Written on Monday, February 10, 2014 by Calvin Freiburger
Over the next two months, Republican Party chapters across the country will be hosting their annual Lincoln Day dinners, reflecting on the pivotal leadership of the GOP’s first president and pledging to carry his principles into the future.
Guests will be regaled with speeches from party leaders, candidates, and grassroots activists. They’ll speak of Lincoln’s wisdom, Republicans’ fight to end slavery, and parallels between the Civil War and today’s political battles. They’ll congratulate each other for whatever gains their local party can claim. They’ll sing the praises of conservative principles. And they’ll put as optimistic a spin as possible on the elections to come.
But most speakers won’t address the subject in most desperate need of attention: how unworthy the modern-day Republican Party is to invoke Lincoln’s name.
Abraham Lincoln preserved the United States through the most harrowing crisis we had yet faced. He fought back political, judicial, and military attacks on the equal, unalienable rights of every American, understanding that the blight of slavery threatened not only black Americans, but also the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
In staking his political life on the proposition that the Founders’ values were worth preserving, that they would not become obsolete simply because future generations found them inconvenient—indeed, that this was when they would be most relevant, as “a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism”—Lincoln became, in effect, the first conservative.
How well is the Republican Party living up to that legacy these days?
Today’s slavery, abortion, has claimed over 56 million innocents since a Supreme Court ruling just as bankrupt as Dred Scott unleashed it. Yet most Republicans seem to, at best, treat the slaughter as just one of many equally weighty policy subjects, and at worst, seek to abandon the pro-life cause out of political cowardice.
For instance, party leaders in Minnesota folded like a cheap tent when liberals complained about a graphic comparing abortion to slavery that apeared on their Facebook page. The Wisconsin Senate’s Republican majority leader, Scott Fitzgerald, has repeatedly delayed the scheduling of pro-life bills that have the votes to pass. The National Republican Congressional Committee saw fit to donate to the congressional runs of openly pro-abortion candidates such as Richard Tisei and Carl DeMaio. Indeed, Democrats force on every judicial nominee the presumption that they must either openly endorse Roe v. Wade or at least respect its status as “precedent,” yet rarely do Republican senators force their colleagues to defend Roe’s unearned legitimacy.
Americans who escape prenatal execution grow up to find a government trying its hardest to prove that money is almost literally no object, to the detriment of economic and religious liberty alike. The president implements a burdensome healthcare regulation scheme the people never wanted with shockingly little regard for what the text Congress sent to his desk actually says, wreaking completely needless havoc in the lives of millions, and Republican leaders can’t stop bickering with the base long enough to work out a strategy to protect the country from it.
This week, the White House and its apologists descended so far into self-parody that they actually attempted to spin a drop of over two million jobs as a good thing, because, in Nancy Pelosi’s words, ObamaCare will “shift how people make a living and reach their aspirations”…at the expense of their fellow taxpayers.
In response, our leaders brainstorm “paths to prosperity” that would purportedly set things right if implemented, but display virtually no vision on how to push back media narratives that keep from actually standing a chance at enactment. They can, however inexplicably take their eye off the devastatingly potent case against ObamaCare to focus their attention on immigration legislation that is virtually guaranteed to give the party of ever-expanding, post-constitutional government a nigh-insurmountable influx of future voters. And that’s despite the fact that the public keeps telling them immigration “reform” isn’t one of their priorities; in fact, in Pew’s most recent survey, “dealing with illegal immigration” ranks a dismal sixteenth place, far behind economic healing and fiscal solvency. It even lost out to platitudes nobody takes any politicians seriously on, like “protecting the environment” and “reducing the influence of lobbyists.”
And while all this is going on nationally, heaven forbid they notice the thousands of other ways despotism flares up across the country, from small entrepreneurs facing fines and imprisonment for declining to participate in same-sex weddings to a Justice Department desperate to disenfranchise voters who enact the most benign of voter-ID laws and defaming them as racists trying to keep minorities from the polls. Those who vote Republican in hopes of finding protection from such tyranny can’t help but feel abandoned.
That’s not to say GOP leaders don’t do anything—they can, apparently, make grand displays of standing up to dime-store demagogues working for failing leftist news channels. MSNBC’s cabal of lunatic character assassins richly deserves public shaming, but would it kill Reince Priebus to muster half of the passion he found for Tweet-gate and direct it at the people actually controlling levers of government? Conservatives want—and the country needs—more than entertaining show fights against slow-moving, ultimately inconsequential targets.
Lincoln presided over a period where America’s very soul was at stake, and he spoke frankly about how the conflicts of his day transcended mere partisan one-upsmanship to direct ramifications for basic human decency. He bemoaned the “progress in degeneracy” that carved out exception after exception to the maxim that “all men are created equal.” “When it comes to this,” he wrote, “I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].”
To make Lincoln Days matter for more than just fundraising and hobnobbing, this is the spirit they need to adopt—sober, self-critical appraisal of just how grave the national situation is and what it will take to set things right. If the man Republicans honor at these dinners could do it through the bloodiest war in our history, then surely Republicans doing it in the face of an unscrupulous opposition party and a hostile press isn’t too much to expect.
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