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Entry: On Lincoln-Bashing Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/on_lincoln_bashing#24887 Post contents: Great post, Daniel. Nice to see someone talking sense. I'm not sure when the idea developed that, if you criticize someone for one thing, but you don't bother criticizing him for another, you must obviously endorse the latter. (Thus, the fact that Bradford didn't bother to criticize Jaffa's claim that Lincoln was the architect of global democracy "proves" that Bradford believes the same thing as Jaffa, even though Bradford rejected all of Jaffa's claims that he did bother to criticize.) Scholars used to realize that "proof" required, well, proof. Perhaps this development arises from Leo Strauss's privileging of silence--the absurd idea, central to the Straussian hermeneutic, that what's most important in a philosopher's work is that which he doesn't say. For Strauss and the Straussians, that allows them to impute their own views to "political philosophers." In this case, it appears that it allows Dr. Havers to impute views that he dislikes to people who, in his mind, have gone over to "the dark side"--even if he cannot cite their own words in support of his claim. Sent at: 2008 08 30