What Lincoln can tell us about MAGA

Something is clearly happening with Donald Trump. Even a year ago, I don’t think he would have begun a rally with 12 minutes of rambling remarks about late golfer Arnold Palmer, concluding with a discussion of the size of Palmer’s penis.

And while you may wish you hadn’t heard about this, it matters. Trump may once again control America’s nuclear arsenal, and aside from that, his erratic behavior should be a warning to businesspeople who downplay his destructive economic agenda, believing that if elected he will listen to reason and back off the worst of his proposals.

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But in a fundamental sense, Trump’s most disturbing remark over the past few days may have been his unprompted comment about Abraham Lincoln during an appearance on Fox News: “Lincoln was probably a great president. Although I’ve always said, why wasn’t that settled, you know? I’m a guy that — it doesn’t make sense we had a civil war.”

What in the world is he talking about here? Is he implying that Lincoln should have let the South maintain slavery in some form, keeping some number of Black people enslaved, just deal points in some sort of run-of-the-mill public policy negotiation? If so, once upon a time Trump would have had enough self-control not to suggest anything like that so openly.

And if he is, here’s the thing: The Civil War couldn’t have been “settled” by moderating Northern demands that the South give up its slaves, because there was no such demand.

Yes, Northern states had banned slavery within their own borders and many Northerners considered slavery abhorrent. But outspoken abolitionists who sought to end slavery everywhere were a small minority. If the South hadn’t seceded, slavery might well have continued unimpeded for decades.

As Abraham Lincoln explained in his landmark 1860 Cooper Union address, which set him on the path to the Republican nomination and eventually the presidency, the reason the Union was facing an existential crisis was a demand by the South — namely, that the North not only let slavery continue unimpeded but also protect the practice from criticism.

Lincoln argued that slave owners’ quarrel with the free states wasn’t that Northerners were hurting their material interests — they weren’t to any significant degree — but the mere fact that they dared to call slavery evil.

“What will satisfy them?” Lincoln asked. His answer:

This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our free-state Constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

Not much room for settling there.

What does this have to do with America today? To a large extent, Trump’s campaign is being kept afloat financially by a handful of aggrieved billionaires, Elon Musk in particular. Why are these (mostly) men so disgruntled? I don’t think it’s mainly financial self-interest — the ultrawealthy will pay lower taxes if Trump wins, but Musk has essentially set fire to millions, even billions, of dollars in pursuit of his political agenda. No, if you listen to them, what really seems to infuriate them is what Musk calls the “woke mind virus.”

I think most of these billionaires would struggle to actually define wokeness, but what’s so terrible about it? Whatever it is, wokeness hasn’t gotten in the way of soaring profits and stock prices.

But one consistent theme is its criticism of abuses by people with power — and some people with power just can’t abide the notion that people are allowed to talk about its possible abuse, let alone the notion that government should do anything about it.

What this means to me is that many people, including and especially some rich and powerful people, who imagine that their lives will go on as before if Trump wins — because they themselves aren’t undocumented immigrants, or part of the “fake news media,” or federal employees who might be suspected of disloyalty, or anyone else whom Trump casts as the “enemy within” — are deluding themselves. Trump and many of those around him are hypersensitive to criticism, and if he wins, you can expect them to punish critics, whoever they are, and demand affirmations of loyalty across the board.

And that prospect alarms me as much as the idea of putting a man who uncontrollably blurts out vulgarities in charge of our nukes.

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