Against Toasting "the King across the Water"

It doesn't have to be like this...

My first introduction to conservative intellectual history was a semi-storied debate over the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. In the mid-1960s, National Review’s books & arts editor made a libertarian-ish attack on Lincoln. He blamed Lincoln for dramatically expanding the role of the state, and, especially, for closing the possibility of state secession as a check on the federal government.

Meyer’s criticism put a fine point on a pretty wide range of ambivalence the American Right had about the Great Emancipator. On the one had, as the first Republican president, a number of conservative intellectuals had a soft-spot for him. On the other, southern conservatives had no such loyalty. And Lincoln had both exercised tremendous powers of state and led the Union in the war that smashed the racist slavocracy. The pre-war South was an ancien regime a great many conservatives looked to as an indigenous conservative alternative to modernity. In short, conservative intellectuals contested Lincoln’s legacy, and through this contest in part staked out the meaning of conservatism.

Lincoln has had no greater champion on the Right than Harry V. Jaffa. Insofar as my research from 12 years ago on this question had a hero, it was - for all his priggishness and vexatiousness - Harry Jaffa.

Harry Jaffa (1918 - 2015)

Born at the end of World War One (the V stood for Victor) to a middle-class Jewish family in New York, Jaffa pursued English at Yale. Stymied by Ivy League anti-Semitism, and after an unfulfilling career in a federal bureaucracy, Jaffa went to the New School for graduate work where he became spellbound by a German emigre professor named Leo Strauss. Jaffa became Strauss’s first graduate student, and followed him to the University of Chicago when Strauss was appointed there. Where Strauss excavated deep meaning in political philosophy, Jaffa began a trend of some of Strauss’s students (the Straussians) using the same tools to uncover the truths of the American political tradition. Jaffa’s special contribution focused on the relationship of the Declaration of Independence - and specifically the claim that “all men are created equal” - to the Constitution. He came to argue the entire American project could not be understood without the guidance of the Declaration.

If you’re reading this newsletter, you no doubt know about the Claremont Institute. It’s a think tank established in the early 1980s by students of Jaffa (the so-called West Coast Straussians) to explore and expound his ideas. When I started studying conservatism, Claremont and its journal, the Claremont Review of Books, were studiously high-brow. Sure, it made trenchant criticisms of liberalism and the “Administrative State” alongside its saccharine paeans to “statesmanship.” Fundamentally, though, Claremont was serious - even fusty.

You probably also know the Claremont Institute became the most ardently Trumpist part of the right-wing intellectual constellation. I’ve argued that Claremont’s descent into madness is in part due to the thought and persona of its patron thinker.

If the West Coast Straussian view holds that the United States was founded as a good regime, it also holds that the nation has been betrayed. But the natural right of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence demands these violations be swept away. Initially, Jaffa developed this argument about slavery. Over time, he and his followers extended it to include… progressives, socialists, black radicals, and third wave feminists. In particular, they excoriate the administrative state: “This shadow government never faces elections and today operates largely without checks and balances. The founders always opposed government unaccountable to the people and without constitutional restraint, yet it continues to grow around us.”

Because they are ideological determinists, the West Coast Straussians struggle to see their opponents on their own terms. They reduce them and their ideas to “nihilistic” successors of John C. Calhoun, one of Jaffa’s punching bags.

It was not always thus. Or, not quite. Casting back to the essay Frank Meyer wrote for National Review, Jaffa, of course, stepped up to defend Lincoln’s honor.

The Jaffa of 1965 was in an interesting spot. Although a New Deal Democrat, Jaffa was on a rightward path. He had chaired Ohioans For Goldwater, and found his way into Goldwater’s campaign staff in 1964. At the Republican Convention in San Francisco, moderate Republicans (and the wider press) took Goldwater to task for his extremism. It’s not entirely clear how it happened, but evidently Jaffa wrote a speech or a memo from which Goldwater’s infamous lines “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue” came. I suppose in isolation, the phrase is defensible, but it helped cement Goldwater’s image. Following the campaign, Jaffa’s cantankerousness and strident anti-communism had led him to leave Ohio State, where he had been a professor for a decade, for southern California and Claremont McKenna Men’s College - invited by his friend, Martin Diamond.

In the early 1960s, Jaffa and the wider Straussian crew had been getting closer to the conservative National Review crowd. The Straussians took the conservatives to task for their shallow thinking on states’ rights, for instance, and placed a far higher emphasis on equality and the state. Conservative academics were also jealous of the Straussians’ relative prestige and ability to win grant money. Over time, however, the engagement grew friendlier and more intertwined. Jaffa tilted right first and hardest. Even so, when he saw Meyer’s essay, Jaffa, who could start a fight in an empty room, felt he had to respond.

