“HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT”: Reading A. Lincoln and Thinking about Today’s Republicans

posted at 12:41 pm on April 21, 2009 by CK MacLeod
[ Politicians ]   

With many hurrying to write the Republican Party’s obituary, others aiming for its re-birth, others campaigning for adjustments, still others sensing political-economic-military cataclysms on the horizon, I’m thinking about Ronald C. White Jr.’s new biography A. Lincoln, which I’ve now read up to the presidential victory of 1860. Now some would say the story’s just getting good, and I trust White will tell me things about the Civil War that I never knew and will remind me of much that I’ve forgotten, but I think I know the next part pretty well.  So now seems like a good point, midway through the nearly 700-page main text, to pause and take stock.

If you want to read a full review with comparisons to other Lincoln bios, or to learn more about Lincoln’s early life and personal character, you can follow the link and take it from there.  What I’m interested in today are the Republican Party’s birthpangs and its initial rise to power, and whether the period and Lincoln’s role in it yield any insights we can apply to our current predicament.

Even if we keep in mind how radically different the US of our day is from the US of the mid-19th Century, there are lessons to be drawn, almost as much from the game theory perspective as from historical analogy:  How Lincoln managed to think through and identify himself with the leading issue of the day – slavery, of course – yet avoided losing himself or his party to extreme (and unpopular) abolitionism, and instead broaden its appeal, is a political lesson of relevance in any era.

Lincoln scrupulously separated himself from the extremes of his party, and, congenial teetotaling country lawyer that he was, abjured the extra-legal tactics and extreme rhetoric of abolitionist revolutionaries and the first Republicans.  Stray statements seeming to legitimize the institution of slavery on constitutional grounds, and open concessions to his era’s reigning ideas about race have led many revisionists to argue that Lincoln himself and the war he eventually commanded weren’t really about slavery.  It was really about state’s rights, they say, or Lincoln’s determination to impose a single social and economic system nationwide.

If there are elements of truth in these claims, the sons of the South on whose behalf they are usually offered saw things differently, and Lincoln did, too.  He was willing to compromise in order to preserve the Union and avoid bloodshed, but he and most thoughtful Americans of his day always knew that slavery was the underlying issue, whether the political argument was over “popular sovereignty” in new US territories, nullification by individual states of federally imposed tariffs, or the election of the first Republican President – with less than 40% of the popular vote and no Southern electors.  As President-elect, Lincoln repeatedly summarized the conflict to those urging impossible compromises on him:  “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted.”

Positioned as a man of deeply held, in some ways radical views, but of moderate, compromising methods, Lincoln was able both to disarm his political enemies and to forge coalitions involving those for whom slavery was at best a secondary concern, or who, like the Northerners attracted to the “Rail Splitter,” symbolic of free labor, didn’t immediately recognize its connection to their own lives.  The approach still works – at times more radically than radicalism alone ever does on its issues, and almost always more successfully on the tactical level.

We saw a partially successful version of Lincoln’s coalition-building methods on the Republican side last year.  Heading into the primaries, John McCain benefited from the same kind of political dynamic that enabled Lincoln to become the Republicans’ surprise nominee at the 1860 Convention (held in Chicago, Lincoln’s home turf):  McCain made himself at least the second choice of a majority – if not quite as smoothly as Honest Abe, whose policy, as he explained it in a letter to a supporter, was “to give no offence to others – leave them in a mood to come to us, if they shall be compelled to give up their first love.”

At the same time, and more important, McCain like Lincoln was the candidate most closely identified with the leading issue of the day – which, in American politics from late 2001 through early 2008, was national security.  There was no one on the Republican side more closely and also more widely identified with security issues than McCain – with the possible exception only of Rudy Giuliani, who traded places with him as early frontrunner more than once.  On the Democratic side, Barack Obama had also been strongly identified with the main Democratic security plank – to the extent that his early opposition to the Iraq war was sometimes called his sole qualification for the top job.  The main difference between McCain and Obama simply on the level of issue identification – that is, apart from their personal and policy differences – is that, as security virtually disappeared from view, Obama and his party were much better positioned to address a conjuncture ever more heavily weighted to domestic, mainly economic, concerns.

So where does that leave Republicans today, 200 years after Lincoln was born, nearly 150 years after the party’s first great national victory, as Obama’s first Hundred Days draw to a close and Spring overwhelms Global Whatever-It-Is-Assuming-It’s-Anything?

Some propose addition by subtraction, the idea that jettisoning strongly conservative elements of the platform and closely held interests of the “base,” adopting an attitude and a program that mimics Obamaism in various ways, and relying on marginal shifts in ethnodemographically defined voting blocs can clear a path to restored power and influence.  You can call that idea a lot of things.  Its proponents like to call it realism – as do most proponents of magical fantasies.  I’d call it a plan for, at best, the electoral campaigns of 2020 or 2024, presuming defeat and realignment in the meantime, and based on a conservatism re-configured to proofread for a liberal state in epochal triumph.  In the shorter term, while there’s still anything to fight over other than spoils, “Less entirely Obamaist” or “Mildly Obamaist but without Obama” does not strike me as a likely formula for rebuking Obama – which is what any victory as soon as 2010 or 2012 would have to amount to.

Lincoln’s approach, by contrast, turned on an ethical imperative whose enunciation provided the climax for his great and seminal Cooper Union speech of 1860, the speech that more than any other single event confirmed Lincoln as a player on the national stage.  For our purposes here, the most interesting section is the one addressed directly “to Republicans.”  White describes Lincoln reviewing and discarding the various possibilities for “ephemeral compromise” with those seeking the preservation and expansion of slavery:

Lincoln finally asked:  “What will convince them?”  His answer:  “This, and this only:  cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.”

The address ends with two sentences.  The capitalization is from Lincoln’s original text:

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves.  LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

150 years later, for all the differences between the Republicans of 2009 and those of 1860, is there a better credo for the party – really for any political movement – than those capitalized words?

Though I think Lincoln’s imperative can still inspire us, and though I don’t think movement conservatives and their issues should or even could be sacrificed for the sake of ephemeral compromises, I concede that they will have to be reflected through a new prism, one that will most likely be characterized, understood, and voted on as the negation of Obama and Obamaism, no matter what other content it carries with it.  But we’ve already seen its image and its positive forms as well.  We were seeing it even before the reality of Obamaism in power began to unfold.

Where was the real heat and light on the right last year?  Is there any doubt that, for all the fratricidal attacks that we must eventually put behind us if we don’t intend to die from them, it was in the grassroots impetus behind Fred, but also Huck, but all along around Ron, around Mitt if too little and late, much later and still for Sarah – in recent weeks starting to congeal again without any identifiable leader in the Tea Parties, as in 2007 on the immigration fight?  I think you have your political and ideological answers about what moves Republicans and conservatives there – the faith that right makes might, held by moderates who are radical about their law-abiding patriotism, decidedly everyday Americans who would be the last ones on the barricades demanding the impossible, but among the first to put on a uniform and defend their country.  They’re not just what should lead a conservative and Republican answer to Obamaism – it’s where the action will be regardless of which Sewards, Chases, Camerons, or Bateses the party or anyone else tries to foist on its voters.

That the impetus developed before Obama’s actual victory, even before his rise, testifies to the fact that it answers needs beyond mere opposition to the man himself.  Channeling this energy into a unifying and at the same time broadening project, rather than a divisive and marginalizing one, may or may not require the depth and other personal qualities of a Lincoln, but it’s the challenge any serious politician or political movement faces – with or without a civil war approaching.

Which is my segueway to the second half of the book…

Blowback