In his article “Southern Cross: The meaning of the Mel Bradford moment,” David Gordon recounts his first meeting with M.E. Bradford:
“You just can’t attack Lincoln and get away with it—you just can’t.” Hearing these words, spoken in front of a portrait of Lincoln at the Rockford Institute in 1989, is my first memory of Mel Bradford. That remark, delivered in an accent characteristic of the Texas-Oklahoma border that was his home country, reflected the wounds of an incident that brought him to national attention.
Indeed, Bradford recollects that incident in the preface of his book Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative. He describes the anger that was unleashed against him because he “had offended against the still holy name of the Emancipator” by criticizing what he called “the Lincoln myth.” The establishment commentariat—both the socialist left and the neo-conservative Lincolnite Republicans—were united in denouncing him as an extremist for failing to uphold the ideal of equality for which, in their view, the Civil War had been fought.
In the article that had incurred their wrath, Bradford derided their view of Lincoln as the “leader of a Puritan people who had just won a great victory over ‘the forces of evil’… Through Booth’s bullet he became the one who had ‘died to make men free,’ who had perished that his country’s ‘new birth’ might occur.” He argued that this veneration of Lincoln as a holy martyr grounds the myth that America was founded as a nation built on the egalitarian ideals for which Lincoln died. In this interpretation, Southern Democrats are depicted as the enemies of equality. Bradford was described in the New York Times as “the nostalgic Confederate remnant of the conservative movement.”
Bradford explains in Remembering Who We Are that he rejected egalitarianism because he saw that “the pseudoreligion of equality that openly insists on equality of condition [and] the attendant proposition that the state should foster such leveling” is incompatible with liberty. As Gordon explains, this is the essence of Bradford’s opposition to the egalitarian redefinition of America—not only is the Lincolnite interpretation historically inaccurate, but it also displaces and obscures America’s devotion to liberty:
Efforts to secure equality of opportunity will inevitably lead to the leveling policies of more radical egalitarians.… To secure genuine equality of opportunity, the state will have to compensate the less affluent. Equality of opportunity leads to equality of result.
As Bradford put it, “Equality achieved is the mainspring, the central teaching of the Left’s secular theology…the kind of equality of opportunity that insists on the right results in every contest.”
That explains why Bradford rejected egalitarianism, arguing that, “Not religion, but the cult of equality is the ‘opiate of the masses’ in today’s world—part of the larger and older passion for uniformity or freedom from distinction.” He warned that treating egalitarianism as the foundational American ideal would amount to “a radical transformation of American society,” regardless of the precise form which egalitarianism takes:
Yet most libertarians and some conservatives nod respectfully toward the related nostrum, “equality of opportunity,” and cannot recognize that, as a matter of fact, as a matter of the record, egalitarians always mean by equality of opportunity a contest between people who enjoy equality of condition (as in a race between identical twins raised under identical circumstances), which, even if it existed without endless and monumental handicapping, would never satisfy them when it produced unequal results. As I have tried for many years to explain to some of my colleagues, only equal persons in equal situations may enjoy equal opportunities.
Bradford’s views caused a storm because the radical transformation that would be required to equalize everyone is seen as desirable across the political divide. Many Republicans regard Lincoln as the Messiah who brought racial equality to America, and therefore, view with great favor the notion that centralized federal power should be maximized to enable the government to pursue the goal of equality. This vision is also shared, albeit for different reasons, by Marxist historians like Eric Foner who regard the slogans of racial equality as the ideal platform for socialist revolution. Hence, Bradford was depicted by politicians on both the left and right as an outlier whose views had no support. Foner, among others, editorialized against Bradford in the NYT complaining that everyone should be concerned about racism and that Bradford had failed to give slavery the attention it deserves. Foner suggested that most conservatives, unlike Bradford, would share the liberal left’s commitment to the egalitarian “idea” of America.
In rejecting Foner’s argument, Bradford pointed out that most of America’s Founding Fathers were not egalitarian, and egalitarianism was not historically regarded by American conservatives as a foundational ideal:
But his biggest mistake is to take my position on the role of equality in legitimate American politics as something unusual among conservatives. In fact it represents the ground of consensus among most of us—except for a few who imagine that an inclusive equality of opportunity is possible. No one goes beyond that. And few that far.
Yet even among conservatives, much confusion remained concerning the importance of Bradford’s defense of liberty and his rejection of statism. He said of himself that “my political roots are among the Antifederalists, mild Federalists, and early Southern Democrats. I agree with Murray Rothbard that the American Revolution exploded against remote and arbitrary power.” Like Rothbard, he opposed the Fourteenth Amendment and the regime of phony civil rights that was introduced after the war by the Radical Republicans, as he recognized the grave threat that it posed to liberty. As Gordon says,
M.E. Bradford was a scholar of immense gifts, devoted to the cause of liberty. Though he was denied in life the full recognition that he deserved, he could apply to himself the words of Browning’s Paracelsus: “But after, they will know me.”
