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      Lincoln and the fight for peace: John Avlon on a president in the shadow of new war

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      InterviewLincoln and the fight for peace: John Avlon on a president in the shadow of new warMartin Pengelly The CNN analyst says the 16th president’s example can guide America through dark times – at home as well as abroadJohn Avlon has published a book about Abraham Lincoln and peace in a time of war. He sees the irony, of course.Why Abraham Lincoln’s meetings with Black Americans matterRead more“I’d like to think that sometimes I can look around corners,” says the CNN political analyst, a former editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast. “But I didn’t anticipate that Putin would invade Ukraine opposite the book.“But there is a foreign policy dimension to the book that is probably unexpected.”In Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, Avlon offers both narrative and analytical history. He retells and examines the end of the American civil war, Lincoln’s plans for reuniting his country, his assassination and how in the former slaveholding states Reconstruction was defeated and racism enshrined in law.He also considers how Lincoln’s ideas about reconciliation and rebuilding lived on, ultimately to influence the rebuilding of Germany and Japan after the second world war, and how the 16th president’s politics of “the golden rule” – treat others as you would have them treat you – offers a model for solving division at home and abroad.More than 15,000 books have been written about Lincoln, but Avlon’s arrives in an America still subject to the attentions of Donald Trump, while from Russia Vladimir Putin pitches Ukraine into war and the world into nuclear dread.“When people pick up a book about Abraham Lincoln now,” Avlon says, “I think the flow-through is [about how] we belatedly realised the dangers of taking democracy for granted, of embracing or encouraging these tribal divides, which can wreak havoc.“So, too, there’s a real danger at taking for granted the liberal democratic order that has preserved a high degree of peace and prosperity in Europe over the past 75 years.“… There are moments where we abruptly remember that defending democracy at home and abroad is a cause that can be as heroic as winning it in the first place, and no less urgent.“It gets back to, ‘Let us have faith that that right makes might’” – a key line from Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860 – “and the flip side of that is what’s being tested [by Russia]. There are people in the world who believe that might makes right.”‘Despotism taken pure’Lincoln said a famous thing about Russia in a letter in 1855, five years before his election as president.“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” he wrote to a friend, Joshua Speed. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal’. We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes’. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics’.“When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”Other than that there isn’t much to go on, Russia-wise. But as Avlon points out, Lincoln was writing not just about the curse of slavery but about a domestic political threat: the Know Nothings, a nativist-populist party.The link between the Know Nothings and the Republican party of Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene has been made before, including by Avlon himself.“It’s obviously safe to say that Lincoln wouldn’t recognise today’s Republican party. His Republican party was the modern progressive party of its time, it was a big tent party, dedicated to overturning slavery.“I think, as you are trying to root Lincoln in the context of contemporary politics, you definitely need to go beneath the party label. And the fact that the Republican party now finds its base among the states of the former Confederacy is a clue … The labels may change but the song remains the same, to a distressing extent.“I was struck by what [Ulysses S] Grant said in 1875. And I checked that quote three times, because it seemed too on the nose: ‘If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.’”‘Our nation is not evenly divided’Many observers think a second American civil war is possible, along fault lines widened by a white supremacist far right which may see Putin and Putinism as a model for negating demographic change. Avlon, whose book has been well received in the political centre and on the never-Trump right, does not think civil war is imminent.“I thought Jamelle Bouie made a great point in a column a few weeks ago,” he says, “where he said, ‘Look, we don’t have structural issues like slavery.’“I do think that the current trend of polarisation, where politics becomes a matter of identity and the incentive structures move our politicians towards the extremes, rather than finding ways to work and reason together, is incredibly dangerous.“But first of all, if you look at the numbers, our nation is not evenly divided. We’re not a 50-50 nation on most issues. We’re 70-30 nation and many issues, whether it’s gay marriage, marijuana, [which] run through the country [with 70% support].“The section that believes the big lie [that Trump’s defeat was caused by voter fraud], they’re very loud. But they’re 30%, a super-majority of the Republican party. We often forget that a plurality of Americans are self-identified independents.‘What it means to be an American’: Abraham Lincoln and a nation dividedRead more“That does not diminish the danger to democracy when one party buys into a self-evident lie. Or when around a quarter of the country refuses to get vaccinated during a pandemic.“But you have to have faith in American democracy, when you look at history, because we have been through far worse before. Every generation faces great challenges. And if you’re overwhelmed by them, or pessimistic … that will not help solve them. You know, difficulty is the excuse that history never accepts.”Histories like his, Avlon says, can help readers “draw on the past to confront problems and then aim towards a better future”. His book aims “in part to give us perspective on our own problems. We’ve been through worse. We’ll get through this.“We need to be aware it’s dangerous to play with these tribal divisions for short-term political gain. And that we have an obligation to form the broadest coalition possible to defend democracy and our deepest values, which we forget sometimes.“Rooting things in the second founding and Lincoln, I think, can be clarifying and can help build that big tent again.”
