Abstraction vs. Reality

Myron Magnet has a great article on Thomas Jefferson in City Journal. As Magnet tells it, Jefferson's belief in rationality and natural order is the basis for the national myth that has held the United States together for more than 200 years. Not myth as falsehood, but myth as poetic truth, an ideal, something we aspire to in spite of the contingencies and necessities of life. His devotion to the abstract ideals of Democracy were at odds with many features of his own life, as well as the political realities of the times. One of the things that Magnet points out is that Jefferson really did believe that greater truths were self-evident, and therefore beyond the checks and balances of Hamilton's notion of competing interests.

Yet his rationalism proved invaluable to the republic not just at its founding but at its moment of greatest crisis, when it had to break with its historical past and square the circle he himself couldn’t square. At Gettysburg, in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln invoked the words of the Declaration of Independence to explain what the war was about: that the nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” needed “a new birth of freedom” to include all men in that proposition. The abstraction, not the history, was at that moment our true national identity. And in the ever-growing consciousness of man’s freedom that is the true meaning of history, Jefferson might have said, so it became.

In Lincoln's speech the two competing threads of America as it is dreamed and America as it is lived came together at a critical moment, and the nation was revived. For many Americans World War II represents a similar moment. But what becomes of America now when the Shock Doctrine replaces the Declaration of Independence, and the reality of competing interests becomes the tyranny of wealth and power?

All-in-all a great article that's also rich in biographical details.