Here is a sentence unsurpassed in American historical writing for its poetic power and its intimations of moral and philosophic depth: “No political contest in history was more exclusively or passionately concerned with the character of the beliefs in which the souls of men were to abide.”

The author was Claremont professor Harry Jaffa.  The source was The Crisis of the House Divided, published in 1959.  Jaffa is considered perhaps the greatest living American historian and Crisis the greatest book on Abraham Lincoln ever written.  The political contest in question was the U.S. senate race between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas.  The focus of Crisis is the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

A (to-date) masterful interview with Jaffa appears this week on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, posted at NationalReview.com under the “NRO Radio & TV” pulldown tab. From Monday to Friday, NRO will put up a new segment daily.  In today’s segment (the second), Jaffa responds to Robinson’s reading of the sentence above by explaining the philosophic foundations of American exceptionalism.  In Monday’s segment, Jaffa told how the Lincoln and Douglas contended over exactly the same issue that was at stake in the first book of Plato’s Republic.  I understand that another week of postings from the same taping will go up on NRO sometime in the next month.

If you care, as I do, about American political discourse and consider it the vehicle through which our national purpose is discovered and developed, you MUST watch this program.  If the momentum of the first two segments is maintained, you will find yourself remembering that the “character of the beliefs in which the souls of men… abide” is the enduring question of our public dialogue and the reason so many of us can find that dialogue so enthralling.