The GOP -- Is Not the Party of Lincoln BY HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[soothsayer]

She’s always excellent.

Link to tweet

?s=21

A brief history lesson from @HC_Richardson

"Today’s Republican Party has traveled a long way from the party of Abraham Lincoln."

Today's GOP Is Not the Party of Lincoln
billmoyers.com

https://t.co/0UGRIchAnF?amp=1

Marcy Sacks
@msacks107
So many excellent lessons provided by Professor Richardson, but this one is among the very best for contextualizing where we are and from whence we came.
6:47 PM · Nov 15, 2020

Snip

As pressure grew for government to promote economic growth for ordinary Americans, the southern slaveholders worked to cement their power. They courted poor white voters, telling them that any attempt to regulate slavery was an effort to lift Black people over them. From their stronghold in the Senate, southern leaders stopped legislation to develop the country and instead pushed laws that spread slavery into the West. When northerners objected, southern leaders packed the Supreme Court and got it to agree that Congress could not stop the spread of southern slavery even across the entire nation. But while they insisted the federal government could not promote the economy for ordinary Americans, they demanded a sweeping federal slave code to protect slavery in the West.

Their system was best for the nation, they explained. Society was made up of a mass of workers, drudges who weren’t terribly smart, but were strong and loyal. They were the “mudsills” of society, akin to the wood hammered into the ground that supported the grand plantation homes above. Directed by their betters, these mudsills produced capital, which accumulated in the hands of the wealthy. There, it did far more good than if it were distributed among those who had produced it, because society’s leaders used their wealth to innovate and build the economy, doing what was best for the workers, who could not understand their own interests. The nation thrived.

To secure this system, though, it was imperative that the mudsills could not vote. If they could, workers would demand more of the wealth they produced. White southerners had enslaved their laborers, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond told his northern colleagues in 1858, but northerners had not, and they foolishly allowed them to vote. “If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than “an army with banners,” and could combine, where would you be?” Hammond demanded. “Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided… by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”

Men like Abraham Lincoln organized to overturn the idea that they were mindless workers, doomed to menial labor for life. In 1859, Lincoln articulated a new vision for the nation, putting ordinary men, rather than elite slaveholders, at the heart of national development.

[Dreampuff]

1. There was a party flip

And I wish I could remember the name of a book that actually talks about it. President Lincoln was more like a Democrat is today and when you hear of Southern Democrats, they were more comparable to the Tea Party.

[liberal N proud]

2. Party ideology of either party is opposite what they were in Lincoln's time

[Laelth]

3. Yes. If you have watched "Downton Abbey," you have seen this system in action.

It is both beautiful and ugly in many ways, but it is essential to understanding the United States—two, competing economic visions of what the nation could (or should) be. Personally, I am glad that the North won, in the long run, but the war isn’t really over yet, as has been proven by election after election. Cheap, uneducated, and poorly-protected labor vs. high-paid, specialized, enriched, and empowered labor. That is the essential question that defines the United States. The battle rages on.



-Laelth