If we cannot learn from and heed the timeless lessons brought to us by Claremont Fellow and author Harry Jaffa, America will make irreversible mistakes. Read the article and, if you have the time, listen to the interviews linked below:
"In an interview this week, Jaffa, now 91 and a fellow of the Claremont Institute, demonstrated that he still has vital things to say. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, Jaffa explained, turned on issues that were present at the very founding of western civilization--and that we must face again today. ..."
"After awhile," Jaffa says, "I realized that the issue between Lincoln and Douglas was identical to the issue between Socrates and Thrasymachus in the first book of Plato's Republic. Not similar to it. Identical. It is a question of whether the people make the moral order or the moral order makes the people."
"The secretary of state, the president, they all talk about 'values,'" Jaffa says. "A 'value' is a subjective desire, not an objective truth. George Washington said, 'The foundations of our national policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality.' If you had said, 'Oh, Mr. Washington, you mean in our 'values?' Washington would have replied, 'What the hell are you talking about?'"
"Our belief in "values" isn't just vacuous. It's perilous.
"Marx saw morality as the great enemy of human well-being," Jaffa says, "and now the society of the future is one in which moral distinctions based upon the Judeo-Christian and Greek tradition will dissolve. Without even knowing it, we are moving into a Communist world. Without a revolution, we are moving into the world that Marx wanted."
"What is to be done? We must once again recognize the objective moral order."
http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/16/henry-jaffa-lincoln-douglas-opinions-columnists-peter-robinson.html
http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/
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