the party embraced a Southern strategy, forsaking the remnants of its Lincolnesque heritage
Donald Trump’s Republican Party is not the party of Lincoln
Republicans have embraced all that Lincoln loathed.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/09/04/donald-trumps-republican-party-is-not-party-lincoln/?wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
President Trump extemporaneously speaks about Abraham Lincoln as if he were his rival. He has boasted that his poll numbers are greater than Lincoln’s, though there were no opinion polls in the 19th century. He has invidiously compared Lincoln with one man he always casts as heroic and whose monuments he defends as sacrosanct: “a great general,” Robert E. Lee.
And yet, to ward off criticisms of Trump’s bursts of racist rhetoric, Republican leaders reflexively play the Lincoln card. “We are the party of Lincoln,” proclaimed House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to shield Trump with the icon of the Great Emancipator.
But the party of Trump is the antithesis of the party of Lincoln, the culmination of a long realignment. Beginning in the 1960s, the party embraced a Southern strategy, forsaking the remnants of its Lincolnesque heritage in exchange for the principles of states’ rights and resistance to civil rights for African Americans previously associated with the neo-Confederate Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party. As a result, the Republican Party changed its identity and abandoned its original principles, becoming strikingly similar to the very opponents that roused Lincoln to resist in the beginning.
Lincoln created the Republican Party out of the fragments of disintegrating parties amid the political chaos of the 1850s. He had to overcome a powerful tide of anti-immigrant nativism advanced by the Know Nothing Party, which he loathed. He faced a reactionary Supreme Court, which in Dred Scott v. Sandford declared that blacks were an “inferior class” who had “no rights the white man is bound to respect,” a decision intended to smash the new Republican Party. He had to confront the most cunning demagogue of his time, Stephen A. Douglas, who hurled every racist trope against him. And he confronted a dysfunctional president, James Buchanan, whose governing incompetence let the country careen to catastrophe.
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Under Lincoln, the Republican Party stood for equal rights and opportunity, political democracy and using the force of the federal government to constrict and ultimately destroy the threat posed by the greatest concentrated wealth and power in the country — the Slave Power. And while the Republican Party’s origin story is one of change and compromise over time, Lincoln might be astonished to see the extent of its transformation today.
Trump’s party has embraced the ideas Lincoln opposed and fought itself into the coats of the Know Nothings and the Dixiecrats. Lincoln might also rub his eyes in disbelief to discover that sitting in his chair is the likes of Trump, the head of this redefined Republican Party, truly the rival to his principles.
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If the Repukes cannot let this go, there's no place for them in the New South. The New South is populated with educated, self-aware, middle class black and Latinx families who vote regularly and who know their civil rights. If the Republican Party (The Chump-publican Party) chooses racism as their hill to die on, we should let them do it. They're going to die anyway, I just hope they're quick about it.
As progressive Democrats we need to support the emerging leaders from the southern states, many of whom are women and minorities, who are fully qualified to run for office and represent their home districts in Washington.
