Standing Up for Abe Lincoln

I generally approve of Jon Stewart.  Among many reasons: he brings top opposition guests onto his show and argues with them respectfully, hearkening back to the style of William F. Buckley, on Firing Line… only punctuated with a little elevated potty humor. Stewart's mostly-liberal audience follows his lead and is generally gracious to major Republican officials or authors… who flock to The Daily Show in order to hawk their books.  Which apparently do gain sales boosts, because Stewart's viewers are open-minded and curious.  (Otherwise, those Republican authors would stop coming.)

In fact, Stewart has more top opposing guests on his one show than the entire Fox News network. (If you subtract the "adult in the room" at FN -- Bill O'Reilly -- FN would score zero, most months.)

Hence, I wan't too surprised when Stewart invited Judge Andrew Napolitano to convey his recent tirade - a real hit on Fox - against Abraham Lincoln. It's one of the most spectacularly deceitful and perniciously vile rants we have seen in an era rife with vile rants, but on the Daily Show Napolitano was allowed to argue his point with Jon Stewart. Then guest historians (in a faux game show called "The Weakest Lincoln") shot down Napolitano's purported "facts" amid a tenor of friendly humor. The judge chuckled amiably. Sure. Fine.  I guess.

Still, I was drawn to recall something I read just last November, referring to how the angry white males of the New Confederacy are now dumping all their former heroes, like Adam Smith, whose version of open-fair-flat capitalism is no longer suited to the right's narrative… and the leader that their parents loved above all others:

"How ironic, for this coincides with the passing of the Greatest Generation -- men and women who fought down the curse of Hitlerism, who overcame the First Great Depression, who embraced the plan of Marshall, Truman, Acheson and Eisenhower to contain communism peacefully until its fever broke… without nuclear annihilation. All so that their unique nation might live.

"A generation that created the mighty American middle class, amid a burst of entrepreneurial productivity so fantastic that their children could afford to take on ancient evils that all others had taken for granted, like racism, sexism and environmental blindness.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled in those mighty causes shared one trait more common than any other.  The Greatest Generation adored Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- once compared lovingly and in all ways to Lincoln -- but who now one third of our fellow citizens have been talked into equating with Satan Incarnate.

"How long until the same thing is done to Honest Abe?"

Okay, I didn't just read that, last November… I wrote it, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.  Indeed, that posting was one of my best and far more worthy of your attention than this little growl.  But it came to mind as Andrew Napolitano's hateful slander began spewing across the Rupert-verse…. crashing upon the shore of The Daily Show. This spiteful revisionist attack upon Lincoln.

== The essence that Jon Stewart misses ==

 Stewart had dealt with some of Napolitano's incantations in an earlier show. And mind you, there was time to only deal with a few of Napolitano's "inventive" interpretations of history. Like the fabrication that slavery was "on its way out" in America by 1860 when, in fact, every historical analysis shows it to have been fantastically profitable for the top 0.1% plantation owners -- though an economic disaster for poor whites.  Indeed, the total value of southern exports of cotton and tobacco exceeded ALL northern industrial exports at the time.  His screed is based on that outright lie.

Alas, many other falsehoods were left unanswered.  For example, Napolitano asserted the southern states' top grievance was largely about tariffs.  A howler that slides past because half-educated folks vaguely recall that John C. Calhoun had threatened secession around 1830 over tariffs.  But a closer look shows that the 1830s levels were rescinded to appease the South.  Soon the South took over the federal government for three decades!  By 1860, tariffs were at their lowest rate in half a century.  In other words, the judge just keeps those bald-faced lies a-coming.

Of the "grievances" that filled the secession declarations, there is no  mention of "tariffs" or "states rights" even once, though "slavery" is praised in glowing terms in the S. Carolina document, thirty or forty times. The notion that such people would simply have let Lincoln "buy" the slaves' freedom isn't just laughable… it is functionally insane.

In fact, the Civil War did not start with the firing on Fort Sumter.  It began in 1852 with the passage - and brutal enforcement - of the Fugitive Slave Act, which led to invasion and outright raids of northern states by squadrons of irregular southern cavalry, committing outrages and depredations from Illinois to Pennsylvania, supported first by southern-appointed U.S. Marshals and later - when locals began resisting - by federal troops.  These slave-catcher raids, smashing into homes, terrorizing neighbors and dragging off friends you knew since childhood, were the prime provocation that radicalized northerners into re-starting their dormant militias. It is what drove many of them to support Lincoln.

Read more about this!  Napolitano rages at Lincoln for continuing to let US Marshals catch and return a few slaves after the Civil War began.  But note these were all along border states like Kentucky, that he was desperate not to rile up and to keep in the Union -- touch and go in the first two years.  That may have been iffy realpolitik, but it does not make Lincoln a "kettle" next to the Confederacy's volcanically evil coal.

== The miscalculation ==

All right, all of that does not matter. What matters is that this time, Jon Stewart deeply miscalculated. He thinks he put Napolitano in his place, amid general hilarity and joviality, by showing some college professors refuting his "facts."  But watch the clip and look at the judge's face!  His smile.

