Status Updates From A Necessary Evil: A History...

"Spontaneity is safer in private life when there is predictability in public quarter. 'Authentic' emotion will find less bent for lynchings, in that case, and trials will be more impersonally authoritative; but freedom will be greater for this 'faceless' proceduralism."

The hatred of evil, once cleansed of particularity, once made abstract by outsized intensity, becomes both frivolous and fascinating to its agents. The evilness of The Other releases terrorists from responsibility for their acts. There is something giddily liberating about such freedom from consequence

It is fascinating to observe how effective religion can be as the medium in which all other forms of localism are fused, bathing them in an emotional glow of approval.

Excerpt from: "A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government" by Garry Wills. Scribd.
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Wills insists we have to consider the repression effort of the Alien and Sedition Acts "in its matrix," that is in the context within which it occurred rather than judging in hindsight. This is why, in a phrase, my current Wills enthusiasm supersedes my usual tendency to hop from author to author. He is REALLY good at coolly insisting on context. Nobody should be able to do that for so many various times.

rigor was rhetorical rather than logical. He pretended to be reasoning his way to the laws of nature when he was just spinning a shiny cocoon around the shared values of his province. He was right to distrust Madison, who felt that men’s prejudices need airing in cosmopolitan forums.

When Taylor was serving in the Senate, his purist conception of the separation of powers made him stop corresponding with his friend James Monroe—since Monroe was serving as an ambassador, part of the executive branch, it would be an improper mingling of the branches for a legislator to communicate with him.