Comments Elsewhere

Even so, sometimes a difference of degree can be perceived as one of character instead if that degree is relatively large. There is such a perception with regard to the Bush administration in particular, and it’s widely held.

Sure, but I think there are clear reasons for regarding that perception as clearly mistaken. As dangerous as the Bush regime is to us, and as deadly as it has been to others, I don’t think there’s any reasonable standard of comparison by which it would compare unfavorably, in terms of degree, to the absolute depotism and overt reign of terror that reigned against American Blacks from 1788-ca. 1968. Bush is bad, but as a matter of degree he is not worse than even Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt, let alone the slave power and Judge Lynch. At the most he represents a lurch back towards the worst elements of Cold War militarist statism.

I understand the dialectical impulse, but part of my worry is that appealing to wistfulness for the Old Republic is likely to purchase whatever insight it offers to the interlocutor only at the expense of blinding them to very important facts about American history, and thus leaving dangerous prejudices about the past untouched (in fact I think that something like this is precisely what happened with the transition from the anti-statist elements of the old liberals and the Old Right, which combined genuine libertarian insights with mythistorical Old Republic nostalgia, to the brazen Caesarism of the New Right).