One of the most prominent clichés that passes for wisdom among the GOP Establishment and conservative intellectual elite is that the Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln. But Donald Trump, as we are told ad nauseam, is doing his best to sever the electric cord that ties the Republican Party to Lincoln’s political principles. https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/07/party-lincoln-no/
Former U.S. Senator John Danforth wrote recently in the Washington Post that the Republican Party is “the party of Abraham Lincoln.” “Now comes Trump,” Danforth argued, “who is exactly what Republicans are not, who is exactly what we have opposed in our 160-year history.” Mona Charen, a contributor to National Review who now apparently enjoys echoing the Left, claims, “The Republican party under Donald Trump has regressed from the party of Lincoln to the party of Lee.”
The glaring problem with this overheated analysis is that it has been quite some time since the GOP was, in any discernable way, the party of Lincoln. And Trump had nothing whatsoever to do with it. In fact, Trump is trying to drag the party back kicking and screaming to its Lincolnian roots.
An obvious example of the modern GOP’s dismissal of Lincoln’s politics is the free trade absolutism it has embraced. While theoretically sound, in practice this slavish devotion to free trade has hollowed out the middle class and benefited hedge fund managers and other professional elites who stand unequally to gain from our knowledge-based economy.
Lincoln, by contrast, was for high protective tariffs throughout his career. For instance, after his election to Congress in 1847, Lincoln noted that the
abandonment of the protective policy by the American Government, must result in the increase of both useless labour, and idleness; and so, in proportion, must produce want and ruin among our people.
In his support of tariffs and other measures designed to help Americans citizens over those of other countries, Lincoln was well within the mainstream of the American political tradition. From Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 “Report on Manufactures,” which outlined the nation’s first industrial policy to support America’s burgeoning manufacturing sector, to Ronald Reagan’s imposition of a 100 percent tariff on certain Japanese electronics in 1987, tariffs have served as a traditional tool of American statecraft.
Lincoln understood that an American isn’t simply what the philosopher Roger Scruton has termed a homo economicus—an individual “who acts always to maximize his own utility.” Instead, Americans are members of families, churches, communities, and their nation, whose good includes but ultimately transcends economic considerations.
Lincoln also wouldn’t recognize the Republican Party’s foreign policy of the past few decades. Republicans are largely beholden to a neoconservative foreign policy whereby the United States spends its blood and treasure on making the rest of the world safe for democracy, while very often neglecting our own. In practice, this has translated into nation building abroad. To overstate for the sake of clarity, the question before GOP hawks is which countries we should invade next—not whether it is just to think in such terms in the first place.
Lincoln would have been appalled at such a foreign policy. In early 1852, he helped draft a resolution praising Lajos Kossuth and the Hungarian revolutionaries of 1848, which contained principles diametrically opposite of those the modern Republican Party has adopted.
While the resolution states the right of the people of Hungary to “throw off” their “existing form of government,” it makes it clear that “it is the duty of our government to neither foment, nor assist, such revolutions in other governments.” Yet Lincoln and the drafting committee did not see any probable violation of our “own cherished principles of non-intervention” should the United States be called upon to help fend off an intervention of any other foreign power into Hungary’s affairs, should prudence allow for such a response.