The Long Road Down
How the Party of Lincoln became the Party of Trump
by Professor John Kane
At some point in Donald J. Trump’s presidency, someone seems to have informed him that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. His surprise was betrayed in the way he relayed the fact to others: ‘Did you know Lincoln was a Republican? A lot of people don’t know that’. This supposedly novel intelligence was often imparted in the context of his claiming that he, Trump, had done more for Black people than anyone else ― ‘except possibly Lincoln’ (as time went by the ‘possibly’ became more strongly stressed to intimate doubt). The claim was preposterous, but not especially noted amidst the showman’s continuous torrent of hyperbolic self-acclamation.
The Lincolnian heritage was also embraced, though with contrary intent, by a group of current and former Republicans who formed a political action committee to produce sharply pointed TV ads attacking Trump and his allies. Their label, ‘The Lincoln Project’, intimated a hope for party reclamation, but it also raised an important historical question: how on earth did the party of Lincoln become, after 150 years, the party of Trump? To be more specific: how did a party founded in moral opposition to slavery and dedicated to defending the civil and political rights of free Black people become a haven for white supremacists with drastically diminished appeal among African-American voters; how did a party that shed patriotic blood defending national union and expected active central government to help develop America devolve into a party of states’ rights suspicious of, and indeed hostile to, central government; how did a party which, under Theodore Roosevelt, sought environmental preservation and the welfare of workers become the party of wilderness despoliation and harsh anti-unionism; how did a party that legislated for the capacity to tax under certain conditions turn into the party committed to cutting taxes under all conditions; how did a party that once regarded conservatism as quite compatible with abortion rights and family-planning turn into a ‘pro-life’ anti-abortionist party hoping eventually to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade case; and how did a party led by ‘Honest Abe’ fall under the domination of an obsessively habitual liar? Above all, how did the party that fought a bitter civil war to preserve the principle of democratic government ― a ‘fiery trial’ to save ‘the last best hope of earth’ ― become an anti-democratic party ready to overturn a presidential election to re-install a would-be ‘strong man’ with authoritarian inclinations?
There are, I believe, three main parts to the explanation of the great Republican reversal:
- the peculiar constitutional-institutional arrangement of American politics;
- the issue of race; and, within the parameters set by the first two,
- the blatant pursuit of political advantage whatever the cost in terms of principle.
I want to emphasise particularly the issue of race, because of the way it interweaves so consequentially with American institutions and party histories.
Broadly speaking, the reversal was accomplished within, and as a response to, long-term economic, social and political changes in the United States and parallel transformations within the opposing Democratic Party. Indeed, what we might term the ‘dance of the parties’ involved a certain switching of roles over time. Democrats after the Civil War were often portrayed by Republicans as the party of ‘treason’, crucially tied to the segregationist ‘Jim Crow’ South where Republicanism was synonymous (for white southerners) with Northern Yankee oppression. But the Democratic Party ultimately became, under pressure of Progressive persuasion and especially the Great Depression, the party of social welfare, workers’ rights and, eventually, civil rights for African-Americans. Meanwhile the Republican Party became an increasingly ‘conservative’-tending-to-reactionary party ever more firmly tied to big business and ‘dog-whistling’ racism. Conservative Republicans achieved political successes in the 1970s and 1980s that pushed Democrats away from their ‘liberal’ base and toward the right (now redefined as the ‘new centre’).
The Black educator Booker T. Washington, born a slave in 1856, published a famous autobiography in 1900 entitled Up from Slavery (Washington 2018), and it has often been observed that the road up from slavery for Black Americans generally has been long indeed, and as yet unterminated. And it is a sad fact that this long road up has been paralleled in somewhat systematic fashion by the long road down of the Republican Party, from high principle and moral purpose to the abandonment of all principle in the simple pursuit of power. Before tracing this road, however, I must set the scene by appraising the current crisis of the party ― a genuinely revelatory crisis ― after the most bizarre presidential term in United States history.
Excerpt from “The Long Road Down: How the Party of Lincoln became the Party of Trump” published in Social Alternatives, Vol. 40; №1. Republished with permission.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN KANE
John Kane is Professor in the School of Government and International Relations and Researcher in Griffith’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy at Griffith University, Australia.
John attained his PhD at the London School of Economics and and teaches in political theory, political leadership and US foreign policy.
He has published widely, been awarded numerous research grants, and five times been Visiting Professor to Yale University. He is the author of The Politics of Moral Capital (Cambridge UP) and Between Virtue and Power: The Persistent Moral Dilemma of US Foreign Policy (Yale UP). He is also co-author (with Haig Patapan) of The Democratic Leader: How Democracy Defines, Empowers and Limits its Leaders (Oxford UP).
