Republicans and Abe, part II

Interesting comments on my first post addressing this issue. BTW, I've decided that, for the most part, I've decided to stop posting direct replies to comments in the "comments" sections of my posts. The reason is simply a lack of time. While I've been able to do a fair amount of blogging lately, generally speaking my blog time is pretty limited, especially once the semester begins at my university. I'll try to respond as best I can to comments in my posts on the main part of my blog, but please don't take it personally if I don't directly reply to every comment. They're all valuable, but I'm a pretty harried college professor (not to mention father of five :-)).

That said, let me clarify just a bit. I actually don't want to get into much of a discussion about either Ron Paul or Andrew Napolitano--at least not here. Those two guys and their (incredibly wrongheaded) comments about Lincoln just started me thinking again about questions I've had in the back of my head for a long time.

And what I'd like to ask is this: can Lincoln be successfully utilized as more than merely a handy political symbol for modern Republicans and/or conservatives? Might he also be used as an intellectual and philosophical foundation for Republicans--perhaps even a way to reinvigorate what I personally think has become a rather stale and suspect current political philosophy for the GOP?

I suppose in proposing answers to this, I should be a bit more systematic. In my first post, I laid out a working definition of "conservative," keeping in mind as I did so that "conservative" and "Republican" aren't necessarily the same thing. The next step now would be to isolate a working definition of what I think are the salient points of a Lincolnian political philosophy that might be relevant to 21st century.

And yes, as several commentators pointed out, this is a delicate matter in terms of historical context. I certainly don't want to suggest that Lincoln, a nineteenth century man, is always and everywhere relevant to 21st century problems. Also, I realize he was a politician, and in many ways not a terribly systematic thinker. His ideas could at times be inconsistent, and compromised by the political realities of his day. Still, I agree with those scholars--Allen Guelzo, Harry Jaffa, J. David Greenstone, etc.--who argue that he deserves to be taken seriously as a significant American thinker (even if I don't always agree with those scholars' conclusions on other matters).

This will require of course a great deal of simplification. I realize that I'm boiling complex issues down into, well, bullet points. You could likely write a book or three on each bullet point. But if Lincoln can truly be made useful in a modern political context, as I suggest, then his (often complex) ideas will have to be made intelligible with a few key points.

So, with those caveats in mind--here are five salient features of a Lincoln political philosophy that might be relevant to the 21st century :

• American Exceptionalism: Lincoln was the prophet of American exceptionalism, and repeatedly articulated a sense of America's uniqueness, and its mission as the "last best hope of earth" for a functioning democracy.


• Symbiotic relationship between the Constitution and the Declaration: Lincoln articulated some interesting and I think fairly unique ideas during the 1850s concerning the ways in which the Declaration of Independence, with its promise of equality, interacts with the Constitution's concern for law and order. This notion of a symbiotic relationship between the two, with both being equally important, is seminal to Lincoln's thought.


• Robust government involvement in economic growth: Lincoln's Whiggish foundation (as linkhorn points out) gave him an essentially activist, really very Hamiltonian perspective on how the government should actively promote what James Willard Hurst termed the "release of energy" in the economy.


• Robust pursuit of worthy military goals: Lincoln was I think a firm believer in pursuing military victory in war with vigor and even with a certain hardness. If the goal of a war was morally correct, he believed, then the means should be energetic in pursuit of victory.


• An ethic of distance as the foundation of the American national community: Lincoln believed in a sense of American community that eschewed sentiment in favor of a certain sense of emotional distance between members of the American public square. He knew that it was impossible to know what is in each others' hearts and souls, and he understood that motives are difficult to discern. He therefore preferred a community in which people kept a certain emotional distance from each other.