by Rich Lowry
If you are an able-bodied person of working age who is interacting with the government—either as a ward of the state or a subject of the criminal justice system—you should get a good dose of the basic values that might keep you from indigence or lawlessness in the first place. Every means-tested welfare program, not just Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (successor to the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children welfare program) but food stamps and others, should have a work requirement (for either actual work or a closely supervised job search). Parole and probation should be much more restrictive. Mark Kleiman of the University of California, Los Angeles suggests an ankle bracelet to monitor compliance with conditions, with swift and certain punishment for breaking them. And so on.
Government should tell people that marriage is important, as poverty expert Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation argues. National leaders should speak about it, something that Bill Clinton did quite courageously in the 1990s. We should tell kids in high-school of the disastrous consequences for their lives of having children out of wedlock. We should include similarly frank information at every government-funded family planning clinic. We should run public-ad campaigns touting marriage as an indispensable tool for fighting poverty. We should reduce the rewards of single parenthood in the welfare system.
The first step is to frankly acknowledge the cultural contribution to our lack of mobility. For Lincoln, our social breakdown would represent America going back to seed. In the rustic world he left, Jean Baker writes, illegitimacy was more common than in the middle-class world he joined. It was back in that world that his relatives “idled away time.” For Lincoln, our social ills would be reason to redouble his commitment to improvement—since we have so much to improve.
ELEVATE THE CULTURE. A vast apparatus of cultural uplift undergirded mid-nineteenth-century America, grinding away to improve minds and inculcate good habits. Whatever else they taught, the readers that Lincoln absorbed as a boy provided a basic moral education. Lessons in Elocution contained “Selected Sentences” such as: “there is nothing truly valuable which can be purchased without pains and labor” (Tattler). “You must love learning, if you would possess it” (Knox). “Good manners are, to particular societies, what morals are to society in general—their cement and their security” (Chesterfield).
Murray’s English Reader, which Lincoln thought so highly of, stipulated in its preface: “That this collection may also serve the purpose of promoting piety and virtue, the compiler has introduced many extracts which place religion in the most amiable light and which recommend a great variety of moral duties. . . . The compiler has been careful to avoid every expression and sentiment, that might gratify a corrupt mind, or, in the least degree, offend the eye of innocence. This he conceives to be peculiarly incumbent on every person who writes for the benefit of youth.” Another collection, The Kentucky Preceptor, forewarned readers: “Tales of love, or romantic fiction, or anything which might tend to instil false notions into the minds of the children have not gained admission.”
These were books put in the hands of children. Charles Sellers writes (not favorably) of the more general spread of “potent agencies of middle-class acculturation”: “Wherever Yankees migrated they outstripped natives in wealth and culture while pressing their example through multiplying churches, colleges, schools, libraries, voluntary associations, and a new perceptual realm of mass literacy and cheap print. Voluntary associations spread rapidly across the North to promote missions and Sunday schools, enforce morality and temperance, aid and uplift the poor, and maintain libraries and lyceum lecture series for cultural self-improvement.”
What do we have that is remotely comparable to such middle-class cultural evangelism? The ethic of the schools, from kindergarten through college, is a watery stew of environmentalism and multiculturalism. Who, to put it in Sellers’s words, is enforcing morality or uplifting the poor? Who even thinks in such terms? Rather than joining the voluntary associations that once made America so distinctive, we are increasingly bowling alone, in the evocative phrase of political scientist Robert Putnam. American males, especially in the working class, are becoming ever more cut off from any institutions whatsoever. Once an instrument for the spread of information and instruction in the most literate country in the world, print is giving way to all things audiovisual, and its associated schlock. The overwhelmingly influential popular culture is a sewer and is proud of it.
It’s not clear what can be done about any of this. The popular culture in particular won’t change until such time as the country’s cultural elite has a crisis of conscience, assuming, that is, it has a conscience.
Suffice it to say, Lincoln would be confounded that so much of our common life is meant to degrade rather than elevate.
LOOK TO THE FOUNDERS. Lincoln’s attitude to the Founders, as discussed earlier, bordered on the worshipful. He spoke of George Washington in his Lyceum address in 1838, and ended with the high-flown hope “[tha]t during his long sleep, we permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate [his] resting place” and “we revered his names to the last.” His temperance address a few years later soared even higher. Noting that it was Washington’s birthday, he wound up with an extravagant encomium: “Washington is the mightiest name of earth—long since mightiest in the cause of civil liberty; still mightiest in moral reformation. On that name, a eulogy is expected. It cannot be. To add brightness to the sun, or glory to the name of Washington, is alike impossible. Let none attempt it. In solemn awe pronounce the name, and in its naked deathless splendor, leave it shining on.”
Although these youthful sentiments were highly rhetorical, they weren’t entirely rhetorical. The Founding became even more important to Lincoln’s political advocacy as he matured. If Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it into battle, Lincoln did the same with the Founders. His truest blows against his opponents in the 1850s and 1860s were those he struck while wielding the Declaration of Independence. The purposes he identified in the Founders and their handiwork are continually relevant.
He believed that they drew us back to the deepest principles of our republic in the Declaration. And they gave us, of course, our foundational law in the Constitution. At any time and place in American history, there are those who find the Constitution an unacceptable encumbrance to their designs. In Lincoln’s day, it was the abolitionists and the secessionists, both coming at the same controversy from opposite directions. For the abolitionists, the Constitution did too much to protect slavery; for the secessionists not enough. The abolitionists condemned the Constitution and sought extraconstitutional action to smite slavery. William Garrison burned the Constitution in 1854, and deemed it an “infamous bargain.” The secessionists, on the other hand, left the Union to write their own.
Lincoln had no use for the impatience with the constraints of constitutional government of either of the two opposed forces. During the war, he called the radicals in his own party “the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with,” even if “their faces are set Zionwards.” Unlike his more heedless friends, he would honor the Constitution even when it obstructed his most cherished ends. In his final speech of the 1858 Senate campaign, he said, accurately enough, “I have neither assailed, nor wrestled with any part of the constitution. The legal right of the Southern people to reclaim their fugitives I have constantly admitted. The legal right of Congress to interfere with the institution in the states, I have constantly denied.” When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he did it as an inherently limited war measure. Allen Guelzo notes how he never lost sight of its prospective legal vulnerability once the war ended. He finally looked to the Thirteenth Amendment—an inarguably constitutional measure—as a “King’s cure for all the evils.”
Lincoln believed in the perpetual vitality of the Founders. They are never dusty, old, or out-of-date. Lincoln embraced change, but always around the cent
ral axis established by them. We must constantly rededicate ourselves to their essential principles, to free institutions and to the equality of all men, and if we do, those principles will ensure the vibrancy and justice of our society. “We understood that by what they then did,” Lincoln said in Chicago in 1858, “it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us.”
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 document
s 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.