He is winning.  Because he is not playing to Stewart's Daily Show audience. And he is not doing this to convince a majority of Americans.  Certainly not those who would listen to a college professor!

Napolitano is part of the Murdochian campaign to keep just 25% of the U.S. public riled up in frothing fury. A New Confederacy that's so far around the bend they'll help tear down every consensus effort and success of the American republic since FDR… and even since Lincoln.  So stoked on hatred of "government" that they sincerely want to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people SHALL perish from the Earth."

Older Republican icons are now toxic. Dwight Eisenhower is assailed as a lackey of FDR. Richard Nixon is called a "liberal"  … (compared to today's GOP)... and Ronald Reagan is barely mentioned, so soft, progressive and "green" he now seems, by comparison. Confronted with the pro-competition positions of Adam Smith -- warning against oligarchy -- rightist shills now dismiss Smith as "archaic."

(See "Liberals Should Reclaim Adam Smith: The 'First Liberal'!"

Should we be shocked that this radicalization now extends to Abe Lincoln? The Sumter shots of  re-ignited Civil War have been landing for more than a decade in the America that pays the taxes, invents, creates wealth and forges the future. Like our forebears, we who are of cooler blood, steadier emotion and scientific-mindedness have been slow to realize the fiery heat of this assault.  But we're not lesser men and women than those blue legions who finally stood up when pushed too far.

I said it much better here.  If we must, we'll rouse and -- peacefully, with malice toward none and charity for all, but with the firmness of purpose to do the right, as God allows us to see the right -- we'll struggle for our Union. So that the great American Experiment may go on.

== Addendum: answering The Daily Show! ==

Let me just grab this opportunity… so long as a junior blog reader on Jon Stewart's staff is reading this… Tuesday evening on The Daily Show, author Paul Taylor discussed the millennial generation and his book The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown.  In discussion with Jon Stewart, Prof. Taylor said that the clade following the millennials… encompassing those born after 2000… does not yet have a name.  Um, well… may I weigh in.

Way back in 1989, in my novel EARTH, I portrayed folks in the 2030s referring to this generation as “blackjacks”… because they were the first ones born in Century Twenty-One.

Blackjack? Twenty-one? Get it? 

 Cool, eh?  Oh… never mind…

150 years after Lincoln at Gettysburg… Can we maintain our resolve? Our Union?

Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of Harvard University, is a historian and author of “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.” In her recent article - 150 Years after the Gettysburg Address, Is government by the people in trouble? - Dr. Faust offers an eloquent and quite moving exploration of the context in which Abraham Lincoln transformed his earlier "hopeful" rhetoric into the more hardened sense of passion that spoke to his contemporaries' aching hearts about "dedication" and "resolve" -- a determination that something more must come out of all their shared sacrifice than mere preservation of a national union.

Seared by fire and blood, the newly emerging version of the United States of America would have to be something finer. In the spirit of a "new birth of freedom," it must forever aspire to be better, then better still.

That sense of resolution is currently at stake, as we confront the 150th anniversary of Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address -- widely considered to be the most impactful speech -- (certainly on a per-word basis) -- in the last several centuries. Greatly noted and long remembered, it has been compared by some (including myself) to the inspiring "funeral oration" of the great Athenian leader, Pericles. (As conveyed to us by Thucydides.)

Only with this vital difference.  Both men died before completing their tasks.  But, unlike those who followed Pericles, we appear to have been ready, after Lincoln, to forge ahead in victory and determination. His words, burning in our hearts, continued making a difference at crucial moments for six succeeding generations, so that the Great Experiment thrived and survived every intervening crisis.

Across the succeeding four score and seventy years, each of those generations found itself disturbed, provoked, challenged not only by foreign dangers, domestic ructions or tsunamis of both immigration and seismic technological change, but also by torments of conscience, as each generational wave gradually matured enough to recognize what its parents could not…

… such as the litany of crimes that had served as bloody mortar, sealing the nation's foundation in a gritty blend of both hope and sin.  Or the waste of human potential that (across more than 6000 years) had dogged and hampered every society that ever pre-judged vast numbers of distinct individuals, based on accidents of birth or gender, class or race.  Or how to deal with the alluring drug of empire, when Pax Americana faced the same temptations that turned earlier great powers into tyrants...

...a dilemma that we handled - if not perfectly - then less-horribly than any other nation that was ever so-tempted.  In part because of the moral ember that Abraham Lincoln sealed into our hearts, smoldering there to remind us that democracy and wealth and power and even freedom become meaningless, unless they accompany a fierce ambition. To aspire. To become better. Together.

That is my brief rumination upon this 150 year-old epochal masterpiece of sadness and solace, of courage and resolve, of dedication to our common project, our shared experiment, our unfinished work called America.

== Oh, but it is always in danger ==

Only there is more… there is always much, much more.  Such as how Lincoln's Gettysburg Address relates to this time. More than ever, it is pertinent to our present set of crises.

For, now we Americans are engaged in a new phase of civil war.  Not yet violent to any significant degree and we can pray to almighty providence that things will stay that way. But there is no question that forces are at work upon this continent, testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived, can long endure.

