Taki Magazine

A Reply to Thomas DiLorenzo

by Grant Havers on April 29, 2008

I did not intend to respond to my numerous critics of my essay on Lincoln, since such a reply would simply restate what I had already written. Many of my detractors have projected ideas and themes onto my piece which I did not even discuss. Since Professor DiLorenzo has entered the fray and responded to my critique of his work on this still most controversial of presidents, the temptation to respond is now impossible to resist, especially when my original piece devoted only a paragraph to his work. Now is the time to fill in this lacuna. 

First, I want to recapitulate the main issue of my piece, since many bloggers missed it: to question the conventional view among neoconservatives and paleoconservatives that Lincoln was a prophet of global democracy. I was focused only on this issue. I was not discussing the debate over the Morrill tariff, Lincoln’s views on the races, the legality of secession, or the devastating consequences of the Civil War for the Southern way of life. The issue was simply the fallacious attempt of twentieth-century rightists to associate Lincoln with crusades for democracy which began over fifty years after his assassination.

In the spirit of Platonic dialectic, I shall focus on the least weighty objections and move onto the more pressing ones. DiLorenzo is offended that I classified him as a “paleoconservative,” when in fact he is a libertarian. He has every right to call himself whatever he wants, and so I cheerfully withdraw this classification. I suppose that I employed the paleo-term because paleoconservatives and libertarians generally agree on portraying Lincoln as a prophet of democratic imperialism, but if this agreement doesn’t justify classifying one camp with the nomenclature of the other, so be it.

DiLorenzo also targets my piece for attributing to him the view that he portrayed Lincoln as the “architect” of Leviathan. Apparently I ignored his view that Hamilton and the Whigs had planned a statist program for America long before Abe, who simply continued the revolution. Yet DiLorenzo’s books (which I have read, by the way) are clear that Lincoln was the most successful architect of federal centralization up to that point in American history. (Perhaps I should have added the words “most successful,” but it does not change my argument significantly.)  In The Real Lincoln, he agrees with Lincoln hagiographers like Garry Wills that the president “remade” America. In the same work, DiLorenzo claims that the federal government could not have acquired as much power as it did in the late nineteenth century if not for Lincoln. Presumably this legacy of Lincoln’s clashes with the libertarian vision of Jefferson, even though this president—as I observed in my piece—was also not terribly shy in using the powers of the state against his political foes or in the economic arena. (These facts about Jefferson are copiously documented in Leonard Levy’s Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Dark Side, a book whose arguments DiLorenzo and his admirers have never addressed, to my knowledge.) 

In short, DiLorenzo still lays the lion’s share of the blame for big government on Lincoln, which then helps him to concoct a portrait of Abe as the first global democrat who used the powers of Leviathan to impose “foreign policy imperialism” onto the world. Oddly, DiLorenzo doesn’t discuss this issue in his response, which was the whole point of my essay! Yet it is abundantly clear from his major books on Lincoln that he agrees with the neoconservative caricature of the president as a global democrat. In The Real Lincoln, DiLorenzo does not fault Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson for invoking the name of Lincoln in their democratic crusades; they had every right to do so!  In the same book, DiLorenzo adds that there would have been no Spanish-American War or American entry into World War One had it not been for Lincoln.  Yet DiLorenzo simply asserts the existence of this straight line between Gettysburg and San Juan Hill; he does not prove it. The fact that TR and WW quoted Lincoln proves nothing whatsoever about a president who died long before these interventions occurred.

In his Lincoln Unmasked, DiLorenzo shows even more sympathy with the neoconservative-Straussian usage of Lincoln’s legacy. In chapter 15, DiLorenzo does not challenge the right of Walter Berns—a prominent Straussian scholar—to invoke Lincoln in support of spreading democracy by force all over the world. As DiLorenzo well knows, Berns’ position is no different from that of Harry Jaffa, whom he dismisses as a “crackpot.” Well, frankly, this position is no different from DiLorenzo’s either! In this context, the only difference between DiLorenzo and the Straussians is that he opposes the cause of global-democracy. On the image of Lincoln as the first true imperial democrat, however, there is complete consensus between DiLorenzo and his ideological enemies that this is the most accurate way to portray Abe.

It may surprise DiLorenzo and his supporters, but one can dispute the idea of Lincoln as a proto-Bush Republican without necessarily being a member of the “Lincoln cult.” I see no value in surrendering to this neocon portrait of Abe, which allows Berns, Jaffa, and many others to persuade Americans to support wars which were unthinkable to Lincoln, a nationalist who was out to save his country (at least as he understood it), not the world itself.   

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