gracchusdixit

Abraham Lincoln was arguably the greatest president in the history of the United States of America.  To be sure, there are those—historians, journalists, members of the general public—who might choose otherwise.  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, even Lyndon Baines Johnson would be formidable contenders for the honor.  But none of them can quite match Lincoln’s record of rhetorical grandeur, political heroism, and personal tragedy.  There is also the dreadful fact that Lincoln quite literally gave his life to preserve the union, murdered by a political assassin just days after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, effectively bringing the civil war over which Lincoln had presided to a victorious end.  It can fairly be said that no other American President has paid such a tragic price to achieve such a momentous purpose.

All the while Lincoln guided the nation through a savage war that pitted millions of Americans against one another in bitter and bloody conflict, he strove to achieve two noble purposes.  One was to end the brutal regime of chattel slavery.  The other was to preserve the union, after the sedition of the Confederacy had been snuffed out.  To fulfill the second purpose, Lincoln was prepared to be remarkably generous and conciliatory to those who had betrayed their country.  As he famously put it in his Second Inaugural Address:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

There are those today who accuse Lincoln of being too conciliatory toward the rebellious South, too willing to subordinate the moral imperative of ending slavery to the political calculus required to save the union.  This accusation is both unfair and flatly wrong.  There can be no doubt that Lincoln looked upon slavery as a moral abomination, which he was determined to stamp out, even as he strove to hold the nation together.  To Lincoln, ending slavery and preserving the union were as indivisible as the union itself.

Today, 155 years after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, the question is not whether he was too conciliatory, let alone politically craven.  The question is whether the union he fought so hard to preserve was worth saving in the first place.

We are a mere 15 days away from a presidential election that may well prove to be as consequential as the election of 1860, which, by installing Lincoln in the White House, led the slave-owners of the South to declare open rebellion against the country their forebears had fought to create.  

Now, as then, the populace is bitterly divided.   Now, as then, the legitimacy of political institutions is tottering on the brink.  Now, as then, the nation faces nothing less than an existential crisis.  Now, as then, to think that we can simply turn back the clock and return to “normal” when the final votes are cast, is folly.  Just as Lincoln’s election did not produce a return to normalcy, Donald Trump’s electoral defeat, if it comes, will not yield a return to normalcy, either.  The gun-toting, bible-thumping zealots who adore Trump are no less crazy than the slave-owning Confederates who turned their guns on Fort Sumter in 1861. 

Although the latest polls show Joe Biden with a significant national lead, they conceal the stark divisions that still separate one part of the country from another.  Biden may be leading in northern and coastal states like Connecticut and California, New York and New Jersey, but in a broad swath of states from Alabama to Arkansas, all of which which once belonged to the old Confederacy, Trump is running 30 points ahead.  It is as if there were two Americas, separated by a chasm as wide as the Grand Canyon.  It is as if the Civil War had never ended, had resolved nothing.

This lack of resolution is brutally apparent when it comes to the most fundamental political, social, and economic questions we face:  the freedom of women to control their own bodies, the right of all Americans to vote, the ability of every American to get decent health care, the separation of church and state, the toxic culture of “gun rights” and the violence it stokes, the desperate need to stave off catastrophic climate change, the survival of democracy itself.  On these and other, no less momentous questions, the two Americas simply cannot agree, and their disagreements are no less irreconcilable than they were a century and a half ago.

There are those who blame this divide on Donald Trump, and there is no doubt that he has made things worse than they might otherwise have been, had he not been elected.  But things were bad enough long before Trump arrived upon the scene.  He is not the cause, but rather the embodiment, of what divides us.  

There is no escaping the unpleasant reality that a large part of this country is prepared to support a psychotic, authoritarian gangster, not with cynical self-interest or weary resignation, but with total, frenzied fervor.  Look, really look, at the crowds who attend Trump’s rallies.  Listen, really listen, to their hoots and hollers.  Watch, really watch, their ecstatic faces as they stomp their feet and clap their hands at the heinous and hateful lies of the man they worship.

What do the rest of us have in common with such people?  What moral, cultural, or political purposes do we share?  They are to us, as we undoubtedly are to them, creatures from another planet, whose interests and inclinations, hopes and aspirations, are utterly alien.

Every American school child could once recite the noble words with which Abraham Lincoln’s began his most famous speech, the Gettysburg Address, delivered in 1863:

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.  Now, we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure…

It’s time to consider the possibility that we have failed the test Lincoln proclaimed, that the union he longed for, fought for, and died for, can no longer endure.  Perhaps it’s time to recognize that we are not one nation divided by conflicting interests, but rather, different nations whose interests can never be reconciled.  Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to go our separate ways.