Republicans are different. Unlike the Whigs, unlike the Federalists, unlike the Democrats, Republicans were explicitly founded around a set of ideas rather than just an agenda or a collection of interest groups. Those ideas have both defined & disciplined the party for 160 years.
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Nobody who knows the history of the Republican Party would claim that it has always been 100% faithful to its founding principles, or that it has been immune to catering to its constituent groups or pandering to baser voter sentiment. But the gravitational force of ideas matters.
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The Democratic Party has veered all over the place in terms of ideology & which voters' resentments & rent-seeking it is catering to at any given time or place. But its history as a collection of interest groups nakedly pursuing their own narrow agendas is the real continuity.
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Republican history is, by contrast, far more consistent over time back to the 1850s - in outlook, culture, and temperament as well as ideas - than is typically acknowledged. What is portrayed as Republican change is often simply the contrast presented by Democratic shifts.
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The challenge in the Trump era is preserving the things that kept the Republican Party constrained by, even inspired by, its founding principles for a century and a half. Elements like Trump were there from the start, but the party's never been led by them.
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Anybody who tells you that Lincoln's party would not have tolerated Know-Nothing nativists in its ranks is historically illiterate. The party forged a majority by doing literally that. Lincoln despised the Know-Nothings, but kept his mouth shut, had an ex-Know-Nothing as his AG.
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The early Republicans believed in the Lockean right to keep the fruits of one's own labors, & that the Founding principles applied to all Americans. They were also American nationalists, Christian moralists, & riven by ferocious internal quarrels over immigration & nativism.
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Lincoln was partly concern-trolling in claiming the label of "conservative," which in his era was more associated with European throne-and-altar reactionaries. But he was sincere in arguing that Burkean fealty to the tried & familiar was in the Republican bloodstream from Day 1.
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And Lincoln was an originalist. His critique of Dred Scott was not that Taney shouldn't have looked to original meaning in deciding who could be a citizen, but that Taney had his history wrong: black men had fought in the Revolution, voted to ratify the Constitution.
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From Lincoln's 1857 speech on Dred Scott:pic.twitter.com/WpeopL19cI
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