NatCons Repudiate Lincoln, Embrace Buchanan

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments.  Forty years ago, conservatism reflected Reagan's sunny optimism about America.  Trump is taking conservatives to a dark place.

At Gettysburg, Lincoln said that this nation was "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."  At the National Conservatism Conference, Senator Eric Schmitt repudiated Lincoln:

If America was a universal proposition, then everything we inherited from our specific Western heritage had to be abolished. So the statues come down. The names are changed. Yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains. The story of the nation has to be rewritten to align America with its true creed.

On the Right, the situation wasn’t all that different. The truth is, by the 1990s, too many on the Right had come to accept the same basic worldview as the liberal elites they claimed to oppose.

In foreign policy, trade, immigration and the domestic culture wars, too many conservatives defined the American identity as nothing more than an abstract and vaguely-defined proposition. Even if you didn’t want to immigrate here, you would be made to submit to that proposition anyway, via military crusades to bring Madisonian democracy to the furthest corners of the world.

For years, conservatives would talk as if the whole world were just Americans-in-waiting—“born American, but in the wrong place.” America was, as one neoconservative writer put it, “The First Universal Nation.”

That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract “proposition,” but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests.

 Ben Jacobs at Politico:

At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington this week, perhaps the second biggest applause line came when Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) discussed his effort to award Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom on the stage. The only bigger reaction came when Trump border czar Tom Homan espoused the hardline immigration rhetoric that once made Buchanan an outlier within the GOP.

For Moore, Buchanan deserved the highest civilian honor in the United States because “he was right about pretty much everything 20 years before most people realized it.” In contrast, he told POLITICO Nightly, George H.W. Bush was “wrong about almost everything.”

The conference wasn’t exactly a welcoming venue for those who adhere to the brand of Republican politics that had dominated at the end of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st century. Even the speaker delegated to defend Trump’s airstrikes against Iranian nuclear sites, Max Abrahms, a professor at Northeastern University, took pains to insist he was not “a neo-con” — an even more deadly pejorative than “liberal” at the venue.

“Buchanan has been revered by the under-30 crowd basically the entire time that I’ve been working in professional politics,” explained Nick Solheim, the head of American Moment, an influential right wing nonprofit. “[P]eople have been posting vaporwave edits of Pat Buchanan since 2016.”

...

David Tell, a former aide to Bush on his 1992 campaign, agrees that Buchanan’s platform is eerily similar to the policies of Trump’s GOP. However, he added, there’s now a “Huey Long element not previously present in American conservatism.”

House GOP Botches Agenda Rollout

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections. 

Steve Benen at MSNBC:

It was 15 months ago when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy first started talking publicly about rolling out a “Commitment to America” agenda. That should’ve given the would-be House speaker and other Republican leaders plenty of time to prepare for a big rollout.

They have reason to be disappointed with how it’s gone.

The first misstep was a couple of days ago, when the House GOP published its blueprint online, only to remove it soon after without explanation, and then republished the whole thing again a day later.

This morning, things got a little worse. The Daily Beast reported:

As he rolled out the first official Republican Party congressional platform in years, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy fittingly invoked the revered father of the GOP: Abraham Lincoln. At the top of a letter to Republican lawmakers thanking them for their contributions to the “Commitment To America” — the policy agenda they are launching near Pittsburgh on Friday — McCarthy included a quote attributed to Lincoln. “Commitment,” reads the quote, “is what transforms a promise into reality.”

It’s a nice quote, but there’s literally no evidence that Lincoln ever said it. The phrase did appear in advertising, however, for Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street giant that collapsed in 2008.

And in case that weren’t quite enough, House Republican leaders this morning also released a video to help promote their agenda, though as HuffPost noted, it had one key flaw.

House Republican leaders on Friday unveiled their “Commitment to America” agenda for 2023 ― and with it, an inspirational video full of scenes presented as exceptional imagery of America that were actually stock footage from Russia and Ukraine.

Pols Saying Stupid Things

CBS reports:

A North Carolina legislator used his Facebook campaign page on Wednesday to compare President Abraham Lincoln to Adolf Hitler.

Cabarrus County Republican Rep. Larry Pittman posted the comment in response to a torrent of criticism over legislation he and two others sponsored in the General Assembly to restore a state ban on same-sex marriage.

Larry Pittman, a North Carolina Republican, wrote on Facebook that Lincoln was the “same sort of tyrant” as Hitler

In the lengthy thread, someone posted that “the Civil War is over. The Fed won. Get over it.”

In an apparent response, Pittman said, “And if Hitler had won, should the world just get over it? Lincoln was the same sort of tyrant.”

Pittman wrote on his page that Lincoln was “personally responsible for the deaths of 800,000 Americans in a war that was unnecessary and unconstitutional.”

Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK):

Rep. Markwayne Mullin told his constituents Monday during a town hall meeting in Jay that it is “bull crap” that they pay his salary.

“You said you pay for me to do this (represent you in Congress). Bull crap. I pay for myself,” the third-term Republican said. “I paid enough taxes before I ever got there and continue to through my company to pay my own salary.

“This is a service. No one here pays me to go. I do it as an honor and service. This is a service for me, not a career, and I thank God this is not how I make my living.”

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI):

“Nobody’s got to use the Internet. … And the thing is that if you start regulating the Internet like a utility, if we did that right at the beginning, we would have no Internet. … Internet companies have invested an awful lot of money in having almost universal service now. The fact is is that, you know, I don’t think it’s my job to tell you that you cannot get advertising for your information being sold. My job, I think, is to tell you that you have the opportunity to do it, and then you take it upon yourself to make that choice. … That’s what the law has been, and I think we ought to have more choices rather than fewer choices with the government controlling our everyday lives.”

His press secretary, who has to use the Internet, tweeted this:

@bradbainum Actually, he said that nobody has to use the internet. They have a choice. Big difference.

— Sensenbrenner Press (@JimPressOffice) April 13, 2017

"Free Trade ... Has to Be Fair Trade"

In his address to Congress last night, Trump said:

I believe strongly in free trade but it also has to be fair trade. It's been a long time since we had fair trade. The first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, warned that the "abandonment of the protective policy by the American government… will produce want and ruin among our people." Lincoln was right -- and it's time we heeded his advice and his words. (Applause.) I am not going to let America and its great companies and workers be taken advantage of us any longer. They have taken advantage of our country. No longer. (Applause.)

The Lincoln line is from an 1847 tariff discussion. 

Ronald Reagan had a different view of protectionism:

You see, at first, when someone says, "Let's impose tariffs on foreign imports," it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works-but only for a short time. What eventually occurs is: First, homegrown industries start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs. They stop competing and stop making the innovative management and technological changes they need to succeed in world markets. And then, while all this is going on, something even worse occurs. High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less competition. So, soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs.

The Stupid Party

There are many, many fake Lincoln quotations on social media.    RNC tweets one (still up after five hours of flaming):

Valerie Strauss reports at The Washington Post:

It’s not just the White House that seems to have a problem with spelling. Someone at the U.S. Education Department, now led by Secretary Betsy DeVos, does, too.

At 8:45 on Sunday morning, the department’s official Twitter account misspelled the name of W.E.B. Du Bois, a black sociologist, historian, civil rights activist and co-founder of the NAACP, the oldest civil rights organization in the United States. Du Bois was misspelled as DeBois — an error that might be understandable from a young student, but the U.S. Education Department?

Hours after the tweet was posted — and after the error was lampooned by a number of people on Twitter, it was corrected, with an apology:

Post updated – our deepest apologizes for the earlier typo. — US Dept of Education (@usedgov) February 12, 2017




The department fixed that tweet quickly, changing “apologizes” for “apologies.”

Marianne Williamson Uses a Fake Quotation

In January 2013, New Age author Marianne Williamson wrote in The Huffington Post:

Now, removed by over a century from the struggles of the Civil War, we face what Abraham Lincoln himself considered the greatest threat to the United States at the end of that war: the rise of corporate power. In Lincoln's words:

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions may prove groundless."

As I pointed out in the comments section of that article, the Lincoln quotation is bogus.  Lincoln never wrote anything of the kind, and as a former lobbyist and railroad lawyer, he would not have agreed with it.

Either she does not read the comments section or does not care about historical accuracy, because she used the same fake Lincoln quotation in her 2014 book, Healing the Soul of America.

Now she is running for Congress.

Obama's Spurious Lincoln Quotation

In his remarks to the House Democratic Caucus (the White House website called it “The House Democratic Congress” – talk about a sense of ownership), the president said:

I have the great pleasure of having a really nice library at the White House. And I was tooling through some of the writings of some previous Presidents and I came upon this quote by Abraham Lincoln: “I am not bound to win, but I’m bound to be true. I’m not bound to succeed, but I’m bound to live up to what light I have.”

The book he was consulting may have been They Never Said It, by Paul F. Boller and John George. If so, he missed what they said about the Lincoln passage: “This sounds like Honest Abe, but honesty compels admirers of Lincoln to admit that there is no documentary evidence for the statement.”

Filling Gaps in the White House Website, Part 10

The White House website includes interviews with foreign journalists in the past week, but not domestic ones.

The president spoke with Major Garrett of Fox News:

And I always think that Abraham Lincoln described this best. And I'm paraphrasing a little bit here. But he basically said, look, I think anything that the individual can do well by him- or herself, he should do by him- or herself; then those things that we do better collectively, we should do together.

The actual text of the Lincoln quotation is:

The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, goverment ought not to interfere.