Lincoln’s Rhetoric on the Struggle Between Good and Evil: Relevance to the Present
In writing a chapter on Puritanism for my projected book on the Western liberal tradition, I came across a fascinating portrait of Lincoln by conservative intellectual M. E. Bradford — a portrait that is quite pertinent to the current political climate. Bradford, incidentally, was an early victim of the neocon takeover of the conservative movement during the Reagan Administration. Bradford was a prominent candidate for the director of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The battle, which Bradford lost,”pits so-called new conservatives [neocons] against more fundamentalist conservatives [paleocons].” The neocons were particularly energized by Bradford’s views on Lincoln.
As noted in TOO several times (e.g., here), a consistent strand of American political thought deriving originally from the Puritan strand of American culture (and exploited by Jewish intellectual movements for their own purposes, as noted in The Culture of Critique) is to cast political opposition in moral terms.
This is particularly noticeable on the left. The Kavanaugh circus and pretty much everything about Trump beginning with his candidacy in 2016 are good examples. As the politics of the country become ever more polarized by race and gender, these moral posturings are increasingly phrased as condemnations of White people as evil. This recent New York Times op-ed is a good example:
White women benefit from patriarchy by trading on their whiteness to monopolize resources for mutual gain https://t.co/EhRrNlk9md
— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) October 6, 2018
After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. …
These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job. The women who support them show up at the Capitol wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out. …
We’re talking about white women. The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades.
This moralistic tradition in American politics has a long history. Lincoln was of New England stock and is a good example of millenarian spirit that pervaded nineteenth-century American thought. Bradford emphasizes this aspect of Lincoln’s thought, describing Lincoln’s view as essentially “secular Puritanism” that “must replace Church with State”[1] while retaining the moralistic, redemptive overtones. In the end, force, apocalyptic force should be used: this utopian future must be achieved as a result of the victory of the forces of good over the forces of evil. And against the forces of evil, there can be no accommodation, no compromise. Read more











