Lincoln the Centrist?

John Avlon of CNN is making the rounds promoting his new book entitled, "Lincoln and the Fight for Peace"

Which is not a surprise.  

After all, as Apocryphal Andy Warhol once predicted, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes for writing a book about Lincoln." But if Mr. Avlon was going to write a book about Lincoln, I do wish he would've checked in with me first.  After all, as a Springfield, Illinois resident, I live just a stone's throw from Lincoln's tomb.  Toss another stone in the opposite direction and you'll hit the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (not to be confused with the Lincoln Library, whis is our very fine municipal library and but not Lincoln's presidential library.) 

We have Lincoln tours.  Lincoln's original law office.  We have a professional Lincoln imitator, pictured above chatting with president Barack Obama who -- fun fact -- announced his run for the presidency in 2007 on the steps of the Old State Capitol here in Springfield.  The Old State Capitol is where Lincoln served as a legislator and  delivered his historic "House Divided" speech (to which John Avlon really should have paid closer attention.)  

The point is, we know Lincoln here.  His life and times are woven deeply into the identity of the town, which is why it's such a shame that Mr. Avlon didn't sit down with a few, local Lincoln stans before committing pen to paper.  Because had he done so he might have spared himself the embarrassment of, well, "distorting" Lincoln's legacy doesn't quite cover it.  A better description would be "warping the shit out of" Lincoln's legacy to suit his political agenda.

He and Lincoln Project founder Reed Galen held each other's hands and walked their listeners down an amazing, imaginary history of Abraham Lincoln, the Patient Centrist that was so vivid, if you closed your eyes, you would swear it was 2014 all over again.

Once again we hear about the terrible "tribalism" that has riven our country which was something that vexed Lincoln as well, but which he overcame in an entirely different way.  By being Centrist.  and Patient.  By offering compromise at every turn.

All of which is true.  Lincoln worked very hard to avoid conflict, right up the Very Bad Thing happened.  

The Very Bad Thing that Mr. Avlon and Mr Galen work very hard to heavily abridge so that they can move past the brutal realities of the Civil War and onto the much more pleasant subject of winning the peace by being generous and forgiving.  Because this fits the fairy tale they want to tell.  A fairy tale about Tribalism.  And Polarization.  And the Extremes on Both Sides being to blame for all the ruckus and disharmony.  And how modern leaders should use the example of a Benevolent Uniter like Lincoln to find their way back to the Commodious Center.

Except in the struggle between democracy and fascism in the United States, we're nowhere near the steps of the Appomattox Courthouse.  Hell, we're barely past the shelling of Fort Sumter.  The Republican party hasn't been beaten or broken,  Its leaders haven't been tried for treason or allowed to slip away into obscurity.  Its fanaticism hasn't finally been forced to surrender at the point of a bayoneted with its cities in rubble and its citizens starving.  

Quite the contrary.  The GOP is more proudly loud and stupid and racist and radical than ever.  Their strategy of conquering the courts, Jim Crow electoral tactics, building a voting base of reprogrammable meatheads and spending billions on a massive propaganda network to keep it all going continues to  pay monstrous dividends.  

If we're doing historical parallels, which is the point at which Lincoln was forced to recognize that there could be no compromise with single-minded fanatics.  When he was forced to turn his attention to the only solution to the problem of the Confederate "tribe" that remained open to him:  destroying their cities, annihilating their armies, starving their citizens and in every other means at his disposal forcing the confederates to unconditionally surrender.

And yet, it is always Lincoln's post-bellum generosity and passion for reconciliation that pundits reach for when they want to stem-wind another sermon about the Extremes on Both Sides.  So rather than pounding angry holes in my keyboard trying to rewrite that which I have already written, let me instead take you back...back...back...to six years ago with snippet from a thing I wrote this about another pundit who had similar uses for Honest Abe.  From David Brooks: Controlling The Future By Butchering The Past

...And yet, in Mr. Brooks' Both Siderist version of America history, the explicit causes of the Civil War and its aftermath hardly exist at all.  The are reduced to "divisions and disappointments" which "fall on both sides" and which seem to exist on some weird, parallel track that runs alongside the Lincoln Administration but barely intersect with it:

The speech is a great reconciling speech. The words recurring through it are “we” and “all.” “All thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it … Both parties deprecated war.”  

Except, no.  Because unlike Mr. Brooks, who it desperate to race right on past the cause and cost of the Civil War on his way to a Both Siderist sermonette, Mr. Lincoln knew exactly how he had finally arrived on that particular platform in March of 1865.

Remember the definition of ellipses from just up the way a little?  The "omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous"?

Compare Mr. Brooks amputated interpretation of the Second Inaugural -- 

“All thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it … Both parties deprecated war.”  

-- with Mr. Lincoln's words in their full and original form --

 ...all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to 'saving' the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to 'destroy' it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would 'make' war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would 'accept' war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

--  to see for yourself what Mr. Brooks' considers "superfluous".

That's right.  To serve his political agenda, Mr. Brooks has very deliberately omitted the entire context for one of the greatest speeches in American history:  the fact that there were two sides to the Civil War -- one which was dedicate to destroying the nation in order to preserve the institution of slavery, and another -- led by Abraham Lincoln -- which was determined not to let that happen.

And as to Mr. Brooks' claim that "Slavery, Lincoln says, was not a Southern institution, it was an American institution, weaving through our common history for 250 years."?   Well for fuck's sake, David, just read the very next god damn paragraph of the speech you are god damn quoting:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

In Mr. Brooks' Both Siderist version of America history, Lincoln is transformed into a disembodied specter who somehow just floats above all of this, hand-in-hand with Mr. David Brooks, as together they survey the sad and petty squabbles of the wretched Extremes on Both Sides, both in 1865 and 2017...

You see, on the subject of  peace and reconciliation, I am actually as one with the Republican president who is interred almost within shouting distance of my home. 

So much so that I borrowed Mr. Lincoln's words to coin this phrase more than a decade ago -- long before the Rise of Trump -- and it has only gotten more depressingly accurate since. 

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

And I believe more strongly than ever that this nation cannot endure, permanently half lobotomized, Fox News meatbags and half free.

I do not expect the nation to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

I, too, want my country at peace and reconciled with itself.

And I, too, no longer see any way to get us to that happy day other than the utter defeat of the party that threatens our democracy from within, and the trying of both the political and propaganda leaders of that party for treason.

No Half Measures