It’s Old Home Week in the American media. First there was the welcome back of Abraham Lincoln (and the brouhaha over the Spielberg film). Now Thomas Jefferson is in the news. But where it was Lincoln the emancipator we were hailing earlier in the week, it’s Jefferson the slaveholder who’s now getting all the press. Yesterday in the New York Times, legal historian Paul Finkelman wrote a bruising attack on Jefferson titled “The Monster of Monticello.” This was a followup to some of the controversy surrounding the publication of Henry Wiencek’s new book on Jefferson, which makes Jefferson’s slaveholding central to his legacy. Finkelman’s essay has already prompted some pushback. David Post at The Volokh Conspiracy (h/t Samir Chopra) wrote: […]
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Categories
Political Theory, The Left, The Right
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Tags Alexander Stephens, David Post, David Roediger, Edmund Morgan, Hannah Arendt, Henry Wiencek, James Henry Hammond, John C. Calhoun, Josiah Nott, Louis Hartz, Lynn Hunt, Paul Finkelman, Robert Brassilach, Thomas Cobb, Thomas Dew, Thomas Jefferson, W.E.B. DuBois, William Harper
Jumping off from Mark Lilla’s negative review of my book in the New York Review of Books—about which more later, though if you’re looking for a hard-hitting response, check out Alex Gourevitch’s demolition at Jacobin—Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a helpful corrective to Lilla’s claim that “political apocalypticism” is a recent development on the right. It’s interesting that Lilla raises Buckley here. People often bring him up as foil to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, as an example of a time when conservatism was sane. But that Buckley joke has always struck me (a college dropout) as batshit crazy. I constantly hear about the sober-minded Buckley, but it’s tough for me to square that with the man who posited that the bombing […]
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Categories
The Right
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Tags Charles Mill, Dominic Losurdo, Drew Gilpin Faust, Edmund Burke, H.R. Haldeman, Haitian Revolution, John Adams, John C. Calhoun, Kevin Mattson, Manisha Sinha, Michael Gerson, Patrick Allitt, Paul Finkelman, Richard Nixon, Rick Perlstein, Robert Brassilach, slavery, Southern Strategy, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thomas Dew, Thomas Jefferson, William F. Buckley, William Harper