      Lincoln and the Fight for Peace is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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      Top 10 books about US presidents | Claude A Clegg III

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      Top 10 books about US presidentsFrom the anguish of Lincoln to the showbiz of Reagan and Obama’s introspection, these books show the power and helplessness of America’s commanders-in-chief The US presidency was supposed to be something different, something novel, compared with the fossilised monarchical rule that it supplanted after the American revolution. Born of Enlightenment theory, settler colonialism and 18th-century warfare, the US constitution gave the chief executive primarily an enforcement role, with the authority to lead armed forces in the event of foreign encroachment or domestic unrest but stripped of the capacity to legislate or issue judicial decisions. The architects of the new republic meant for the president to preside over a citizenry well-endowed with rights, not to rule over cowed subjects.Chief executives from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan have been sorely tested by both the responsibilities and the limitations of the country’s highest, loneliest office. Through civil war, economic catastrophes, foreign misadventures, social upheavals and plagues, the presidency has endured, but it – and the 45 men who have occupied the job – has been moulded and often humbled by the promise and perils of the office.Is the US presidency – indeed, American democracy – equal to the dire challenges of the 21st century? One could certainly argue that it isn’t, based on the ongoing bungling of the Covid-19 response, the horrifying (and presidentially inspired) insurrection of 6 January 2021 and the glacially slow and fickle efforts to address everything from climate change to widening social inequality. If the founding fathers meant to circumscribe the power of the presidency out of a well-founded fear of kingly abuses, then they would surely comprehend the creeping threat that authoritarianism and political extremism present to the US system of government today. Nevertheless, they probably could not have guessed that the hard lessons that they had learned about the fragility of democracy would be so fiercely resisted or blithely ignored more than two centuries after they beseeched a patrician general from the Virginia countryside to preside over their fledgling experiment in government by the people.Of the many works that I have found useful in thinking about the history of the US presidency and for writing my newest book, The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama, these 10 have been among the most helpful. They are a mix of biographies, memoirs and reportage which, taken together, represent some of the best writings by and about the small group of powerful people who have occupied the White House.1. Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge by Erica Armstrong Dunbar (2017)Dunbar’s important book is less a biography of George Washington, Martha Washington, or Ona Judge, the runaway enslaved woman whom the first couple made such extraordinary efforts to recapture, than a look into the power and privilege of a slaveholding elite forcing its way through a new republic rhetorically committed to liberty. The relentless pursuit of Judge by the Washingtons after her bold flight from the new US capital in Philadelphia is expertly told by Dunbar.2. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (2008)This history of overlapping, intertwined families vivifies the world around Thomas Jefferson, the third US president, while skilfully making more legible the travails and aspirations of the enslaved people on his storied estate at Monticello. The decades-long relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of the Black women he owned and who bore several of his children, occupies the core of the book, but Gordon-Reed manages to craft a complicated and often contradictory history that extends far beyond the tangle of race, gender, and status that marked the Jeffersons and the Hemingses’ commingled journey through US history.3. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (2005)This book follows the intersecting biographical tributaries of the powerful, ambitious men whom Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s 16th president, was able to steer toward the rushing river of his own turbulent civil war presidency. Lincoln as political strategist and savvy tactician is the frame that Goodwin points up most dramatically. But the book also succeeds at conveying Lincoln as a beleaguered and empathic head of state whose mettle is tried time and again by those around him and news from the battlefield.4. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant (1885-1886)Rightly considered by many historians and literary critics as among the best of presidential autobiographies, this book was completed a generation after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox as Grant succumbed to a slow strangulation by throat cancer in the 1880s. The memoirs provide a vantage point on the nation’s bloodiest and most defining conflict that only a soldier elemental to the war and its aftermath could offer.5. Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris (2001)As the best biographical volume on America’s 26th president, Theodore Roosevelt, Morris’s book draws bold-coloured portraits of outsized historical figures, with equally knowing shades of nuance and frailty. Morris has the contextual eye of the historian and sets scenes that are alive and convincing. He also conveys mood and meaning as well as any novelist.6. Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 by William Leuchtenburg (1963)Dated, frayed, and surpassed by newer research and more eloquent storytellers, Leuchtenburg’s volume on the first two presidential terms of Franklin Roosevelt still stands the test of time as a scholarly, well-researched, and jargon-free narration of arguably the most consequential presidency of the 20th century. It is the tale of the rise of the liberal welfare state against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the gathering clouds of world war. Leuchtenburg tells the story well and sets the standard for future researchers.7. The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White (1961)White’s fascinating chronicle of the 1960 presidential race is the starting point of quality, book-length journalistic coverage of modern American politics. Writing in the moment, White had an eye for discerning the essential character of men such as John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon who sought the country’s highest office, even as the media ecosystem of his day made such discernment more difficult to achieve.8. Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years by Haynes Johnson (1991)Johnson captures the zeitgeist of the 1980s by juxtaposing the countervailing forces of American optimism – or the desperate need of many Americans to again believe in their scandal-wracked government – against the greed, corruption, militarism and debt that threatened to unmask the soothing myths of American exceptionalism. At the centre of Johnson’s story is a self-made man, an actor by training and temperament who through force of will, theatrics – and a good dose of luck – led the country through domestic and external perils whose ramifications are still being felt today.Top 10 books about the Roman empire | Greg WoolfRead more9. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (1995)Of Obama’s autobiographical writings, this one provides the best understanding of his origins and burgeoning sense of self. His early and more frank ruminations on race are present here, and the book is not encumbered by the exigencies of political campaigning. At once a memoir, travelogue and deeply introspec­tive meditation, it is a fluent self-study of his efforts to reconcile himself with his eclectic lineage and to discover his place and pur­pose in the world.10. Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin (2010)The essential volume on the 2008 presidential primaries and general election. Heilemann and Halperin had generous access to many of the historical players – including Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin – and their staffs. It is a fast-paced, even breathless read, and anyone who paid even casual attention at the time to the historic events chronicled here will recognise its richly drawn characters, plotlines and twists of fate.
      The Black President: Hope and Fury in the Age of Obama by Claude A Clegg III is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. To help the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from the Guardian bookshop. Delivery charges may apply.
      TopicsHistory booksTop 10sPolitics booksUS politicsAbraham LincolnFranklin D RooseveltJohn F KennedyRichard NixonfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Republican school bill mocked for claim Frederick Douglass debated Lincoln

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      Republican school bill mocked for claim Frederick Douglass debated LincolnVirginia bill banning teaching of ‘divisive concepts’ confused black civil rights campaigner with white senator Stephen Douglas A Republican bill to ban the teaching of “divisive concepts” in schools in Virginia ran into ridicule when among historical events deemed suitable for study, it described a nonexistent debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.David Blight on Frederick Douglass: ‘I call him beautifully human’Read moreLincoln did engage in a series of historic debates hinged on the issue of slavery, in the Illinois Senate campaign of 1858. But he did so against Stephen Douglas, a senator who had ties to slavery – not against Frederick Douglass, the great campaigner for the abolition of slavery who was once enslaved himself.The Virginia bill was sponsored by Wren Williams, a freshman Republican sent to the state capital, Richmond, in a tumultuous November election.Identifying “divisive concepts” including racism and sexism, the bill demanded the teaching of “the fundamental moral, political and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government”.In part, this was to be achieved with a focus on “founding documents” including “the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Federalist Papers, including Essays 10 and 51, excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and the writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States”.The teaching of history has become a divisive concept in states across the US, as rightwing activists have spread alarm about the teaching of race issues. In November, the winning candidate for governor in Virginia, the Republican Glenn Youngkin, made it a wedge issue in his win over the Democrat, Terry McAuliffe.Youngkin successfully seized upon critical race theory, an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society – but which is not taught in Virginia schools.Why Frederick Douglass’s struggle for justice is relevant in the Trump era | Ibram X KendiRead moreNor, it turned out, will Williams’s bill be enforced in Virginia courts. As the Washington Post reported, “by Friday morning, Frederick Douglass was trending on Twitter, and the bill had been withdrawn”.Online, ridicule was swift. “New rule,” wrote Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor. “If you don’t know the difference between Frederick Douglass and Stephen Douglas, you don’t get to tell anyone else what to teach.”Many were also happy to point out that Douglass has caused embarrassment for Republicans before. In 2017, Donald Trump at least gave the impression he thought the great campaigner was alive.“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognised more and more, I notice,” the former president said.On Friday, Sidney Blumenthal, a Guardian contributor and Lincoln biographer, said: “Lincoln did not debate Frederick Douglass. Historians may search for the video, but they will not find it.”Blumenthal also pointed out that Lincoln and Douglass did meet three times when Lincoln was president, from 1861 to 1865 and through a civil war that ended with slavery abolished.How did Republicans turn critical race theory into a winning electoral issue?Read moreTheir conversations included a discussion about inequality in pay between Black and white soldiers, upon which Lincoln ultimately acted, and Confederate abuse of Black prisoners. There was also a famous meeting after Lincoln’s second inauguration, in 1865, when Lincoln greeted Douglas at the White House as a friend.Blumenthal also offered a way in which students in Virginia and elsewhere might use Douglass’s life and work to examine divisions today.Speaking a day after two centrist Democratic senators sank Joe Biden’s push for voting rights reform, Blumenthal said: “Frederick Douglass’s great cause became that of voting rights.