She has no coherent theory of equality.

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.

The central issue before us is the true meaning of equality as understood by the American Founders and Abraham Lincoln. Field never clearly states what she thinks that is; she only insists that I am wrong without coherently explaining why. As I shall try to show, the “logic” (such as it is) of Field’s position points to three possible, expansive meanings of equality, none of which she clearly states but all of which are incompatible with the founders’ and Lincoln’s understanding.

The first centers on the age-old controversy of equality of rights or equality before the law versus equality of outcomes, whether for individuals or groups. The founders and Lincoln quite clearly state that they understand equality to demand the former but not the latter. There must be political equality for all American citizens, but differences in abilities and talents will inevitably lead to social and economic inequality—which is not only not a bad thing, but is a source of wealth, innovation, progress, and achievement. The founders and Lincoln are therefore against a leveling equality of enforced equal outcomes, in which human differences are homogenized for the sake of proportional parity. I think all this is A) true and reasonable and B) unquestionably the founders’ and Lincoln’s view. Does Field? She is never clear on this point. I also … I was going to say “believe,” but that word is too weak in this context. I also see clearly that equality of rights and before the law is inconsistent with an equality of enforced outcomes. Does Field? A fair-minded reader simply trying to discern her real views could read her either way.

The second possible meaning of equality, or of what the principle of equality demands, centers on its universalism. There can be no doubt that for equality to make any sense at all as a principle, it must be universal. But what does that universalism demand or require? This is a debate as old as the founding. Is the United States obligated to democratize the world because of our dedication to the principle? The founders and Lincoln thought not. I agree with them. What does Field think? Again, it is impossible for even the most careful reader to discern.

The third possible meaning of equality also centers on the principle’s universalism. Does that universalism require, in effect, an unalienable right of foreigners—of all mankind—to settle in the United States and become citizens with or without the consent of the actual, existing American citizenry? The founders and Lincoln, again, rejected this extremely radical view, as do I. Does Field? At one point she rather heatedly denies holding that view and angrily denounces me for suggesting she might. But the “logic” of several of her “arguments” points in this direction, as I tried to show in my original review of her book, and as I try to show below.

All right, now into the weeds.

How the Founders Understood Equality

This whole “debate” (such as it is) goes back to something I wrote in 2016. My point was to show what equality, as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, actually meant to the founders and to Lincoln, whom I argued (and still believe) understood it exactly the same way.

It means simply this: equal natural rights inhere in all human beings by virtue of their being human beings; government therefore derives its just powers from the consent of the governed; all human beings are bound to respect the equal natural rights of all others; all fellow citizens shall be equal before the law; the United States shall have no formal aristocracy of any kind, hereditary or otherwise, and no monarchy.

Equality thus understood acknowledges unequal talents unequally distributed in the population, including (as Madison put it in Federalist 10) “the different and unequal faculties of acquiring property” and (as Jefferson put it in a later letter) “superiority in understanding.” To these we might add superiority in war and statesmanship as exemplified by Washington and Lincoln. The purpose of the principle of equality is therefore, in part, to protect unequal natural talents for achieving different good things for oneself, one’s family, one’s community, and one’s country.

This understanding came under attack in the early republic as Southern slaveholders began to make their so-called “positive good” argument in favor of slavery, an argument that was either absent or extremely uncommon in the founding era. (I personally am not aware of a single instance, but add that qualification in case the nitpicky Field finds one forgotten pamphlet from some nobody everyone else forgot circa 1778 that makes this argument, and then trumpets that as “proof” of my profound historical ignorance.)

The reason for these later attacks is obvious. Even persons of the meanest capacity can see that equality is incompatible with—utterly contradicts—the practice of slavery. This was widely understood in the founding era, even by many slaveholders themselves. One might cite, for instance, Jefferson trying to insert anti-slavery language into the Declaration, or Washington freeing all his slaves with grants of money and means to make an independent living. (Jefferson admired this action and wanted to emulate it, but he was a notorious spendthrift in debt up to his eyeballs and so could not afford to.) We might also point to the fact that the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Continental Congress’s law governing territory acquired in the Revolutionary War that later became several Midwestern states, explicitly forbade slavery anywhere in that territory. And to the specific constitutional provision banning any legislative interference with the slave trade for 20 years—which is to say, permitting Congress to ban said trade after 20 years—and the fact that once those 20 years were up in 1808, Congress immediately outlawed the slave trade.

