All these Harry Jaffa students turning out to be or signing on to the be the house intellectuals of Trumpism raises the question of whether Jaffa himself would have gone full MAGA. What makes it a tantalizing question is that Jaffa died only a few months before Trump …
2/ announced his campaign in the summer of 2015. So we almost found out. I suspect the answer is that yes, he would have ended up full MAGA, red hat and all. I’m no Jaffa expert but I did spend two or three months in 1989 talking to him almost every day. I was a research …
3/ assistant that summer at a place called The Salvatori Center, a small think tank affiliated with Claremont McKenna College where I was a research assistant for Jaffa and the founder of the center and I think the first president of CMC a guy named a George Benson.
4/ I was mainly there because it was something to do near my home but also because I was very into everything about Abraham Lincoln and I’d been put on to the straussian/Jaffa stuff by one of my high school teachers. In any case, Jaffa was a very charming guy and we talked …
5/ about Lincoln and natural rights a lot. Some of the stuff seemed hard to figure. Once he told me that we could be pretty sure homosexuality violated natural law since it was one of the few things that Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Aquinas agreed on. In any case …
6/ the best reason to think that Jaffa would have been a hardcore Trumper is that so many of his students turned out to be. Not conclusive. But certainly indicative. And how would he have justified it? Well, I think like everyone else: Democrats are super bad, are …
7/ a threat to the nation’s founding principles, a lot of hand waving and … well sometimes the disease is so bad you need strong medicine. And that’s Trump. I could imagine him making some analogy to Lincoln needing to limit habeas corpus to save the Union.
8/ This is really the path to Trumpism for all these guys. The other side is worse. And that justifies Trump. Also, MAGA. Of course, what makes all of this so comical is that these guys present themselves as being the custodians of the constitution and The Federalist …
9/ Papers are treated as something like their bible. And if you’ve actually read The Federalist Papers you’ll know that maybe half of them are about Donald Trump. And they don’t like him. But people find a way to get to where they want to go. Thoughts @HeerJeet ?
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