“If there is any debate that is going on now, it is not between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. It is between Frederick Douglass and all the Republican senators who refuse to support voting rights – and Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema too.”TopicsBooksFrederick DouglassAbraham LincolnAmerican civil warHistory booksVirginiaUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Trump’s allies think they can defy the Capitol attack panel. History suggests otherwise | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Trump’s allies think they can defy the Capitol attack panel. History suggests otherwiseSidney BlumenthalIn the infancy of the Confederacy, Congress formed a committee to investigate – and everyone cooperated Donald Trump’s extraordinary claim of executive privilege as a former president to prevent any of his aides and agents from testifying before the House select committee to investigate the 6 January attack on the US Capitol rests on the premise that the privilege resides with a president even after he leaves office. Trump is asserting that the position of former president is a recognized constitutional office with permanent rights and privileges. President Joe Biden, the incumbent president who rightfully holds executive privilege, has waived that privilege from covering the relevant documents and potential witnesses Trump wishes to keep secret and silent.Want to make Jim Jordan sing about the Capitol attack? Ask Jefferson Davis | Sidney BlumenthalRead moreStanding behind Trump’s supposed shield, a number of those subpoenaed by the committee refuse to cooperate with the investigation. Stephen Bannon, a Trump White House aide early in his term but not during the insurrection, has been cited for criminal contempt and indicted by the Department of Justice. Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, who was at the center of the plot, and Jeffrey Clark, the former assistant attorney general, who plotted to have states overturn lawful election results on baseless theories of fraud, have refused to cooperate on the grounds of an unspecified legal executive privilege.The US court of appeals for the DC circuit has granted Trump a temporary administrative injunction against the National Archives from turning over certain subpoenaed documents to the committee, in order to hear full arguments in the case on 30 November. In a prior ruling, however, Judge Tanya S Chutkan stated, “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.”Trump’s claim of executive privilege is based on his claim that as a former president he retains a “constitutional and statutory right” to protect his “records and communications” under any and all circumstances. His lawyer, in his emergency appeal to stay the disclosure, denies that the House committee has any “legislative purpose” and is merely “a rival political branch” – a rival apparently to a former president, who is implicitly another “political branch” even though he is no longer in office. President Biden, the appeal alleges, is simply a member of “rival political party”, acting on naked partisanship. Release of Trump’s communications in question, far from serving any legitimate government purpose, is designed only to “meet a political objective”.The attempted coup to overthrow a democratic election seems so astonishing and novel that the filings in the case have failed to come up with any remotely similar situation. But there is a precedent as exact and specific as it could be – and it directly contradicts Trump’s contentions.In fact, there was a House select committee empaneled to investigate an insurrection. That committee requested the papers of the president, subpoenaed the testimony of his cabinet secretaries and members of his administration, and called for the appearance of senior military officers. No one resisted. No one invoked executive privilege. There were no legal challenges, not a single one. Everyone fully cooperated. The president handed over his records and communications, the cabinet secretaries testified under oath, and the top general forthrightly answered questions.That insurrection began with the election of Abraham Lincoln on 6 November 1860. In a planned sequence, the federal courthouse, custom house and post offices in South Carolina were seized, and secession of the state from the Union proclaimed. President James Buchanan issued a statement declaring that while secession was illegal he had no constitutional power to prevent it.Buchanan’s passivity permitted the insurrection to advance. The small garrison of US troops stationed in Charleston was menaced by local militia. Major Robert Anderson removed his troops to the safety of Fort Sumter, located on an island in Charleston Harbor. The other forts and the Charleston arsenal were at once overrun. Soon, six other states in the lower south held elections of delegates to secession conventions, which were marked by the coercion of armed militias. To whip up the secession movement, the southern governors coordinated armed attacks from 3 January to 14 January 1861 on eight federal forts and arsenals, capturing 75,000 weapons.Washington, surrounded by Maryland and Virginia, where secessionist militias had been organized, was awash in rumors of armed assaults, including on the Capitol, and of Lincoln’s assassination to prevent his inauguration. (Indeed, there would be an assassination attempt on Lincoln’s life as he passed through Baltimore in February.) On the advice of Gen Winfield Scott, Buchanan reluctantly summoned several hundred troops to guard the capital to assure the peaceful transfer of power. The Capitol itself became a veritable army base.On 9 January 1861, in the midst of the seizure of federal forts, the House created a select committee to investigate the rolling coup that was under way. The committee demanded and received the internal correspondence of the president. It held extensive hearings and examined witnesses, including cabinet members on far-ranging elements of the subversion, from Buchanan’s dealings with the South Carolina secessionists to “the “alleged hostile organization against the government within the District of Columbia” and the “seizure of forts, arsenals, revenue cutters, and other property of the United States”.