To make a (very) long story short, despite a consensus acknowledging that equality and slavery are incompatible, the founding generation agreed to kick the slavery can down the road for the sake of achieving union. Those who find this morally indefensible need to remember (among other things) that the fledgling nation was located on a continent where three great European empires—all more populous, richer, and better armed than young America—still had expansive holdings. The possibility that our new and relatively weak country (or parts of it) could be gobbled up by one or more of those empires was, as the saying goes, non-trivial. The founders were worried about it. Federalist 1-14, and especially 2-5 by Jay, go into this extensively. Any attempt in the founding era to curtail slavery in the South (it was abolished in the Northern states during this period) would have split the Union and made it much more likely that European empires would take (or retake) American territory.

Equality Under Attack

Now, as noted, the “positive good” argument emerged later, as slavery came under pressure from growing abolitionist sentiment in the North and West, and as Northern states economically outperformed the South and grew more populous, thus accruing more political power. This school held that equality in any form is a “self-evident lie” (in the 1853 words of a Northern, but pro-slavery, US Senator). It did so, of course, to make a rhetorical defense of slavery.

This is the context, which Field entirely leaves out, of the Lincoln speech in question. In the passage under discussion, Lincoln is responding to critics who attack equality in order to accuse him of being a secret radical and discredit him among voters who were, we may say, “in the middle”: that is, opposed to the westward expansion of slavery after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and perhaps even opposed to slavery simply, but not supportive of full social and political equality for freed slaves.

Lincoln himself is quite hard to pin down on the last point, deliberately so. We do not know what was really in his heart because he never said. His rhetoric was calculated to imply different things to different people, depending on their preferences and prejudices, and to navigate an extremely tricky political environment. (This, by the way, is the central controversy animating Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln; it’s striking that a Hollywood movie director can understand this while a self-avowed PhD in political theory cannot.) Some scholars today read Lincoln carefully, find evidence of Lincoln’s sympathy for full social and political equality, and conclude this was his true position. There is, as noted, evidence for this view; the passage under discussion is one such piece of evidence. It is not, however, conclusive evidence, as we shall see. Lincoln was also deeply interested in, and even at times advocated for, “colonization”—i.e., relocating all freed slaves outside the United States—on the grounds that many factors rendered impossible the two populations’ living together in any kind of harmony.

In any case, even if it could be proved that Lincoln in his private mind and heart favored full social and political equality, that does not establish Field’s—quite radical, and entirely mistaken, but also deeply incoherent—interpretation of Lincoln’s language on equality in the Dred Scott speech.

Political Context of Lincoln’s Speech on the Dred Scott Decision

Before turning to a detailed analysis of that passage, let me re-summarize the context. Lincoln returned to politics in 1854 outraged over (1) the Kansas-Nebraska Act’s repeal of the Missouri Compromise, (2) the possibility of slavery’s westward expansion, (3) the principle of “popular sovereignty” which holds that America should properly be indifferent or agnostic on the question of slavery’s goodness or badness, and (4) the resultant street warfare—e.g., “Bleeding Kansas.” As that decade progressed, the sectional crises grew and, in Lincoln’s view, what he called the “slave power” was winning.

The Dred Scott decision of 1857 was one such—major—victory. At that time, Lincoln was about one year away from the Illinois U.S. Senate contest of 1858, when his opponent would be Stephen Douglas, Lincoln’s major rhetorical adversary in his speech on the Dred Scott decision. Douglas was not only the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act; he was also the country’s leading proponent of the view that “popular sovereignty” should settle the slavery question, and advocated that the United States should take no position on whether slavery is good or bad.

Throughout this period, Lincoln always explicitly stated that he believed the federal government had no lawful, constitutional power to do anything against slavery in the states where it then existed. He advocated only that slavery not be allowed to expand into federal territories which would, sooner or later, become states. And he argued that Congress indeed had the power to outlaw such expansion.

