Conservatism in Crisis

Harry Jaffa was an intellectual leader of American conservatism, particularly as it developed in the second half of the twentieth century. In 2013, when Jaffa was 94 years old, theNational Review called him “the most important conservative political theorist of his generation” (Miller 2013, 34). When Jaffa died, two years later, his eulogists all echoed that judgment. Charles Kesler, for instance, told theLos Angeles Times that “Harry helped to reshape the American conservative movement” (Woo 2015, B8). Jaffa spoke about himself in similar terms; he described himself as a conservative and talked about his work in terms of building “the conservative movement” (Benson 2012, 23). Most such accounts of Jaffa’s career tie his influence on American conservatism to his reading of Abraham Lincoln, particularly in Crisis of the House Divided. Writing for the Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward (2015) puts it this way: “It is no exaggeration to say that [Jaffa] singlehandedly caused conservatives to embrace Lincoln after a long period of indifference or even hostility toward the Great Emancipator.” Joseph Fornieri writes that throughout Jaffa’s work, “Lincoln’s statesmanship figures prominently as the gold standard of measurement” for American conservatism (2016, 43). Generally speaking, I agree with these assessments. It would be hard to disagreewith them. Jaffa surely helped to shape the thinking of those calling themselves American conservatives during the second half of the twentieth century, and Jaffa’s reading of Lincoln was a core part of his teaching.