Has anyone who makes the “Lincoln was a Republican, and thus the republicans today are somehow more tolerant, less racist and better people than the democrats” argument actually learned about his politics?
Did you know he corresponded and was on friendly terms with Karl Marx? That he championed the rights of labor and workers over businesses? Does this sound republican to you?
Like Marx, he believed, and I quote “things ought to belong to those whose labor has produced them” – the means of production and consequent wealth, in Marxist terms.
His inaugural address didn’t talk about tax cuts, or closed borders, or trade wars. It talked about labor and capital. “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”
In other words, Lincoln was unambiguously a socialist. Does today’s republican party lay claim to that?
It is sad indeed for America that the Democratic party is fighting a civil war between moderates and radical progressives, and the moderates aren’t winning, while the republican party, which would ordinarily get my vote, has destroyed its credibility through its enthusiastic embrace of populist demagoguery, insensible policy on trade, taxation, gun rights and health care, while playing defense for a confused and incoherent foreign policy which alienates friends, empowers enemies, and has simply weakened America.
Just because the man who freed the slaves was a republican in the 1860s, doesnt mean that the republicans of today share anything more with him than a name.