p. 42 & p. 44 The Conservative Foundation of the Liberal Order, Mahoney

Tocqueville identified something in Christianity that made it a political necessity, but that political necessity was previously an object of ridicule in France. What was that necessity?

Answer:

As Manent argues, conservative-minded liberals such as Constant and Tocqueville found for religion 'its specifically modern political and moral credibility.' They praised it 'for the very reason it was formerly and even recently criticized: it is something above the human will.'

Which is why Solzhenitsyn was making a philosophical claim and not one merely rooted in faith, when he said that totalitarianism arose in no small part because "men had forgotten God." (p. 44)

And it's what Whitaker Chambers was talking about when he said that the crisis of communism exists to the extent that it has failed to free the people it rules from a belief in God. The crisis of the West exists, Chambers said, to the extent that it is indifferent to God.

p. 21 The Conservative Foundation of the Liberal Order, Mahoney

Why is theory inadequate?

"In contrast to the tyranny of such an abstract democratic 'idea,' Tocqueville teaches us to practice the art of liberty within democracy and to defend the broader inheritance of Western civilization. The democratic order is not self-sufficient and depends upon a precious civilizational inheritance that it has trouble renewing and that it sometimes actively undermines. With no hope of simply resolving the 'problem' of democracy, we must draw upon its practice to correct its theory. But we must do so in the awareness that there is a tension in the very idea of 'popular sovereignty' between the abstract idea, always tending toward more radical interpretation and applications, and concrete exercise of democratic self-government. Instructed by Tocqueville, we are in a better position to defend democracy against those who love it immoderately."

My notes: Democracy tends toward the "more radical interpretation" in the West--that is, of total individual autonomy--but it can also tend toward a more Islamic state elsewhere in the world, which is also its enemy.

Connect Tocqueville and Marilynne Robinson's Absence of Mind. Robinson argues about the failure of scientism, which she identifies as a theory that fails to account for the human mind that created the theory.

p. 276 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

Lincoln says he would rather live under the despotism of Russia than under the pretense of liberty.

p. 193-195 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

Four states refused to ratify the Constitution. What was the difference between those four states in 1789 and the Southern states in 1860?

The Audacity of the State, by Douglas Farrow

This drawing is my attempt to sum up this article by Douglas Farrow.

Witness by Whittaker Chambers, from the foreward

The crisis of Communism exists to the degree in which it has failed to free the peoples that it rules from God...The crisis of the Western World exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God.

pp. 121-123 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

Connect the use of the courts in the gay marriage movement, and the natural right of revolution with this statement by Jaffa: "It cannot be emphasized too often that the doctrine of the Declaration requires a people who can appeal truthfully and sincerely to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of their intensions."

Personal note: Most political arguments are proxies. Relate Jaffa's quote here to Chambers here.

*p. 86-90 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

Chief Justice Rhenquist as nihilist. Jaffa says that Rehnquist uses the same argument to defend original intent as Calhoun did to defend slavery--what is the argument? How does Lincoln repudiate slavery and Rehnquist? p. 86 How did the Confederacy lose the war but win the battle of ideas?

Relevant Passages: Rehnquist's "original intent" has less in common with the intent of those who ratified the Constitution than with the intent of those who "dc-ratified" it in 1860-61. The Civil War was fought between two different conceptions of what constituted the "original intent" of the framers and ratifiers.

The heart of the Southern understanding of the Constitution consisted in the denial that any moral distinction could he drawn between the safeguards of individual liberty in the Constitution and the safeguards of slavery. By their account, all part', of the Constitution were of equal moral, no less than of equal legal, obligation.

Rehnquist's views are very different. For him, intrinsic worth as a concept has no foundation in reason. If safeguards of liberty have no such worth, then neither has liberty itself, or even life. In Rehnquist, we can observe that historical right has been transformed into unmitigated positivism or indeed into nihilism. He accounts for constitutional morality by saying that constitutional safeguards "take on a generalized moral rightness or goodness" when they "assume a general social acceptance."

pp. 82-83 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

How can Carl Becker argue that to ask whether natural rights is true or false is a meaningless question? And how does Jaffa answer Becker?

Relevant Passages: They were certain that from the abolitionists to the advocates of the positive good of slavery, those who asserted a ground of truth for their moral preferences were laboring under delusions. They therefore condemned, whether explicitly or implicitly, those politicians on either side of the Mason and Dixon Line who inflamed the uncompromisable moral passions of the electorate.

They were convinced that they knew, as Lincoln and his fellow citizens did not, that to ask whether slavery was right or wrong was to ask, in the words of Carl Becker, an "essentially meaningless question."

The answer is that in our time, truth has been disarmed by the opinion that reason is impotent to know what is just or unjust, right or wrong, true or false.

p. 75 A New Birth of Freedom, Jaffa

What is first necessary to be a revisionist and declare that the Civil War was unnecessary?

Relevant Passage: Revisionist historians thus approached the Civil War convinced a priori that they understood the questions facing the American people of that period better than Lincoln or any of his contemporaries. They were convinced that they knew, as Lincoln and his fellow citizens did not, that to ask whether slavery was right or wrong was to ask, in the words of Carl Becker, an "essentially meaningless question." And they concluded that to go to war over a difference of opinion that could not be settled by any rational means was essentially foolish.