That post of mine, below – one theme of which is that groupishness is next to underdogliness, in potentially problematic ways – is too long. For the less literate CT reader, then, the present post provides an opportunity to track attitudes towards patently superfluous Confederate statuary, going back. It’s interesting that the joke is: we are perversely proud of failure, including moral failure. (But it would be indelicate to indicate the actual, main moral failure of the Confederacy in such a connection.) In general (no pun intended), it’s hard to pin down how much the romance of the Lost Cause has always been not just an attempt to sublimate the stain of slavery into a nimbus of state’s rights, but a kind of romantic antiheroism. Who doesn’t love a good antihero, after all?

In the hopes of writing something that isn’t rendered obsolete by Donald Trump in 48 hours, I’m going to say a few (thousand) words about how I got a lot out of Jacob Levy’s good new book, Rationalism, Pluralism, Freedom. At its core is a dilemma – an antinomy: two models of the optimal form and function of groups within a liberal order. Neither model can be quite it. It seems we need to split the difference or synthesize. But there is no coherent or necessarily stable way. (Well, that’s life.) There, I gave away the ending. [click to continue…]