OPINION: Rescuing Lincoln’s legacy in 2024

Abraham Lincoln was a towering president of the United States, and a Republican.

To stop the spread of chattel slavery and to preserve the Union, President Lincoln and his Republican Party led our country through the Civil War.

After the war, Lincoln and the Republicans attempted to reconstruct the defeated South, to bring it back into the Union on a more equal and humanitarian basis. 

But Democrats adopted racist tactics to stop Lincoln’s hopeful plan for Reconstruction.

Decades later, the Democrats would change their tune and redeem themselves. 

Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” lifted millions out of poverty, and Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” made Democrats the party of dignity, human rights and equality.

Political parties aren’t monoliths — they can change over time. 

In the 1960s Republicans regressed and adopted race-baiting tactics to gain the votes of Southern evangelical whites.

This so-called Southern Strategy won the White House for Richard Nixon.

Gradually, with help from talk radio and cable TV, the Republican Party became even more socially conservative.

Since 2016, the Republican Party has reflected Donald Trump’s far right Make America Great Again faction. 

At every level of government, the MAGA GOP is now more powerful, more polarizing and more extremely conservative than it has ever been.

Nationally, the party that once opposed Russia and other dictatorships, now supports Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban.

The party that still calls itself the defender of law and order now wants to exonerate Donald Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection, mishandling and refusing to return top secret documents, and conspiring to overturn the 2020 election.

They even want to see Trump back in the White House, despite his unrivaled ability to divide his own party, and his lack of any platform other than to play to people’s racial and class based grievances. 

This is a very frightening prospect that Jim Messina, an Idahoan and former deputy chief of staff for President Barack Obama, says “should be repellent to any decent person who believes in freedom and building a more perfect union.”

Trump’s malevolent influence trickled down to states and counties.

In the Idaho Legislature, MAGA Republican leaders now feel free to openly disparage women using the ugliest of terms, referring to them as cows and baby factories who need to produce service workers.

The MAGA faction that runs Kootenai County seeks to destroy community colleges, public schools and libraries by incurring large legal bills and being administratively dysfunctional.

The MAGA puppet in the Assessor’s Office is equally dysfunctional and possibly corrupt. 

The MAGA sheriff is openly biased in favor of Republican organizations and against LGBTQ+ people. 

Today’s MAGA Republicans purge anyone whose views deviate from their hard line.

They are the modern supercharged heirs of Nixon's Southern Strategy of the 1960s.

Their party and its leaders bear no resemblance whatsoever to the party of Abraham Lincoln.

In fact, it has been observed that the radical Republican leaders who lived through the Civil War understood a principle that seems lost on the radical Republican leaders of today: “that, if entrusted with power, leaders who commit assaults on the national government once may well attempt to do so again.” (J. Cobb: New Yorker Jan. 14, 2024)

Abraham Lincoln was far more closely aligned with the principles and values of today’s Democratic Party.

To celebrate Lincoln’s (small d) democratic values and to reclaim Lincoln’s patriotic and humanitarian legacy, the Kootenai County Democrats will gather on the evening of Saturday, Feb. 17, for a Big Blue Democracy Dinner.

Find details at www.kootenaidemocrats.org. 

Join us. Won’t you?

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Evan Koch is chairman of the Kootenai County Democratic Central Committee.