This was too much for the slave power. They knew that if slavery were not allowed into new territories, that “peculiar institution” would—in words Lincoln would use the following year—be “placed in the course of ultimate extinction.” In other words, Lincoln and the slave power agreed on the predicted outcome, but disagreed on its desirability or lack thereof.

Douglas himself was not an advocate of the “positive good” argument, but in most other respects he was, as a practical matter, aligned with pro-slavery interests. Hence the slave power and the “popular sovereignty” advocates joined hands in order to paint Lincoln as a dangerous radical and, moreover, a disingenuous radical who hid the extent of his radicalism. They attributed to Lincoln (and a fortiori, whether they acknowledge this or not, to the founders) an expansive, radical understanding of equality that requires not just banning slavery in the territories, nor even merely full abolition, but full social and political equality for all freed slaves. They, and Lincoln, knew full well that if this charge could be successfully attached to Lincoln in the public mind, then his cause would be doomed and slavery would advance.

This, then, is the context of Lincoln’s Dred Scott speech and of the passage under discussion—and we may say of nearly all Lincoln’s rhetoric in the 1850s. Granted, Field is not a historian and may not know any of this. But as a PhD in political philosophy, she ought to know something about rhetoric, and it is important to remember that Lincoln’s speech on the Dred Scott decision is rhetoric—that is, words carefully chosen not merely to advance an argument, but to persuade, to change or mold public opinion, and to defend one of Lincoln’s vulnerable flanks.

In both Lincoln’s original speech and in my 2016 defense of it to which Field objects, equality is being attacked (or deliberately misinterpreted, which amounts to the same thing), we may say, from “the Right.” In Lincoln’s case, the attacks come from the slave power and its populist allies. In my case, the attacks came from a contemporary corner of the Right, which sees the principle of equality as inherently leveling, inherently demanding equal outcomes for all. I quoted that speech to show that once one understands what the founders and Lincoln mean by equality, this charge is proved false. In other words, like Lincoln, I was (in part; more below) defending equality as it were “from the Left” against (a part of) the Right. Field sees that in Lincoln’s case but, in her extreme uncharity against her many, many enemies, cannot see it in mine.

Field’s Chief Falsehood

In Furious Minds, Field alleges that I once “appealed to Lincoln to justify the idea that people from different places and backgrounds are rightly understood to be unequal.” This is simply a lie on a number of levels.

Here is what I actually wrote in the passage in question:

Here I address my neoconservative friends specifically, and also those Trump supporters who are either hostile to or try to wave away America’s founding creed. Yes, it is true that “all men are created equal.” But Lincoln adds the crucial caveat: all men are not “equal in all respects” (emphasis in the original). They are not “equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments or social capacity.” People from different nations with different circumstances, histories, beliefs and traditions will—by definition—hold very different conceptions of good government, some irreconcilably opposed to our own. It has been said that a principal cause of Rome’s fall was that “many men who never knew republican life and did not care for it…became Roman citizens.” Why then do we Americans continue to import millions upon millions who have never known republican life and do not care for it? In doing so, we do not uphold our Founding creed; we hasten and enable its oblivion.

Note first that I am specifically responding not just to neoconservatives, but also to “those Trump supporters who are either hostile to or try to wave away America’s founding creed”—i.e., who deny or minimize the equality language of the Declaration. I do so to affirm the truth of that axiom.

Second, I specifically do not say, nor do I claim that Lincoln or the founders said or believed, that “people from different places and backgrounds are rightly understood to be unequal.” Field simply makes that up in order to impugn me. What I said is exactly what Lincoln and the founders said and believed: the fact that “all men are created equal” does not mean that all are equal in all respects. Some are better at certain things than others. Some are bigger, stronger, taller, faster, smarter, and so on. Some are more and some less virtuous. And so on. This is exactly—precisely—what Lincoln said in the speech that Field accuses me of distorting, not to mention obvious enough to anyone with a basic level of reading comprehension.

The sole respect in which “all men are created equal” is—for the founders, Lincoln, and me—in being endowed by nature and nature’s God with certain unalienable rights. All human beings in all times and places possess these rights, even “people from different places and backgrounds.”

