Whose Creed? Whose Country?

Conservatives don’t need a special occasion to debate what it means to be an American. One line of argument on that topic has remained unbroken since 1959 and ’60, when Harry Jaffa published Crisis of the House Divided and Willmoore Kendall reviewed it critically in National Review. The Jaffa-Kendall controversy evolved into a running battle that, over the decades, has involved such intellectual combatants as M. E. Bradford, George Carey, and, recently, Michael Anton and Chronicles Editor Paul Gottfried.  

Jaffa argued that Abraham Lincoln understood the Declaration of Independence as America’s philosophical charter—it established us as what some would call a “proposition nation,” and others have lately described as a “creedal nation.” In Jaffa’s account, Lincoln went beyond the intentions of the Founding Fathers themselves in doing this. Kendall warned that if Lincoln could use the “promise” of the Declaration to redefine America, so could any of today’s enterprising left-wing ideologues.

Today, the left takes the equality enshrined by the Declaration to mean male transvestites are equivalent to women and illegal aliens are equivalent to U.S. citizens. Nor are leftists the only ones who believe that a labor force here is no better than a labor force anywhere else. Equality knows no limits, and universal rights and laws make no distinctions of person or place.

Jaffa did not agree with the left’s interpretation of equality, and in fact, he and his “West Coast Straussian” students are staunch opponents of leftist racial and sexual politics. Jaffa’s own writings about what follows politically from the unnatural character of homosexuality are as right-wing as any traditionalist conservative could ask. For that matter, anyone imagining that America had “liberal” origins consistent with liberalism today should read about Thomas Jefferson’s proposed penalty for homosexual practices.