I'm a Communist
You're a Communist
He's a Communist
She's a Communist
Wouldn't you like to be a Communist too...
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That Lincoln piece is so profoundly wrongheaded it's hard to know where to start. Lincoln's view of labor & capital was purely Lockean, & his view of free labor's sacrosanct right of contract was at odds with slavery then, as it would be at odds today with progressivism.https://twitter.com/williamrblack/status/1155508766131011589 …
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Yes, Karl Marx worked for men like Charles Dana & Horace Greeley. That didn't make them Marxists. Marx's own views were further radicalized by disputes with his journalistic employers over his wages.
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Also if you're going to cite Dana & Greeley as major Republican figures, worth noting that both of them turned against Grant & bolted to the Democrats by 1872, with Greeley serving as their candidate on an anti-Reconstruction platform. Grant tried to get Dana arrested for libel.
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Reference to Greeley backing "redistribution of land in the American West to the poor" is also misleading, esp compared to what Lincoln did in the Homestead Act. This was *federally owned* land. Lincoln wasn't redistributing, he was *privatizing*
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Horace Greeley was, of course, a key Lincoln ally at times, and was also a highly erratic thinker full of crackpot ideas & shameless reversals. Other key Lincoln allies were slaveowners & nativists. Lincoln had his principles, but was a determined believer in big-tent coalitions.
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Much of 1861-76 Republican economic policy was driven by the federal government unloading its vast tracts of unsettled land. Today's progressives ignore the privatizing aspect of the Homestead Act, or how land sales drove the Morrill Act, or why the railroads were paid in land.
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You can only call that "redistribution" if you count taking the land away from, say, the Sioux.
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What did Lincoln think of big business? He had a natural American skepticism of big, but he was also a lawyer who represented big railroad companies against tort liability, & enthusiastically backed the colossal Union Pacific Railroad.
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Sorry, 21st century progressives: Abe Lincoln would gladly have accepted your votes, but he wasn't into your ideas. He was a free-market Lockean classical liberal & an originalist. If you want to use him against Donald Trump, you need to argue from those long-Republican premises.
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