Against the neocons, however—but with the founders and Lincoln—I also affirm that this natural equality does not entail or imply a right to immigrate to the United States. I also affirm—again, with the founders and Lincoln—that people “from different nations with different circumstances, histories, beliefs, and traditions will—by definition—hold very different conceptions of good government, some irreconcilably opposed to our own.” To repeat, the founders and Lincoln affirmed this explicitly. Note how Field does not confront their actual arguments, or even represent mine accurately. She simply insinuates that the founders and Lincoln believed that the equality principle means that America must welcome everyone, and anyone who opposes that must ipso facto believe that “people from different places and backgrounds are rightly understood to be unequal.”

Field goes on:

If you know this speech, you will recognize how Anton manipulates it. Lincoln did discuss the nature of human equality there and used the words Anton ascribes to him. But in the speech, Lincoln drew a clear distinction between the unjust real world and the ideal, between the descriptive and the prescriptive. He explained that, while the writers of the Declaration of Independence were not in a position to bestow equality on all people (“they could not confer such a boon”), the founders nevertheless defined “with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all men created equal.” They were, Lincoln explained, equal with respect to “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And he said that the Declaration was—contra the Dred Scott ruling—intended by the founders to be a beacon of hope for a more equal future.

Apart from the first sentence, this is all true enough, but how does it contradict anything I wrote? Field then quotes another passage from the same Lincoln speech:

[The founders] meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all: constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, of all colors, everywhere.

Again, how does this contradict anything I wrote? Field attempts an explanation:

Anton, like a sophist, took Lincoln’s description of the empirical (but, in Lincoln’s view, very bad) reality of inequality and used it to defend the normative ideals of inequality and exclusion (or what he liked to call “the historic American nation”).

Huh? This simply does not make sense. Since Field’s writing is so unclear, I tried before and shall try again to tease out her real meaning.

I surmise that her confusion stems from an overinterpretation of the words “all people, of all colors, everywhere.” For Lincoln and the founders, the principle of equality is universal; indeed, if it is not universal, it is inherently contradictory: by definition, “all men” cannot be “created equal” in the sense of possessing unalienable rights if some men, or groups of men, do not possess those rights.

But as I pointed out in my review, the practice of enforcing equality is the business of each nation; the principle’s universality does not mean that the United States government is obligated to secure the equal natural rights of non-Americans. The founders and Lincoln are quite clear on this point. This is what, for instance, the words “to ourselves and our Posterity” in the Constitution mean.

Founders’ Son

In her new piece, Field notes that Lincoln’s speech continues after the quoted paragraph (duh; that’s what a speech is) and charges that by excluding what comes after, I am “grossly misrepresenting Lincoln’s meaning.” I will note before I address the substance of this charge that here is yet another example of Field’s persistent bad-faith, any-weapon-at-hand style of argumentation. According to this charge, my sin is selective quotation; not altering a quote, or quoting something out of context, but simply not quoting enough. Taken to its logical conclusion, this would require that any time anyone quotes anything and does not quote everything, he is committing (in Field’s words) “intellectual malfeasance.”

The charge might have some merit in a specific case if the omitted part of the quote materially changed the meaning of the preceding part, but in this case it does not. No surprise there; Lincoln was a brilliant and careful writer who, unlike Field (more on this below), didn’t contradict himself from sentence to sentence.

The reason I stopped the quote where I did is that the words I quoted were sufficient to prove the point I was making: that for Lincoln and the founders, equality means equality of rights and before the law, not equality of outcomes, much less the equal right of all foreigners to become Americans without the existing American citizenry’s consent.

Field denies believing the latter, but what else could her attack on my paragraph possibly mean? What I said was that the truth of equality as understood by the founders does not logically require, nor was understood by the founders or Lincoln to require, endless open immigration. Field objects to that pronouncement, calls it a gross distortion of Lincoln, then denies that she herself thinks that’s what equality demands. So do we agree after all?

But let’s return to the texts. In her latest piece, Field goes on:

Lincoln described how the Declaration of Independence is an aspirational ideal in an often ugly and brutal world; Anton uses Lincoln’s description of those hard and difficult realities to justify ongoing injustice and cruelty. It’s a staggering inversion of the spirit of Lincoln.

