WHAT LINCOLN KNEW...

And what we can choose to remember

Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass/ Heritage Art/ artist unknown

Just as Roman society had already begun to crumble before the barbarians ever reached their gates, so America was on the path of dying empire before Donald Trump reached ours. So many sectors of American civilization - and so many of us, I’m afraid - had compromised our principles, our ethics, even our decency too often and too completely, for years. Tiny lies, tiny vulgarities on the part of individuals as well as institutions became cultural norms. Things that seemed perhaps like unimportant compromises with our own integrity, easy enough to gloss over, became features rather than glitches in how we did business, even inhabited our personal relationships. In the quantum field out of which this moment emerged, there’s no difference between a lying lover and a lying corporation.

Thus weakened morally, we became politically vulnerable. The problem wasn’t just that Trump prevailed; it’s that he found it to be so damn easy. He got to the gates and he broke them open. In ways tough to admit, it wasn’t that hard. He and his minions are raping and pillaging even as we speak, and they’ve only just gotten started. They won’t be done until every non-white person, woman, immigrant and non-Christian is put back in their place - you know, that place below, acquiescent, compliant, subservient, less vocal. The worst thing is, the people behind all this actually think that will be for the best. That’s how evil this phenomenon is.

The vision of the New Barbarians is everything the Founding vison of our country is not. Their efforts are a direct attack upon a society in which we are true to the idea that “All men are created equal.”

That sentence is not simply that we’ve decided to create a society in which all men are treated equally. It’s a statement that we will treat all men equally because we were created that way. To our Founders that meant everything, and it should mean everything to us. The sentence is a spiritual creed, not just a political agreement. And only a devotion to that creed will empower us to prevail against the barbaric forces at work in our modern politics.

Unless We the People reclaim for ourselves the radicalism of our Founding vision - that all men are endowed by our Creator with unalienable Rights, and governments are instituted to secure those rights - then everyone from Peter Thiel to Elon Musk to Russell Vought to Donald Trump and the rest of them will be successful at demolishing it. To them, those principles are just meaningless nonsense; it’s up to us whether they will be meaningless to us. It was so obvious when Terry Moran asked Donald Trump what the Declaration of Independence meant to him, the President responded, “Well, it means exactly what it says... it's a declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot." It was glaringly obvious he had never read it.

Now that we are where we are, what matters is not who Trump is but who we are. The Declaration of Independence is America’s mission statement, and what matters is whether you and I understand it. When enough of us reclaim its vision, deeply, in our hearts, then we will have the power to push back the barbarians. But not before. Why? Because that document is not just a statement of politics, it’s a statement of moral force. It transmits more than information; it transmits power. And we need that power to support us now. It’s what Martin Luther King, Jr. called “cosmic companionship.” Shouting about what the Constitution says, without claiming the emotional and spiritual power of the Declaration, ultimately gets us nowhere. Elected officials and legal experts shouting at the modern barbarians every time they trample on our Constitution, “You can’t do that here! It’s against the law!” is not enough to save us. The barbarians don’t care that they’re trampling on the Constitution. That’s exactly what they’re here to do.

The Founders’ task, as they saw it, was to create a government that would reflect divine universal law - not just British law. They referred to “Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” as having entitled us to our freedom, therefore our rights are not granted by the government. Governments are instituted to secure the rights already granted to us by Nature’s God. Government derives its just power from the consent of the governed, as expressed through representative electoral processes outlined in our Constitution. If and when government does not secure our rights, We the People have the right to alter or abolish it. The Constitution is politically brilliant; the Declaration is morally profound. The Declaration, like the Constitution written eleven years later, was radical in 1776 and it is radical today.

Abraham Lincoln did not expect to win a second term. With the Civil War dragging into its fourth year and almost half a million Americans already killed, he couldn’t blame Northern voters for having had enough. He expected a huge majority would agree with his opponent, General George McClellan, that it was time to make a deal with the South; why should their husbands, sons and brothersd have to die just because someone else owned slaves? If they wanted to go, went the argument, let them go. Negotiate an end to the war and we could start again as two neighboring countries, one slave- owning and one not.

Lincoln stood his ground however, with a platform calling for the South’s unconditional surrender and the abolition of slavery. He did so not only to preserve the union, but to stand by what he saw as the moral raison d’etre of the war: the principles of the Declaration of Independence. If you’ve never read his Second Inaugural Address or haven’t read it recently, do so now and it will rip you open.

To him, whether this country would abandon the principles of the Declaration was the crux of his generation’s political struggle. It was their struggle then, and it is ours now. To Lincoln, if all men are created equal, entitled by their Creator to the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, then slavery must not be allowed to exist. The Confederate states had no plans to contain the institution of slavery within their own borders, by the way; their plan was for a huge slave-owning empire that would stretch not only across this continent but would include large swaths of Latin America as well. For millions who had never owned or traded slaves - who had lost their own loved ones in this most hideous war - to then vote for Lincoln on the strength of that moral argument, remains a staggering testament to their greatness as well as to his.

My mother used to tell me, “Growing old is not for sissies.” And neither is saving a country. We cannot, and must not, allow the political rupture of our own time to devolve into a second Civil War. Yet we must stand up as bravely as our ancestors did - true nonviolent struggle takes courage too - if we’re to preserve the principles on which we purport to stand. We have never fully actualized those principles, but from Abolition to Women’s Suffrage to the Civil Rights movement, at times we have made great strides. It is the job of every generation to seek to “create a more perfect union.” In our time, unfortunately, we are literally slipping backwards. There are those among us, barbarians in business suits, who have no use for our Founding principles - they find them inconvenient to their purposes, mocking what they see to be their quaintness and inefficiency. It’s up to us whether or not we will join the barbarians, or care so little to stand up to them that they’ll continue over the next three years to march like Hitler through the Rhineland.

Our Founders didn’t underestimate the dangers that King George’s authoritarianism posed to their rights as free people; we shouldn’t underestimate the dangers that the new crowd of American authoritarians poses to ours. Our biggest mistake in the years leading up to this was a toxic form of complacency; our biggest mistake today is if we choose to be naive.

*NOTE:

For those of you wanting to delve deeper into our Founding principles, I’ll be leading a two day book club on Healing the Soul of America for paid subscribers.