Lincoln Unbound (26 page)

Lincoln thought the American system depended ultimately on public opinion. He talked of how if the arguments of Douglas were accepted, it would “tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country.” If we ever lose Lincoln's reverence for the Founders, it will tend to do the same, to our detriment and shame.

Lincoln himself is so revered that nearly everyone wants to make a claim on him. And his tradition is capacious enough that nearly everyone can. Democrats make theirs largely on the basis of their positive view of government.

President Obama says that Lincoln understood that government can aid private economic growth and opportunity rather than impede it. About this, he is undeniably correct. On the other hand, it is not true that everything government does aids growth. The liberal fallacy is to believe Lincoln would have favored almost every iteration of government and expansion of it, just as they do. Old-­age entitlements funded by young workers that are clearly unsustainable? He'd fight to perpetually expand them. Massive peacetime deficits? All in favor. Government-­dominated health care? Why not? Steeply progressive taxes on the rich, justified as a matter of basic justice? Sign him up. Subsidies for farmers? Yes! Perpetually expanding welfare? Absolutely. Costly regulations? Certainly. Red tape obstructing development? But of course.

Lincoln favored an active government, not a blunderbuss government. The debate over the role of government in Lincoln's time was, in large part, over how pro-­business it would be. And much of the action was at the state level. It is a grievous mistake to extrapolate from his position in that debate and portray him as an inchoate Great Society liberal, favoring every new federal program and every new business-­impeding regulation.

The default of the Democrats is to government action rather than individual initiative, turning Lincoln on his head. Self-­reliance is typically translated, in their argot, into the swear phrase of the “you're on your own” society. They style themselves pragmatic problem solvers, yet whatever the problem, the solution is always more government. They in effect want to replicate the ill-­fated ­fiscal experience of Illinois in the 1830s on a much grander scale, with the federal government running trillion-­dollar annual deficits and locked into entitlements that promise worse yet to come.

What Lincoln might hate most about our government, the transfers to individuals, including able-­bodied, non-­elderly adults who should be in the workforce, has been the project of liberal Democrats. They have been on the side of the cultural change that has dethroned the two-­parent family, and their allies in the media and the culture scream bloody murder whenever someone suggests the importance of recovering lost mores. They style themselves the party of civil rights, but the concrete expression of this cause is a collection of race-­conscious policies. They are champions of a “living Constitution” unmoored from any serious commitment to the document. They believe in a zero-­sum economics and, for all their future-­oriented rhetoric, protect the structure of government programs as they were handed down to us in the 1930s or 1960s. For Democrats, any line back to Lincoln is interrupted by the rise of progressivism. It is in progressivism, and its default to rule by experts, that modern Democrats have their roots.

Their case for an essential identification with Lincoln comes down, in a nutshell, to the belief that Lincoln would have favored funding high-­speed rail. And maybe he would have—­if he had precisely the same romance for trains that he had 150 years ago when they were the hot new thing. (There's nothing to be said for the economic merits of high-­speed rail.) Regardless, this is a remarkably impoverished understanding of Lincoln. Lots of ­people have favored subsidies for public works throughout our history. That doesn't make all of them, or really
any
of them, Lincolnian in their understanding of America, or in their deepest purposes.

The immediate objection to any Republican claim on Lincoln, in turn, is the party's record on civil rights. Its presidential standard-bearer in 1964, Barry Goldwater, opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act (although a greater proportion of Republicans than Democrats voted for it in the House and the Senate). Goldwater had a good civil rights record as a businessman and local politician back in Phoenix. He opposed the federal legislation as a senator out of genuine constitutional concerns. But he and other conservatives opposed to the act on the same grounds missed the most important point. Southern states were in blatant violation of both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments guaranteeing equal protection under the laws and the right to vote, and Congress had the explicit constitutional power to act.

In the historical context, the Civil Rights Act and its companion, the 1965 Voting Rights Act were the last spasm of the Civil War. The South had frustrated the imposition of black civil rights during Reconstruction in a low-­grade insurgency that successfully rumbled on into the 1960s. Black civil rights weren't going to be vindicated anytime soon, absent the application of federal power again. Yes, there was already a ­people's movement that was having some success against segregation, but without the Civil Rights Act, it probably would have been decades more of repression in the South, and blacks—­rightly—­weren't willing to wait, nor was the rest of the country willing to make them.

The hostile interpretation of the party's trajectory ever since is that Republicans have held the South based on their implicit racism, that they are the de facto heirs of the segregationist George Wallace. Political scientist Gerard Alexander has written persuasively in opposition to this charge. The Republicans made their first breakthrough in the South at the presidential level not in 1964, but in 1952. That's when Dwight Eisenhower took states on the periphery of the South (Virginia, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas) and Republicans began to make inroads among middle-­ and upper-­income voters associated with the “New South.” In 1964, Goldwater prevailed only in the states of the more racially polarized Deep South (and his native Arizona), but this was an exception that didn't represent the pattern of the Republican growth in the South. Over the years, the party tended to overperform among transplants to the South and younger voters, both groups presumably with more progressive racial views.

“In sum,” Alexander writes, “the GOP's Southern electorate was not rural, nativist, less educated, afraid of change, or concentrated in the most stagnant parts of the Deep South. It was disproportionately suburban, middle-­class, educated, younger, non-­native-­Southern, and concentrated in the growth-­points that were, so to speak, the least ‘Southern' parts of the South. This is a very strange way to reincarnate George Wallace's movement.”

Republicans steadily gained strength in the South in the 1980s and 1990s at the same time that the region shed its ­racism, and in fact the party didn't win more than half of con­gressional seats in the South until 1994. The broad trend was that as the region became more prosperous and open, more populated and economically diverse, and less agricultural and bigoted—­in short, as it evolved in a direction Lincoln would have wanted long before—­it became more Republican.

