THE TRAGEDY OF TRUMPISM FOR THE GOP...:

For Lincoln, America, like Eden, could be maintained only by the willingness of the people to deny themselves certain pleasures; in particular, the pleasure of despotism, of ruling others without their consent. The great Lincoln scholar Harry Jaffa summed up the Great Emancipator's argument when he wrote that "if the pleasures of freedom come into competition with the pleasures of despotism, they cannot survive on the basis of their pleasantness alone." There is no guarantee that the self-interest of the citizen will always lead him to respect and defend the rights of others. The persistent practice of slavery was enough to demonstrate this. Lincoln maintained that there was no difference in principle between enslaving a white man and enslaving a black man. From this premise he reasoned that a local majority voting in favor of enslaving other men was something akin to a logical contradiction. By voting in favor of the proposition that human beings can be ruled without consent, they rendered their own majoritarian consent meaningless. This is why Lincoln rejected Douglas's central idea. Popular sovereignty can function only if the conviction that no man is to be ruled without consent is first affirmed. To use a phrase of the late Justice Robert Jackson, this commitment must be put "beyond the reach of majorities." Otherwise, popular sovereignty collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

Lincoln's rejection of Douglas's strict democratic-libertarian model of freedom, with its emphasis upon choice in and of itself as the supreme political value, reveals a classical bent in his political thought. The idea that freedom means living under the right restraints, rather than the fewest restraints possible, is one we find in Greek philosophy and in the early Fathers of the Christian Church, not in Locke or Hobbes. And yet this, the classical understanding, is the model of freedom we find expressed and endorsed by Lincoln. The classical Christian understanding of human nature conceives of it as something toward which we move, not from which we come. Fallen and sinful man is, according to this view, in a profoundly unnatural state, judged by the standards of the ideal human being. This arch-human paragon might be Achilles to the Greeks, or Christ to the Christians, but either way, a standard is upheld.

Lincoln's conviction that slavery was profoundly unnatural must be understood in these terms. He does not argue that slavery isn't habitual or normative -- he was too great a student of history to think that. But its practice requires the abandonment of certain self-imposed restraints without which we cannot rise to the full height of our humanity. Without these restraints, we are little more than beasts. Thus it is for Lincoln that living according to one's nature means, first and foremost, living under the restraints of human equality. Throw off these restraints, and the exercise of a purely libertarian freedom by some amounts to nothing more than the abasement of the species.

This brings us to Lincoln's own "central idea," that "all men are created equal." The words, of course, are lifted from the Declaration of Independence, but Lincoln's interpretation of them is subtly different from Jefferson's. Our third president interpreted this statement in the conventionally pre-political Lockean sense: All men are created equal in the state of nature and then, faced with the threat of violent death, reluctantly form a government to protect themselves from their fellow men. It's essentially a negative formulation designed to create a permission structure for revolution when government oversteps the mark. However, as Jaffa observes:

Lincoln's interpretation of "all men are created equal" is not that it specifies the condition of man in a pre-political state, a highly undesirable state which marks the point at which men ought to revolt, but that it specifies the optimum condition which the human mind can envisage. It is a condition toward which men have a duty ever to strive, not a condition from which they have a right to escape. It is conceived as a political, not a pre-political, condition, a condition in which -- to the extent that it is realized -- equality of right is secured to every man not by the natural law (which governs Locke's state of nature, in which all men are equal) but by positive human law.

This is yet more evidence of Lincoln's classical revision of the Founding. Politics exists in order to allow citizens to better live according to their nature, and the great American insight into this nature is that "all men are created equal." Lincoln transfigured this great phrase from a pre-political stick with which to beat tyrants (as it was for Jefferson) into a classical political ideal toward which the citizenry has a duty to strive. "Equality" becomes for the United States what wisdom was for Athens and what martial glory was for Sparta. As an ideal it always escapes the conclusive grasp of Lady Liberty's outstretched arm, but she and her country are nevertheless exalted by her persistent and relentless reach for it. Not a perfect Union, but an "ever more perfect Union." Jaffa, once again:

The Declaration conceives of just government mainly in terms of the relief from oppression. Lincoln conceives of just government far more in terms of the requirement to achieve justice in the positive sense; indeed, according to Lincoln, the proposition "all men are created equal" is so lofty a demand that the striving for justice must be an ever-present requirement of the human and political condition.

There is, consequently, no room in the United States for politics, like those of Douglas, that deny the truth of universal human equality. Popular sovereignty is legitimate only within the proper constraints of human nature, and human nature is one, indivisible, and evenly distributed among all members of the species. According to Lincoln's carefully constructed arguments, those whose would deny this are the very definition of anti-American. They hold the country's "central idea" in contempt.

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