“The law has been defied, the Constitution thrust aside, and the government itself assaulted,” the committee concluded, and rebuked Buchanan for claiming the president is impotent before an attempt “to overthrow the government”. Rather than being helpless before an insurrection, the committee declared that a president must suppress it. “The Constitution makes no provision for releasing any of its officers or agents from the obligations of the oath it requires them to take.” The committee’s report quoted from the oath of office for the president: “The Executive must take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” And it cited from article 1 on the “Powers of Congress” that “Congress shall have the power” to “execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections …”Less than three weeks after the committee report was released, Lincoln was inaugurated, on 4 March 1861. A month later, on 12 April, with the Confederates firing on Fort Sumter, the insurrection crossed into civil war. By the end of war’s first year, Lincoln said in his annual message to the Congress, “It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government – the rights of the people.” He cautioned against the clear and present danger of tyranny: “Monarchy itself is sometimes hinted at as a possible refuge from the power of the people. In my present position, I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism.” Lincoln closed, “The struggle of today, is not altogether for today – it is for a vast future also.”In ruling whether a former president is entitled to the immunity of a king, the DC court of appeals should be informed by the precedent of the House select committee investigating the insurrection that led to the civil war, its clarion call for the president and other elected officials to uphold their constitutional responsibility to act decisively against the destruction of democracy, and the words and example of Lincoln.
      Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth
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      The Guardian’s history in the US: Politics Weekly Extra

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      As celebrations marking the Guardian’s 200th year continue, Jonathan Freedland and David Smith explore the paper’s rocky road through covering the biggest stories in US political history

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      This week, to celebrate the Guardian’s 200th birthday, David Smith takes Jonathan Freedland on a historical journey through the paper’s centuries of US coverage, from its constant criticism of Abraham Lincoln, to its show of force against the Iraq war, which went against most in the US media at the time. They discuss the fascinating transition from being a sort of outsider looking in, to being a go-to guide for millions of Americans. Read David Smith’s piece on 200 years of Guardian US coverage Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Abraham Lincoln is America's better angel – Joe Biden must draw on his spirit | Ted Widmer

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      When the President-elect Joe Biden gives his inaugural address on Wednesday, one former president will tower above all others, and not merely because of his celebrated stovepipe hat.Abraham Lincoln is always famous, but he turns into something more than that when Americans are bitterly divided. In moments of crisis, he becomes a kind of guardian angel, not unlike the phrase he was looking for when he closed out his own inaugural address in 1861. Given “guardian angel” by his adviser, the New York senator William Seward, he improved it to “better angel”.So surely did he find the moment that politicians are still laboring to come up with anything new. After the Capitol putsch of 6 January, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, lamely called on Republicans to find their “better angels”, after they sought to garotte the vice-president.Centuries from now, archeologists may have trouble piecing together the values that drove the US between 2017 and 2021. There may be a few signs – a golf cart here … a My Pillow there … and all of the phones, by the millions, rusting in the shallow waters that cover Washington, with just the statue of Armed Freedom pointing above the waves.But the actual ethics of this complex society may be elusive, as remains the case with other four-year realms.That is why Lincoln still speaks to us, unlike so many presidents. His moral compass worked. He was elected at a time when no one in their right mind would have wanted the job. Despite constant hatred from his enemies, he fought to unite Americans and in doing so he restored a measure of racial justice. He reminded them that their own words were important, and the truth mattered. That helped the country live up to its ideals, as expressed in the declaration of independence. He did all of these things while writing in a kind of prose poetry that still sounds musical.Lincoln delivered two inaugural addresses, each clairvoyant about problems the nation would face. In 1861, he asked Americans not to go to war; in 1865, he asked them to come back together, “with malice toward none; with charity for all.” Those two speeches, standing like bookends at the beginning and end of the civil war, feel especially relevant in the dark winter of 2020-21, when charity is in such short supply.Lincoln appeared briefly on 6 January, the night of the Capitol putsch, as Biden quoted from the 1862 annual message, in an attempt to calm the waters.It would not be surprising if Lincoln returned during the inaugural address at the Capitol on 20 January. In 1861, the Capitol was already a battleground, filled with treasonous southern politicians who had stayed in Washington while their colleagues were leading an effort to launch a new country, founded upon slavery. Lincoln deftly walked through those landmines, delivering an effective speech that pleaded for Americans to remain a single country. It was a lawyer’s speech, rejecting the argument for secession, but it included a poet’s peroration, the final paragraph in which Lincoln asked the south to pause before separating.