The other objection to a Republican claim on Lincoln is the contemporary party's libertarian bent, exemplified by its patron saint, Ronald Reagan. His view of government accorded much more with that of Jefferson or Jackson than of Lincoln. Yet, a profoundly humane man and natural storyteller with deep-­felt ideas that he communicated with common sense and eloquence, Reagan succeeded brilliantly in Lincolnian terms. He restored the commercial vitality of the country after the stagnation of the 1970s. He was a paladin of individual economic achievement and a friend of the middle class who never scored political points off the rich. He urged staying true to the country's founding documents and grounded his deep-­felt patriotism in them. He waged a war for freedom, on a global scale. Reagan left the world freer and the country wealthier and more dynamic in a triumph of statesmanship with deep Lincolnian resonances.

Widening the ambit of opportunity was his goal, just as it was Lincoln's, although the means changed. For Reagan, the task wasn't to leverage government support for the modernizing edge of the American economy but to reform and pare back government so it was no longer blunting that edge. At a time of underdevelopment, Lincoln sought to remove the physical impediments to joining together the national economy; at a time of onerous government, Reagan sought to remove obstacles created by burden­some policies and rank economic mismanagement—­on inflation, taxes, and regulation.

Reagan is the default model of contemporary Republicans. He is the Second Founder of the party, and understandably so. But it behooves the party to forge a connection to its original founding figure that has more to it than mere ancestry and annual Lincoln Day dinners.

Today's Republicans will never have Lincoln's positive attitude toward government, nor should they, given that we have a much different
kind
of government today than in the mid-­nineteenth century. It is vastly more extensive. It is more exacting and obstructive. It is redistributive. The Republicans are the ones keeping alive a Jacksonian reflex toward negative government, hostility to debt, and hatred for special government favors for the well connected. That is all to the good, and necessary. On the other hand, there are few Republicans today outside of Ron Paul who, in their implicit acceptance of the welfare state, don't support a much greater level of government than Lincoln could have imagined.

Developing a Lincoln-­inflected agenda within its limited-­government framework is absolutely essential for the party. It has no future unless it is a party of aspiration. It needs Lincoln's emphasis on uplift, delivered in his populist voice. It needs an economic agenda that is broader and deeper than tax cuts. It needs to engage with the struggles of the working class and do it more seriously than in ritualistic denunciations of “elites.” It needs to understand that a dynamic capitalist society depends on character, and on character-­shaping institutions. Preserving such a society is not merely a matter of limiting government and its dampening effect on enterprise, but of fostering individuals who are disciplined, ambitious, and skilled enough to rise within it. It needs a policy toward the big banks that finds a balance between necessary financial risk-­taking and government-­backed recklessness, and that communicates that Republicans aren't the tools of Wall Street. It needs to be the party of “the sober, industrious, thriving ­people.”

In short, it needs to become the Party of Lincoln in a sense more meaningful than a long-­standing nickname.

The current predicament of the party bears some relation to that of the Whigs, who had to scrape for their presidential victories and faced an adversary, in Andrew Jackson, who had seized on powerful democratic symbols and had a technical advantage in the business of vote-­getting. Republicans have won a majority of the popular vote in only one of the last six elections. ­Demographically, they are swimming upstream, and in important respects they feel stuck in a bygone era—­the 1980s—­when in fact the world has turned many times since then. Their ability—­and sometimes even their desire—­to make themselves appealing seems to wane as the task of doing so becomes more urgent in an increasingly treacherous political landscape.

Given its occasional attraction for off-­putting rhetoric and suicidal tactical extravagance, the party would be well served to heed the lessons of Lincoln's tone and of his statesmanship. Lincoln was a champion of a kind of nonjudgmental morality. In his temperance address, he extolled the virtues of drunks and defended the point of view of liquor merchants. For all his condemnations of the slave system of the South, he always said that Southerners were just as the rest of us would be in their circumstances. He maintained an unbending moral standard without ever descending into moralism. This is a tricky balance.

Lincoln maintained it partly out of a belief that it was the only way to convince anyone of anything. He said in the temperance address, “When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced,
persuasion
, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a ‘drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.' ” Once he grew out of his “skinnings” that made ­people cry and his anonymous newspaper articles that brought on duels, he wasn't needlessly inflammatory. He could still be tough and even excoriating, but always to make a point, never simply to wound.

This approach was buttressed by his Madisonian realism about human nature—­rarely surprised by human foibles, Lincoln wasn't inclined to be denunciatory about them. A Wisconsin journalist named J. S. Bliss remembered a little incident after Lincoln's election in 1860 but before he had left for Washington that demonstrated the keen insight of a man fully attuned to the ways of the world.

Bliss was with Lincoln in his office at the Capitol in Springfield when Lincoln's son Willie came running in and demanded twenty-­five cents to buy candy. The president-­elect said he could give him five cents only, which he took out of his vest pocket and put on his desk. Willie stormed off, turning his back forever on the thoroughly unacceptable and insulting five cents. Lincoln predicted his boy would be back. Bliss wondered why. “Because,” Lincoln explained, “as soon as he finds I will give him no more he will come and get it.” After the matter had been forgotten and as they were conversing, Bliss recounts, “
Willie
came cautiously behind my chair and that of his father—picked up the
Specie
, and went away without saying a word.”

On much weightier matters, his judgment was almost as unfailing. Contemporary Republicans—­especially the right of the party—­can forget that they need prudence along with their principle. Lincoln never did. The genius of his political leadership was how uncompromising he was in his ultimate goal and how compromising he was in the course of getting there. He combined strategic fixity with tactical flexibility (and exactly the same can be said of Ronald Reagan).