Look at the political map of our bitter, partisan divide, and just try telling yourself that it's not the very same struggle. Not over slavery or freedom or states' rights, which -- for all their importance -- were surface matters of dispute, symptoms of a fissure that plunges deeper than even those great matters. So deep, because America and Americans seem divided by differing, incompatible dreams.

One side of our national character hungers for change and tomorrow. To treat the future - the range of possible futures -- as ambition-attracting terra incognita, across which our children will explore and stride, better than we are in every way, even if that means repudiating many of our now-unclear assumptions and errors! Preparing those much-better generations for a boundless future is our dedicated proposition. Our mission.

But there is an opposing passion -- the temptation to wallow in nostalgia, romanticism, sanctimony, authority and the comforting rigidity-of-caste that dominated nearly every other civilization, across 6000 years.  It was called feudalism and humanity's greatest heroes fought to liberate us from that beastly, limiting and dismally stupid way of life.

Those who would restore the feudal yoke have always been with us, gathering forces, conniving, aiming persuasive dogma-incantations at both extremes of the vile "left-right political axis." These would-be lords (whether aristocrats or commissars) are spurred by deeply human impulses, arising largely out of male cojones. Impulses that whisper - "You could be a lord, build harems, dominate. Your wealth and power were all self-earned! They arose from inherent superiority! Never imagine that mere luck might have played a role. Or the coordinated creativity of a great nation, or the brilliance of a whole people and civilization. You owe nothing back. The sheep owe you everything."

Boringly predictable, heard in every ancient palace, this rationalization propels ingrate-lords who call themselves "job-creators" while creating few jobs, except for the propagandists that they hire en masse to rail against Abraham Lincoln's high aspiration. Or against scientists, teachers, professors, civil servants, journalists, economists, skilled laborers, law professionals, diplomats, medical doctors -- every profession of ambitious, forward-looking knowledge and skill.

But one core thing is under attack, more than any other. That is the very idea of shared endeavor, of joint action, of common projects that are mediated-by and consensus-chosen through the process of politics that we call "government"… this very idea is denounced as anathema, as repulsive, as inherently evil.

How far has this mania gone? So far that even members of the United States military officer corps  are experiencing real fear for the republic that they love. To which they dedicated their full measure of devotion.

== The passing generation of heroes ==

As happened in 1861, a major fraction of our countrymen have been talked into suckling nostalgic future-rejection and caste-romanticism. Enraged, they'll fight for New Confederacy lords whose "plantations" now span Wall Street, cyberspace and ten million secret accounts in foreign private-banking havens.

How ironic, for this coincides with the passing of the Greatest Generation -- men and women who fought down the curse of Hitlerism, who overcame the First Great Depression, who embraced the plan of Marshall, Truman, Acheson and Eisenhower to contain communism peacefully until its fever broke… without nuclear annihilation. All so that their unique nation might live.

A generation that created the mighty American middle class, amid a burst of entrepreneurial productivity so fantastic that their children could afford to take on ancient evils that all others had taken for granted, like racism, sexism and environmental blindness.  The brave men, living and dead, who struggled in those mighty causes shared one trait more common than any other.  The Greatest Generation adored Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- once compared lovingly and in all ways to Lincoln -- but who now one third of our fellow citizens have been talked into equating with Satan Incarnate.

How long until the same thing is done to Honest Abe?

This ongoing struggle is not (despite propaganda) about 'left-versus-right.'  Not when entrepreneurship, small business, federal fiscal responsibility and the middle class always do far better under democrats than under the Republican Party. We could fill page after page with clear evidence that the father of capitalism and the "First Liberal" -- Adam Smith -- would today be a democrat.

No.  When the rhetoric has devolved into a universal and blanket spite toward all government, in principle, and when the greatest sin  -- as perceived by one third of our fellow citizens -- is to even speak of compromise, negotiation, deliberation or an agile freedom from constraining dogma, then we have come full circle.

== For we, the living… ==

One hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln urged our predecessors to advance the unfinished work which the heroes of Gettysburg so nobly advanced, we should read his words again, letting them roll in our heads and off our tongues. And then we must rise to our feet, in similar, steely resolve that the epochal achievements of those who came before us shall not have been in vain.

Oh, this phase of the American Civil War will end as the others did, with victory for Union and moderation and freedom, plus continuation of our ambition to forge ahead.  Mostly as individuals and families and self-formed teams…

...but also with great projects that we choose by "governmental" processes that -- even when filthy-political -- still often launch us forward.  To conquer polio and build internets. To educate one and all. To create the world's finest universities. To span the continent with highways and dams and electricity… then to preserve much of the rest for future generations. To probe ahead, with the tools of science, for mistakes to catch and solve in the nick of time. To keep the world's longest and greatest peace. To step onto the surface of the Moon.  To aim for the stars.

But first, it will take resolve -- stopping those who would end the Experiment amid dogma and rage. We intend to welcome them back, with charity for all, when this latest fever breaks!  Abe Lincoln showed us how.

But till then, it must simply be stopped.  The oligarchy-financed attempted putsch. And the nostalgic-romantic lunacy that makes so many citizens of a great and free republic screech their hateful vow --

-- that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall perish from the earth.