Republicans who want to constrain the role of resentments & identity politics within their coalition can, to this day, draw on a long, rich GOP tradition of neutral, classical-liberal principles. Democrats, by contrast, can only offer age-old cynicism that such principles exist.
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The idea that this is a killer rejoinder misses the point. Lincoln himself stood for leniency & charity towards the defeated Confederates. Grant befriended some of them. Lincoln would likely have said, "let them have their monuments" & focused on policy. https://twitter.com/ASFleischman/status/1153701921099849728 …
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The hard question of Reconstruction, which has never been satisfactorily answered, is how you reconciled Lincoln's view of leniency towards the vanquished white South with vigorous protection of the freed black South.
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But neither Lincoln nor Grant ever started from the position that you should not want to appeal to white Southerners - as a partisan matter, as a matter of personal friendship, as a matter of the American nation. Very much the contrary.
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And yet, much of the "Lincoln's Republicans were not like this" shtick takes as its premise that Lincoln's party would not have wanted *those* people in its ranks.
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Now, where you see the greatest continuity between the GOP of 1856, 1896, 1924, 1956, 1980, 2004, & 2014, is in the Midwest, the real heart of the original party & of revived importance since 2010. Many of the Midwestern Republicans of the past two decades fit that bill.
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Now, as I've noted upthread & many places elsewhere, maintaining the Lincoln-Grant-McKinley-Coolidge-Eisenhower-Reagan line of the party is, in fact, a real challenge in the Age of Trump. The party has had factions like Trump before, but never as leader of the party.
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But it would be useful for historian-written columns like this one to grapple with more of the history & in particular the philosophy of the GOP over time, & not reduce both the Lincoln & Trump era parties to caricature.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/opinion/lincoln-republican-party-trump.html …
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End of conversation
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I might be wrong about this, but I also recall that the early 20th century Populist Party---including William Jennings Bryan---at least tacitly courted Jim Crow voters.
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Anybody who talks about FDR's southern strategy without acknowledging that Dems abandoned that strategy in the 60s and the GOP picked it up and continues to run with it today is a rightwing hack.
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