Leaving aside the histrionic nature of the prose, this shows that Field simply doesn’t understand Lincoln at all. It is true that in the Dred Scott speech, Lincoln distinguishes between “the empirical…reality of inequality” in his time versus some future time when “the enforcement of [equality] might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.” But he was speaking solely of enforcement within the United States. To torture my words into “sophistry,” Field must vastly expand Lincoln’s meaning to the assertion that the “enforcement” of the right must eventually apply to the entire world, and be conducted by the United States government to boot. Either that, or she means that the “enforcement” of the right must require perpetually open borders to anyone who wants to move to the United States, regardless of what our country’s present citizen-majority votes for.

I don’t see any way around this. What Lincoln actually means by “enforcement…might follow” is that the promise of equality was obviously not fulfilled at the time of the founding because of slavery. The founders knew that slavery was wrong, knew they couldn’t abolish it in the moment, and hoped—even expected—that a time would come when it could and would be abolished.

This is, at a minimum, what the “enforcement” of equality meant for Lincoln: the abolition of slavery. It might also have meant, though Lincoln never explicitly says so, social and political equality for all freed slaves. I am certain of the first claim, less so of the second simply because the record doesn’t prove the case either way.

One suspects that for Field, the second claim is also the bare minimum, though she never spells that out either. But supposing she’s right and that could be proved, would she stop there? Because that interpretation would also be completely compatible with my own understanding of Lincoln, which she finds so wrong and horrifying.

Hence Field’s attack on me amounts to—must amount to—denying that Lincoln intended the full meaning of equality to extend up to, but no further than, full citizenship for all freed slaves and their descendants. In other words, for her charge that I am wrong to have any merit, even any substance, Field must believe that Lincoln believed extending equality to freed slaves was only a step toward the further expansion of equality in other realms. There is no logical way around this, which is what I pointed out in my review of her book.

If, then, it is Field’s position that Lincoln’s understanding of equality must extend beyond full citizenship for all freed slaves and their descendants, what must the “correct” understanding (according to Field) entail? What could be those other realms? I see three possibilities, not mutually exclusive.

The first is simply the leftist dream of equalizing outcomes for individuals and/or across groups. But as we have already seen (and thousands more similar quotes could be cited), this understanding was explicitly rejected by the founders and Lincoln alike. Does Field accept that? If so, she is agreeing with me, distasteful as that must be to her. Or does she affirm the opposite? If so, she is contradicting their plain words. How does she square that circle? In her book and in her two new pieces, Field is all over the map on this question. I could not say whether she is confused on this point, but her writings do not provide the material to determine what she really thinks; to the contrary, differing passages can be cited in support of either conclusion.

The second possibility is that because equality is a universal principle, its just “enforcement” requires that every regime on earth be “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” and that the United States, having declared the principle, is obligated to enforce it around the world. If that sounds insane, it’s because it is. Even Jefferson himself, the very author of the words and, among the founders, the furthest to the “Left” on this question, rejected what are now called “democracy wars.” Lincoln himself never addresses the question, and there is nothing in his writings that even implies that he held such an understanding. As for what Field thinks, again, I have no idea because she’s so unclear.

The third possibility is that because (again) equality is a universal principle, every person on earth has an unalienable right to become an American citizen, with or without the existing American citizenry’s consent. Many—I would say most—on the Left today hold this view. The idea traces back to a speech by Robert Kennedy in defense of the Hart-Celler Act, in which he proclaimed immigration a civil right for foreigners and Hart-Celler an indispensable pillar of the civil rights movement. Does Field believe this? I think it plausible that she does and have explained why in my review of her book and above. Now she denies it. What are her real views? Who knows? How could anyone possibly know? Field either refuses to be clear, i.e., she deliberately obfuscates, or she is incapable of being clear.

There is much more that could be said; as I noted in my review, Furious Minds contains an error, a deliberate mischaracterization, a bad-faith interpretation, or an unsupported assertion in virtually every line. The same can be said of her two latest attacks. Who has the time to catalogue them all? Who even cares?

Which is why I have confined my response to Field’s central point. I hope to have shown—and believe I have shown, again—that Field is a shoddy scholar, a careless reader, and a confused thinker. That she continues to be—and no doubt forever will be—showered in accolades by every elite institution and organ in our society shows how intellectually corrupt are our times.