Laura Field Mangles the Founders and Lincoln

Laura Field once again accuses me of “distort[ing] and obscur[ing] a specific passage from an important speech by Lincoln.” She also accuses me, once again, of betraying the teaching and legacy of Harry Jaffa—an extraordinary claim for Field to make, considering that in her book she admits to finding Jaffa “unreadable” and plainly demonstrates that she doesn’t understand him.

In truth, Field is the one doing the distorting and obscuring—both in her new articles and in her book, which I showed when I reviewed it earlier this year. I will go through the logic chain line by line, which can get tedious, so be warned, but before I do, let me cut to the chase and state a few conclusions up front. Which will make this, in addition to tedious, a bit repetitive, so be warned about that too.

First, what Field is doing is retconning the American Founders and Abraham Lincoln to transform them into perfect avatars of cutting-edge 21st-century progressive leftism. In this, Field is not alone; there are many just like her on that part of the Left that allows limited expression of open admiration for the founding (and Lincoln) but which, in order to make that professed admiration “respectable” or at least acceptable to their peers in the leftist hive mind, must ahistorically and illogically strip all non-Left-conforming ideas out of the founding (and Lincoln). As one friend (who, as it happens, got a PhD in the same program as Field) put it to me, “For Field, the founding is just the open society.”

But the above is really too generous to Field because it presumes that her understandings of Lincoln, of the founding, and of present-day America are all coherent, when in fact they are not: not individually and not in the aggregate. Which points to the second and more fundamental problem with Field’s attacks. Her general approach in the book and the articles boils down to: Lincoln was a good man, Anton is a bad man, therefore they must hold opposite views; whenever Anton claims to be following Lincoln, he must be lying. But Field stumbles into incoherence when she tries to prove this, because whenever she deals with anyone she dislikes (a long list), her moral indignation overwhelms her reason.