“We are not enemies, but friends,” he wrote, in language that would sound just as resonant in 2021. “We must not be enemies.”Four years later, Lincoln returned for another inaugural. This time he was more preacher than lawyer, seeking to explain the shocking sacrifice of 750,000, a number we continue to revise upward. Americans badly needed a message of redemption.Lincoln found it, using his gift for language and some stagecraft too. Behind him, the same Capitol that had looked so forlorn four years earlier was now completed, with a sparkling new dome and that curious statue on top – cast by an African American liberated by Lincoln. As the president spoke, he stood next to a table constructed from materials used to complete the dome.But Lincoln was too honest to simply say good had prevailed over evil. With a deceptive simplicity – there were only 703 words, 505 with one-syllable – he delivered a kind of theological self-assessment unlike any other presidential speech. It acknowledged blame for “American slavery” – notably, he did not say “southern slavery”. But it also accused slavery’s defenders of a gaudy and insincere patriotism, fortified by violence rather than truth, as evidenced by their willingness to “make war rather than let the nation survive”. In the end, resorting to violence was a shabby way to promote democracy.Lincoln quoted the Bible liberally, to explore the ways in which Americans might atone for their sins. That was new territory for a president, especially one with unconventional views of his own. But Lincoln’s faith had intensified, perhaps in some measure because of his own severe trauma as the parent of a beloved child who died. After proposing that God might have wanted the civil war to come, to atone for the crime of slavery, Lincoln softened again, as he did at the end of the first inaugural.He concluded by asking Americans to be gentle with each other, to take care of the widows and orphans dotting the landscape, and the amputees attending the ceremony. African American soldiers were out in force as well, as seen in one striking photograph from that day.That was another improvement: African Americans were not allowed on the grounds of the Capitol at previous inaugurations.In 1865, as recounted by a fine book, Edward Achorn’s Every Drop of Blood, many distinguished Americans attended. Among them were a well-known actor, John Wilkes Booth, and a leading African American author, Frederick Douglass, each feeling quite differently as Lincoln summoned a kind of Old Testament anger against the sin of racial injustice. Lincoln and Booth both loved Shakespeare. Booth may have felt he was on another stage, contemplating the murder of a Caesar, likewise killed in a Capitol.That tragedy played out six weeks later. But Booth could not extinguish Lincoln’s words. Instead of giving Americans a simplistic message of self-congratulation, Lincoln had delivered a sterner measure, one that offered the tools for self-salvation. In a country still struggling to live up to its ideals, that remains a potent message. More

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      Trump's Maga insurrectionists were perverse US civil war re-enactors | Sidney Blumenthal

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      “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Donald Trump tweeted on December 19, a week after his would-be Brown Shirt followers rioted in the streets of Washington to protest the “stolen” election. When Der Tag – the climactic day of battle arrived – Trump assembled his true believers on the South Ellipse at the White House for a “Save America” rally, waving them up Pennsylvania Avenue as his army to nullify the congressional certification of electoral college votes in the presidential election.Near the steps of the Capitol, as Trump’s shock troops prepared themselves for the assault on the citadel, they built a bare but dramatic monument to their revenge fantasy: wooden gallows with steps leading up to a swinging noose. Smashing their way through the windows and doors of the Capitol, they rampaged in a mad dash, breaking furniture, slashing paintings and looting offices. One of the invaders roamed through the corridors carrying a large Confederate flag, the first and only time that emblem of the Slave Power has ever appeared inside the Capitol.Just two weeks earlier, on 21 December, at the request of the commonwealth of Virginia, the statue of Robert E Lee that the state had given as a gift to the Congress in 1909 to represent it in Statuary Hall was replaced with one of Barbara Rose Johns Powell, who as a teenager had integrated Virginia’s public schools. Trump’s rabble had first rioted in 2017 in defense of another statue of Lee, in Charlottesville, Virginia, after the city council had voted to remove it.