Lincoln Enough
Time, and history, will tell if Donald Trump is “better†or “greater†than Abraham Lincoln. But if he is re-empowered in 2020 to actually make great Republican principles work, Trump would be the Lincoln we deserve.
Michael S. Kochin
- December 6th, 2019
A recent poll, widely reported, found that a slight majority of self-described conservatives say Donald Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln. God only knows what such a response means, in an age when our mass media considers it their democratic duty to dox and fire ordinary people for their opinions, and when most historians regard it as unprofessional to teach American history in a way that leaves students with a favorable impression of America.
As a university teacher of American politics and American history, I wouldn’t say that Trump is a better president than Lincoln. More useful would be to ask how the principles Lincoln stood for and the policies the Republicans of his era favored can be adapted to the United States of today. After all, it is more than a century and a half after a Democrat and celebrity actor decided to sacrifice his life and career to star before a D.C. audience in actual assassination porn.
The Republican Party—from Lincoln to Ford—had a constitutional vision and a policy agenda. Republicans in Congress enacted pro-growth, pro-equality, domestic policy: civil rights for African-Americans, the Morrill Land Grant that subsidized higher education for the children of farmers and workers, fiat money, and the Homestead Act. Republicans enacted tariff and antitrust protection of American industries, and immigration restriction to protect American workers, so that “cheap goods†did not make “cheap men.â€
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