The conversation continues over at IM—1776 in part III of “The American Nation Dialogues,” this one titled “The American Nation: Resurrections.” There is much to consider in this fairly yuuuge conversation in writing between Lafayette Lee and Michael Anton. I will confine myself to brief remarks on one large theme—the notion of America as the best regime.

Michael (I take the liberty of using his first name because we are old friends) introduces this theme to the discussion as part of the Claremont way of thinking:

[O]ne of the supposed tenets of Claremontism—perhaps its most fundamental tenet—is that the American Founding is perfect, or as close to perfect as any human institution can be, and that it solved problems created in the ancient and medieval worlds. The godfather of our sect, Harry V. Jaffa, after all, wrote a monograph called “The American Founding as the Best Regime,” whose title pretty well sums up its content.

Michael goes on to say several instructive things about the idea of “the best regime,” but as he admits, this is “too long and exalted” a question to try to summarize even in a yuuuge conversation. And I don’t intend to attempt that here, just to add a few details for what they’re worth.

Michael reflects that in the classical conception, the best regime may never have existed and may never exist, though it must in principle or by nature be possible (those are my words, not his). And he raises the question: “if the best regime cannot be real—is not even presented as a serious possibility—then how can the American Founding, a real-life government, be the best regime?”

It can sound mindbogglingly boastful—not to say crazy—to claim that America is perfect, or the best regime in history, or the best regime in the world, or the best regime ever. So I take this occasion to spell out, as faithfully as I briefly can, what Harry Jaffa wrote about America as the best regime in that essay Michael refers to, which is worth reading along with Jaffa’s other essays collected in The Rediscovery of America, edited by Edward J. Erler and Ken Masugi.

First, we might note that Jaffa expressly writes that America is “in its principles or speech” the best regime (my italics). What did he mean by this? He contrasted America’s “claim to the character of the best regime in Western Civilization” with the Platonic or Aristotelian idea of the best regime on the one hand and the biblical idea of the best regime on the other. For Plato and Aristotle, “the best regime was that of ‘the examined life’ as defined by Socratic skepticism.” Human happiness, the highest of all possible human ends, was to be found in “purely contemplative activity.” Biblical religion, on the other hand, “found not the examined life, but the life of obedient love of the living God to be the highest of all possible ends of human existence.” Both biblical religion and classical philosophy held that man’s highest end transcends morality.

According to Jaffa, “Philosophy, the way of life grounded upon the powers of unassisted human reason, can never refute the existence of the biblical God or the possibility that the best way of life is not that of the examined life.” Philosophy is “always open to the challenge of revelation.” Socratic skepticism “always leaves philosophers open to the undeniable fact that the claims of autonomous human reason cannot be fully vindicated by that reason.” True philosophic skepticism always “leaves philosophers open to the possibility that the fully consistent life—the life that the philosopher longs for above all others—is possible only on the basis of revelation.” Jaffa agrees with Leo Strauss (in Jaffa’s words) that “the vitality—and the glory—of Western civilization is to be found above all in the ‘mutual influence’ of these two irrefutable, irreducible principles of human life.”

The unprecedented character of the American Founding is that it provided for the coexistence of the claims of reason and of revelation in all their forms, without requiring or permitting any political decisions concerning them. It refused to make unassisted human reason the arbiter of the claims of revelation, and it refused to make revelation the judge of the claims of reason. It is the first regime in Western civilization to do this, and for that reason it is, in its principles or speech (leaving aside the question of its practice or deeds), the best regime.

Jaffa says much more in developing his argument, both in this essay and, as Michael points out, in the second chapter of his great book, A New Birth of Freedom. As they say, read the whole thing.