Editor’s note: Two years back on this site, we quoted David Bromwich’s essay on Lincoln calling him a “constitutional radical.” A year ago Weiss wrote a piece from Cairo called, The Reluctant Radical. Lately the scholar Noel Ignatiev sent Weiss an email saying that Bertrand Russell grew more radical with age. We asked him to explain the term.
The hallmark of radicalism is the willingness to destroy what one has in order to create something new. It was best expressed by Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address (right before the part everyone quotes about “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” It reads as follows:
“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”
I used to cite that passage in the 60s in response to whites asking why black people were burning their own neighborhoods. In the first place, I would answer, they don’t own them, they just live there. In the second place, they were merely following Lincoln’s injunction to destroy what they had in order to build something new.