Harry Jaffa to William F. Buckley, August 30, 1965.

Jaffa is nicely on display in this letter (which I wish I had had while writing my Master’s thesis), and there are a few things worth calling attention to.

You get a sense of his verbosity and (mild case of) self-importance in the fact he took time out from writing one long-winded reply to something he’d read to write another. Jaffa chronically posted long, unsolicited manuscripts to people. Similarly, apparently “many eyes are now watching” his response. I’m not sure who he could possibly mean; despite the efforts of his students, Jaffa never reached the top tier of conservative intellectuals - and in 1965 he was still a relative newcomer.

You also see indications of Jaffa’s burgeoning relationship with conservative intellectuals. He had a genuine friendship with William F. Buckley, one he truly treasured. For whatever reason, Buckley insisted on reviewing and reviewing positively Jaffa’s sometimes minor work in his magazine. You can see also Jaffa’s positive feeling toward Meyer. Although the two had initially treated each other warily, they became friends via long late-night long-distance phone calls.

Frank Meyer was no Confederate. But Jaffa sees in his essay “neo-Confederate ideological tendencies.” Indeed, these tendencies must be urgently purged from the conservative movement lest conservatism wind up a rococo political identity. To some extent Jaffa correctly identified conservative sympathies for the antebellum South. His conservatism of equality - rightly understood - put him more in line with the mainstream presuppositions of the Republican Party and the rising Ronald Reagan than it did with Meyer and the implicit subjects of his criticism: people like Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Willmoore Kendall, and others who had heretofore defined the new conservatism. At the same time, as suggested above, Jaffa tended to overheat these things, and burn bridges as he did so.

Related to this, Jaffa endorses Buckley’s campaign against the John Birch Society. Buckley vs. the John Birch Society is a contested part of conservative history. It’s been traditionally argued that Buckley and responsible conservatives sidelined the hard-right and conspiracist John Birch Society. This narrative his been revised to account for the softly, softly approach Buckley et al took and the extent to which the responsible conservatives and the Birchers were intertwined. (A fascinating point in Max Boot’s biography of Reagan is the extent to which Reagan read and drew on Bircher propaganda and incorporated it in his speeches as a political activist and pitchman in the 1960s.) Even so-called responsible conservatives divided over the JBS and how to treat them. In general, Buckley tended to be on the more critical side, and he (and his magazine) took flak for criticizing them, so it is worth disaggregating him from others at National Review, for instance. In 1965, with Goldwater’s failed campaign over, there was relatively little to lose, and so, in between issues debating Abraham Lincoln, dedicated an issue of National Review to comprehensively attacking the John Birch Society itself, which he had previously held off doing.

It’s possible Jaffa saw his war on neo-Confederatism as of a piece with Buckley’s campaign against the Birchers. The conservative movement needed to purify itself of racist, anti-modern thought and embarrassing conspiracist authoritarians.

Despite his friendship with Buckley, which ensured gentle coverage in NR, Jaffa remained relatively unloved among the wider intellectual Right. Much of this was self-inflicted as Jaffa shifted from a self-professed friendly “West-Coast pedant” to a vituperative moralist. He destroyed friendships and provoked unnecessarily bitter exchanges of views. And although I have suggested his ideas were more attuned to a Reaganite conservatism, Jaffa’s gospel and the ardor with which he spread it (and smote heretics) always attracted right-wing critics. In the late 1950s, Willmoore Kendall saw in Jaffa’s thought a tendency toward Caesarism, albeit Kendall thought it would be leftist in orientation. These criticisms had a peak in the 2000s as Jaffa’s crusading thought was linked with the Iraq War and Freedom Agenda.

The paleoconservative Paul Gottfried makes the argument here:

from Paul Gottfried’s Conservatism in America, 2007, pp. 20-1.

Gottfried is an ideological determinist too, he overstates his case, and was also professionally jealous of Jaffa. I include this excerpt here to illustrate how strongly many paleoconservatives and traditionalists rejected Jaffa’s insistence on equality. If they thought neoconservatives were crypto-liberals subverting the Right, Jaffa was the worst of all.

As we now know, Jaffa’s successors have allied themselves not only with the aged Gottfried, but with a bevy of transmogrified paleoconservatives in the form of BAPists and neoreactionaries. While not necessarily enthralled to the American slavocracy, they nonetheless propound the same anti-egalitarian and Jacobite ideals Jaffa called to be purged (often through casuistic interpretations of West Coast Straussian principles). At the same time, they make common cause with conspiracists and authoritarians. The history of conservatism is complex, rife with tributaries and eddies. While we can see reasons for Claremont’s Trumpist turn in Jaffa’s own person and writings, it did not have to be this way.