declaration and not to the US Constitution, whose validity including future amendments would rest in “Liberty to all.”
For Jaffa, the inalienable right of liberty is the soul of America and our soul rested upon recognition that “all men were created equal . . . with certain inalienable rights.” Theoretically, had the Declaration lacked the word “equal,” one might assert that all men have inalienable rights but some men, such as a monarch, a wealthy man or a certain race, have more inalienable rights. That was essentially the argument which Stephen Douglas put forth.
For Lincoln and for Prof Jaffa, the nation could not survive without its steadily making the principle “Liberty to all” a reality for all. For Prof. Jaffa, a nation which abandoned its soul would disintegrate.
Federalism Can Be a Threat to National Survival
As a Federal Democratic Republic, the sovereign nature of the individual states is vital. In fact, the Tenth Amendment recognizes this fact.
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Both Lincoln and Prof. Jaffa held, however, that federalism did not trample Liberty to all. One could not use federalism, i.e. state’s rights, to deny any person his innate Liberty without destroying the Union. Senator Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 due to his deference to federalism, saying that the federal government had to yield to states’ rights. Because Liberty to all was indispensable to the Union’s existence, Prof. Jaffa found it a grave error to place the Tenth Amendment above the Declaration.
The extremism, which Prof Jaffa wanted to explain to Goldwater, was the transcendent necessity of the federal government to use its power to guarantee that no person’s inalienable rights were truncated on the basis of race, creed, color, etc. Prof. Jaffa did not advocate that men engage in extreme action.
The Doctrine of Esotericism and the Concept of Extremism
Prof Jaffa like his good friend and colleague Prof. Martin Diamond, who convinced Prof Jaffa to join him at CMC, believed in the Doctrine of Esotericism, i.e. that certain “truths” should not be told to the general public as they would misunderstand and misuse them. While Prof. Jaffa had privately used “extremism in defense of liberty is not vice” in private, he certainly did not want such a statement to be broadcast to the masses.
Prof. Jaffa meant that Goldwater and by extension the GOP should embrace the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because the nation’s soul rested on the realization of “Liberty to all.” In 1964, that meant the federal government’s core mission was to guarantee civil rights and not leave it to the individual states. The parallel between what Prof. Jaffa was advising Goldwater and Lincoln’s position is exact.
When one knows about Prof. Diamond’s and Prof Jaffa’s great coincidence of thought on American political philosophy, one realizes that the meaning of Equality, as that term has come to be used in modern America, is the antithesis of how Prof. Jaffa and Lincoln used “equality.” It merely emphasized the universality of “Liberty to all.” As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, Equality is the moral enemy of Liberty. Nothing in Liberty, however, was intended to protect the status quo in wealth distribution. From my personal experiences with both Prof. Diamond and Prof. Jaffa both would shun today’s perverse type of Equality (Identity Politics) but agree with Black Lives Matter that systemic change is required to save America’s soul, “Liberty to all.”