“Jews will not replace us!” they chanted, and a young woman was murdered by a neo-Nazi. Trump praised them as “very fine people,” and tweeted, “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.”The rioter parading through the Capitol with a Confederate flag, as though he had reached the high-water mark of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, was captured in a photo between two portraits on the Senate side, one of Senator John C Calhoun, the proslavery ideologue and nullifier from South Carolina, and the other of Senator Charles Sumner, the abolitionist from Massachusetts. The neo-Confederate rioter appeared indifferent to the images, even as he flaunted the symbol of the Lost Cause for Trump’s lost cause in a new civil war.In a valentine to the vandals of the Capitol, Trump proclaimed, “We love you,” and, “You’re special.” The rabble was a mélange of true believers in conspiracy theories, paranoid delusions and twisted history. For the QAnon followers, their presence at the Capitol was the moment when the storm of the rapture would bring about the revelation of Trump’s final plan and his restoration to perpetual power. It was the culmination of Trump’s promise for apocalyptic change. For neo-Nazis, carrying flags with abstract versions of broken swastikas, and tattooed latter-day Klansmen, it was a stand for racial supremacy. Charging the gates of the Capitol was storming the gates of heaven. Or, alternatively, it was a heroic last-ditch defense of Trump’s bunker from the onslaught of hordes of impure infidels led by Joe Biden.As William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But the warped history that the Trump mob thinks it is enacting, reenacting or conjuring is a costume drama of militant ignorance. The true history sheds more light on their feeble attempted coup than their fervid visions of pedophile liberal celebrities acting in concert with the deep state and the Illuminati.When senators scrambled for cover from violent assailants, it recalled the nearly fatal attack on Charles Sumner. In 1856, after delivering a stem-winding speech against the effort to turn the Kansas territory into a slave state, “The Crime Against Kansas,” Sumner sat at his desk on the floor of the Senate writing letters. Representative Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, taking umbrage at his remarks, clubbed him with a gold-handled cane until he was almost dead. Blood ran across the floor of the Senate. The caning of Sumner was a precipitating outrage that helped bring on the civil war.President Lincoln was determined that Washington would never fall to the Confederacy. He ringed the city with forts. Tens of thousands of troops were stationed there. In August 1864, when a Confederate army came within sight of the Capitol, Lincoln himself rushed to Fort Stevens to participate in the battle, and was shot at. A young officer, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, later the supreme court justice, shouted at him, “Get down, you fool!”Lincoln directed the rebuilding of the Capitol dome, originally a wooden structure that had rotted, as a symbol of confidence in the ultimate victory of democracy. The dome was completed in December 1863, a month after Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address proclaiming “a new birth of freedom”.The Trump diehard brandishing the Confederate flag in the Capitol mocks the constitutional democracy that Lincoln died forLincoln’s second inaugural took place at the newly restored Capitol. He ordered that units of Black soldiers, who had been recruited as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation, be present in force. In the Rotunda, where Trump’s rioters so recently frolicked, there was a disturbance as Lincoln passed through. A man rushing forward was restrained, later identified as John Wilkes Booth. The famed actor had become a Confederate secret service agent stalking Lincoln. Booth edged himself onto the Capitol Portico to observe Lincoln while he spoke. One hundred and fifty-six years later, Trump’s mob climbed over the spot where Booth had stood.“Right makes might,” Lincoln had stated in his Cooper Union address of 1860, which launched him on his campaign for the presidency. Six months later, on 11 July 1860, Charles Sumner came to Cooper Union to support Lincoln’s candidacy by speaking on the subject of The Republican Party: Its Origins, Necessity, and Permanence. He defined the new liberal party as the antithesis of John C Calhoun, “chief in all the pretensions of slavery and slave-masters,” who attacked “the self-evident truths of the declaration of independence as ‘absurd,’ and then to proclaim that human beings are ‘property’ under the constitution.”“All that the Republican party now opposes,” said Sumner, “may be found in John C Calhoun.”But now, it should be apparent in the last days of Trump, as he invokes the spirit of Calhoun’s nullification, that original Republican party has ceased to exist. The Trump diehard brandishing the Confederate flag in the Capitol mocks the constitutional democracy that Lincoln died for. Not since the intrusion of John Wilkes Booth has there been such a traitorous presence. More

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      How Donald Trump canceled the Republican party | Sidney Blumenthal

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      The Republican convention that nominates Donald Trump for a second term will be the greatest event in the political history of cancel culture. What Trump is cancelling is nothing less than the Republican party as it has existed before him. He ran in 2016 in the primaries on cancelling the GOP and in 2020 he ratifies his triumph. After the election, political scientists and historians will study his obliteration of the Republican party as his greatest and most enduring political achievement.The Republican party has been on a long journey away from being the party of Abraham Lincoln, accelerating since Barry Goldwater and rightwing cadres captured it in 1964 in reaction to the civil rights movement. After Richard Nixon embraced the southern strategy and won the nomination in 1968 with the help of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the Dixiecrat segregationist presidential candidate in 1948, the party increasingly radicalized in every election cycle and became gradually unmoored. In 1980, Ronald Reagan opened his general election campaign at the Neshoba County Fair, the place where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964. Surrounded by Confederate flags, he hailed “states’ rights”. As brazen an appeal as it was, Reagan felt he had to resort to the old code words.Central to Trump’s unique selling proposition is that he dispenses with the dog whistles. His vulgarity gives a vicarious thrill to those who revel in his taunting of perceived enemies or scapegoats. He made them feel dominant at no social price, until his catastrophic mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic and economic crisis. Flouting a mask is the magical act of defiance to signal that nothing has really changed and that in any