In Chapter 1 of We Are Doomed (buy it!), I take a swipe at Ralph Waldo Emerson:

The optimistic rot set in as Calvinism gave way to Unitarianism in the later 18th century. The 1805 election of Henry Ware Sr., a Unitarian, to the Professorship of Divinity at Harvard University prepared the way for the great liberal-optimist flowering of the Transcendentalist movement in the 1830s and 1840s. Henry Ware, Jr., the professor’s son, was friend and mentor to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a key progenitor of modern smiley-face liberalism, and a person who, in my opinion, ought to be burned in effigy at the commencement of every conservative gathering.
The fine original pessimism of our nation’s founders had been set aside, and the modern style of vaporous happy talk had been born.

I’ll confess to a twinge of guilt about having said anything at all about Emerson, as I have always found his prose utterly unreadable, putting me in a weak position to make any pronouncements about his ideas and their consequences. Most of what I know about him comes from secondary reading and discussions with a brace of better-informed friends (both conservatives). Around three-quarters of it actually comes from the (sympathetic) account offered by Professor Nichols in the Teaching Company lectures on Transcendentalism.

One reader of WAD has directed me to Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven, which pegs RWE as something of a pessimist, confounding my point. I promptly bought Lasch’s book and am halfway through it, but so far no wiser.

Now here is some reinforcement for my position: William Major in the Chronicle of Higher Education “Giving Emerson the Boot.”

Of the many serious violations and petty criminalities in Emerson’s vision, perhaps none is more egregious than his optimism.

Yee-hah! Though I must say, with Lasch in mind, that the suspicion grows stronger by the hour that you can argue Emerson on either side of any issue: a pessimist and an optimist, an activist and a quietist, radical and reactionary. If he’d lived into the era of modern baseball, he’d have been both a Yankee and a Met. Not for nothing, perhaps, is his best-known remark that one scoffing at consistency.

Emerson’s ideas cannot be distilled, and any reading of his work (absent an agonizing 15-week dive into all his major writings, an undertaking about as inviting as prepping for a colonoscopy) provides students with but a bit of the man.

I’ll drink to that.