I'm a libertarian lawyer and college professor. I blog on religion, history, constitutional law, government policy, philosophy, sexuality, and the American Founding. Everything is fair game though. Over the years, I've been involved in numerous group blogs that come and go. This blog archives almost everything I write.
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But this is just once more the appeal to the will of the majority as equal to justice—an equation which someone so intoxicated on classicism and references to Lincoln ought to know is one which Harry Jaffa has likened to the argument of Thrasymachus in the Republic.
A man who can write a sentence like this has no business complaining about anyone's style.
Ah, perhaps that sentence was, in its own unique, particular way, labyrinthine; but not for nothing did Theseus wend his way through the darkness to find the ultimate prize. We reach for the zenith of our understanding when we search for the thing, the essential thing, the most important thing that we can search for in our national public discourse. This discourse—that Lincoln contributed so forcefully to in his doomed, but ultimately successful crusade to put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction—is at times tumultuous, boisterous, confusing, and noisy, and especially so when the majority is opposed to one’s position, and especially with the majority is made up of most of the people. At such times the words may, indeed, come falteringly, and the passions may gain the best of one’s rhetoric—as Aristotle warned us ought to be avoided—and yet the mind remains convinced and persuaded that the truth can ultimately be found if only we will have patience; if only we will seek for it, as Shakespeare said, “in the dust,” and if only we will have magnanimity in our fellow man. That is the thing, of course, the essential and most important thing; the crucial element in our bloviating mumbo-jumbo....
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From Sandefur:
But this is just once more the appeal to the will of the majority as equal to justice—an equation which someone so intoxicated on classicism and references to Lincoln ought to know is one which Harry Jaffa has likened to the argument of Thrasymachus in the Republic.
A man who can write a sentence like this has no business complaining about anyone's style.
Ah, perhaps that sentence was, in its own unique, particular way, labyrinthine; but not for nothing did Theseus wend his way through the darkness to find the ultimate prize. We reach for the zenith of our understanding when we search for the thing, the essential thing, the most important thing that we can search for in our national public discourse. This discourse—that Lincoln contributed so forcefully to in his doomed, but ultimately successful crusade to put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction—is at times tumultuous, boisterous, confusing, and noisy, and especially so when the majority is opposed to one’s position, and especially with the majority is made up of most of the people. At such times the words may, indeed, come falteringly, and the passions may gain the best of one’s rhetoric—as Aristotle warned us ought to be avoided—and yet the mind remains convinced and persuaded that the truth can ultimately be found if only we will have patience; if only we will seek for it, as Shakespeare said, “in the dust,” and if only we will have magnanimity in our fellow man. That is the thing, of course, the essential and most important thing; the crucial element in our bloviating mumbo-jumbo....
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