case, Trump bears no responsibility.But there has also been a political cost to Trump’s louche comic lounge act that still transfixes a diehard audience lingering like late-night gamblers for the last show. Trump is the only president since the advent of modern polling never to reach 50% approval. Despite decisively losing the popular vote in 2016, he said he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”. This time, fearing an even more overwhelming popular rejection, he says the outcome will be “rigged” and he has pre-emptively tried to cancel the US Postal Service, to undermine voting by mail.From Reagan onward, even as the fringe moved to the center and took it over, the party did not anticipate that it was slouching toward Trump. Conservatives have consistently failed to grasp the unintended consequences of conservatism. Even when Reagan fostered the evangelical right, George HW Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to the supreme court, George W Bush invaded Iraq and neglected oversight of financial markets that collapsed, and John McCain named Sarah Palin as his running mate, Republicans believed they were expanding the attraction of the conservative project. When Newt Gingrich, Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh methodically degraded language, it seemed a propaganda technique to herd supporters. When the dark money of the Koch family and the wealthy reactionaries of the cloaked Donors Trust bankrolled the lumpen dress-up Tea Party to do their bidding on deregulation of finance and industry, the munificently funded conservative candidates did their bidding as retainers of privilege.In the wasteland, only cockroaches and Mitch McConnell may surviveAt the presidential level there still remained residual elements contrary to what metastasized into Trumpism. Reagan represented free trade and western firmness against Russia. George HW Bush was a paragon of public service. George W Bush was an advocate for immigrants. John McCain was the embodiment of patriotic sacrifice.After Trump, all that has been cancelled. Since he first rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, to declare his candidacy against Mexican “rapists”, there has always been a new escalator downward. After overcoming his initial hesitation, the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, welcomed the election of a QAnon conspiracy-spouting candidate from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Then McCarthy condemned QAnon and stated that Greene wasn’t part of a movement she continued to defend.Trump hailed her as a “future Republican star”. For months, he has been tweeting messages to encourage the racist, antisemitic cult. “There’s a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it,” Greene proclaimed. “I’ve heard these are people that love our country,” Trump said. In the wasteland, only cockroaches and Mitch McConnell may survive.Stuart Stevens, a prominent Republican political consultant, eyes startled wide open, has entitled his exposé of the party It Was All A Lie. He describes the conservative Trump apologists, the adults in the room, as latter-day versions of Franz von Papen, the German chancellor who enabled the rise of Hitler in the complacent belief that he could be controlled and the conservatives would maintain power.On 4 July, at the mammoth stage set of Mount Rushmore, Trump mugged for his photo op by posing his face next in line to the carving of Abraham Lincoln. He had earlier told the South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem, “‘Did you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?’” “And I started laughing,” she recounted. “And he wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious.” (Trump tweeted that it was “fake news” that he had ordered an aide to inquire about immortalizing his face on the mountain.)Ostensibly, Trump came to deliver his ideological message. He denounced “cancel culture”, which he said was “the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and to our values, and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America”. He attributed it to “a new far-left fascism”. And he spelled out its punitive nature: “If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished.” Thus, he offered a concise description of his own cancel culture’s methods.Trump’s cancel culture deals in aggressions, not micro-aggressions. The only safe space is where Trump is worshipped. Before, during and after the death of McCain, Trump unleashed tirades of insult. He finally complained that the McCain family never thanked him for approving the senator’s funeral arrangements, even though it was Congress that gave approval. For years, Trump has disparaged the Bush family. At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, when George W Bush called for setting aside partisanship and embracing national unity, Trump tweeted, “but where was he during Impeachment calling for putting partisanship aside”.Trump’s cancel culture deals in aggressions, not micro-aggressions. The only safe space is where Trump is worshippedTrump has invoked Reagan only as a stepping stone of his own monumental pedestal. At a rally in 2019, Trump mused: “I was watching the other night the great Lou Dobbs [of Fox News], and he said, ‘When Trump took over, President Trump,’ he used to say, ‘Trump is a great president.’ Then he said, ‘Trump is the greatest president since Ronald Reagan.’ Then he said, ‘No, no, Trump is an even better president than Ronald Reagan.’ And now he’s got me down as the greatest president in the history of our country, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Thank you. We love you too.”When Trump sought to profit for his 2020 campaign by selling a gold-colored Trump-Reagan commemorative coin set, the Reagan Foundation sent him a curt letter, telling him to cease and desist. Trump has constantly retailed a false story about Reagan supposedly remarking after meeting him, “For the life of me, and I’ll never know how to explain it, when I met that young man, I felt like I was the one shaking hands with the president.” The chief administrative officer of the Reagan Foundation felt compelled to note that Reagan “did not ever say that about Donald Trump”. More