{"id":870,"date":"2013-06-07T13:11:35","date_gmt":"2013-06-07T17:11:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=870"},"modified":"2013-06-07T13:12:17","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T17:12:17","slug":"a-brief-response-to-rich-lowrys-conservative-defense-of-abraham-lincoln","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2013\/06\/a-brief-response-to-rich-lowrys-conservative-defense-of-abraham-lincoln.html","title":{"rendered":"A (Brief) Response to Rich Lowry’s “Conservative” Defense of Abraham Lincoln"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest in Lincoln polemics comes courtesy of Rich Lowry, editor of National Review.\u00a0 <\/i>In the latest issue of the latter, Lowry both promotes his new work and takes aim at those of our 16th<\/sup> president\u2019s detractors that are to Lowry\u2019s political right\u2014the \u201cLincoln haters.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cLincoln haters,\u201d Lowry insists, are limited \u201cmostly, but not entirely,\u201d to a libertarian \u201cfringe\u201d whose members \u201capparently hate federal power more than they abhor slavery.\u201d\u00a0 Chief among these fringe characters is Lincoln scholar Thomas DiLorenzo, who Lowry accuses of having \u201cmade a cottage industry of publishing unhinged Lincoln-hating polemics.\u201d<\/p>\n

To sense what sort of argument Lowry\u2019s promises to be, the reader should note that before it even gets under way, its author seeks to undermine the character <\/i>of his opponents\u2014not the substance <\/i>or form <\/i>of their reasoning.\u00a0 His interlocutors are \u201chaters,\u201d on \u201cthe fringe,\u201d and even, as in the case of DiLorenzo, \u201cunhinged.\u201d\u00a0 From the outset, Lowry tries to stack the deck in his favor by portraying his rivals as both irrational and disreputable.<\/p>\n

Ironically, in doing so, he deprives himself of the high ground, both intellectually and morally, for Lowry\u2019s argument, it is painfully clear, has little to do with history and everything to do with contemporary politics.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe debate over Lincoln on the Right is so important,\u201d Lowry writes, \u201cbecause it can be seen, in part, as a proxy for the larger argument over whether conservatism should read itself out of the American mainstream or\u2014in this hour of its discontent\u2014dedicate itself to a Lincolnian program of opportunity and uplift consistent with its limited-government principles.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lowry wastes no time in spelling out for the undecided just why conservatives must <\/i>embrace the course that he has chosen.\u00a0 \u201cA conservatism that rejects Lincoln is a conservatism that wants to confine itself to an irritable irrelevance to 21st<\/sup> century America and neglect what should be the great project of reviving it as a country of aspiration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, being neither a Lincoln scholar nor even an historian, I am neither a \u201chater\u201d nor a deifier of Lincoln. I am, however, a philosopher, a political<\/i> philosopher, and a conservative <\/i>political philosopher to boot.\u00a0 As such, I confess to being at a loss to account for how any self-avowed conservative, any proponent of \u201climited government,\u201d could look to, of all people, Abraham Lincoln as a source of inspiration.<\/p>\n

Lincoln presided over America during what remains, by leaps and bounds, its darkest hour.\u00a0 More tellingly, he was, at the very least, instrumental in making it <\/i>its darkest hour, for Lincoln waged a war unprecedented (in our history) for its death and destruction, and he waged it against Americans.\u00a0 <\/i>Whether or not he had the constitutional right to do so, whether or not the South was the aggressor, are utterly irrelevant considerations.<\/p>\n

To repeat, for our purposes here, Lincoln\u2019s legal and moral prerogatives or lack thereof simply do not matter<\/i>.\u00a0 What matters is that for four long years, the President of the United States conducted the bloodiest war that, before or since, our nation had ever witnessed, a war that laid waste to much of the country, to say nothing of the genuinely federal <\/i>character of the government that the Framers of the Constitution ratified.<\/p>\n

And he waged this war against his fellow citizens, men and women who sought to peaceably secede from the Union\u2014not usurp Lincoln or the federal government.<\/p>\n

Again, whether Lincoln\u2019s was a morally worthwhile cause or whether he had the legal right to do what he did are matters for historians and moralists to sort through.\u00a0 The point is that whatever else may be said of Lincoln, it is difficult to see how, with Lowry, we can say of him that he was \u201cperhaps the foremost proponent of opportunity in all of American history,\u201d \u201cthe paladin of individual initiative, the worshipper of the Founding Fathers, and the advocate of self-control [.]\u201d\u00a0 In what universe, one must wonder, can a self-declared champion of conservatism, like Lowry, regard Lincoln as \u201ca fellow traveler with today\u2019s conservatives\u201d?<\/p>\n

But maybe that\u2019s the point. Maybe today\u2019s <\/i>\u201cconservatives\u201d do need Lincoln, for given their obsession with fundamentally transforming the Islamic world into a bastion of Democracy and their own country into the melting pot of the universe, today\u2019s conservatives care as much about preserving the decentralized character of American government as did Lincoln.<\/p>\n

As a result, they are about as conservative as him as well.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest in Lincoln polemics comes courtesy of Rich Lowry, editor of National Review.\u00a0 In the latest issue of the latter, Lowry both promotes his new work and takes aim at those of our 16th president\u2019s detractors that are to Lowry\u2019s political right\u2014the \u201cLincoln haters.\u201d The \u201cLincoln haters,\u201d Lowry insists, are limited \u201cmostly, but not…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nA (Brief) Response to Rich Lowry's "Conservative" Defense of Abraham Lincoln<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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