Extremists are the greatest danger to America, according to the Biden administration and many media outlets, and come in only two varieties: Islamic terrorists and white supremacists.
Leftists are confident, even sanctimonious, in their extremism, which is now called “woke.” The more radical their agenda becomes, the more stridently they demand obedience to it. Republicans, meanwhile, cower at charges of extremism, mostly because they lack a moral and intellectual framework on par with wokeism.
“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” said Barry Goldwater while accepting the Republican nomination for president in 1964. “Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Goldwater turned the extremist label into a badge of honor.
In his speech, Goldwater repeatedly referred to his belief in “the whole man.” This was a phrase he often used to distinguish his own broad view of human life from narrow Marxist materialism, which reduces man to an economic cog in the machinery of history. The principal author of Goldwater’s speech was Harry V. Jaffa, the Abraham Lincoln scholar who drew on his study of Aristotle and the western philosophical tradition to elaborate and refine this idea—placing Goldwater’s “whole man” within a deeper political context of “freedom under a government limited by laws of nature and of nature’s God.”
