John Avlon has published a book about Abraham Lincoln and peace in a time of war. He sees the irony, of course.
“I’d like to think that sometimes I can look around corners,” says the CNN political analyst, a former editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast. “But I didn’t anticipate that Putin would invade Ukraine opposite the book.
“But there is a foreign policy dimension to the book that is probably unexpected.”
In Lincoln and the Fight for Peace, Avlon offers both narrative and analytical history. He retells and examines the end of the American civil war, Lincoln’s plans for reuniting his country, his assassination and how in the former slaveholding states Reconstruction was defeated and racism enshrined in law.
He also considers how Lincoln’s ideas about reconciliation and rebuilding lived on, ultimately to influence the rebuilding of Germany and Japan after the second world war, and how the 16th president’s politics of “the golden rule” – treat others as you would have them treat you – offers a model for solving division at home and abroad.
More than 15,000 books have been written about Lincoln, but Avlon’s arrives in an America still subject to the attentions of Donald Trump, while from Russia Vladimir Putin pitches Ukraine into war and the world into nuclear dread.
“When people pick up a book about Abraham Lincoln now,” Avlon says, “I think the flow-through is [about how] we belatedly realised the dangers of taking democracy for granted, of embracing or encouraging these tribal divides, which can wreak havoc.
“So, too, there’s a real danger at taking for granted the liberal democratic order that has preserved a high degree of peace and prosperity in Europe over the past 75 years.
“… There are moments where we abruptly remember that defending democracy at home and abroad is a cause that can be as heroic as winning it in the first place, and no less urgent.
“It gets back to, ‘Let us have faith that that right makes might’” – a key line from Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech of 1860 – “and the flip side of that is what’s being tested [by Russia]. There are people in the world who believe that might makes right.”
‘Despotism taken pure’
Lincoln said a famous thing about Russia in a letter in 1855, five years before his election as president.
“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid,” he wrote to a friend, Joshua Speed. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal’. We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes’. When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics’.
“When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
Other than that there isn’t much to go on, Russia-wise. But as Avlon points out, Lincoln was writing not just about the curse of slavery but about a domestic political threat: the Know Nothings, a nativist-populist party.
The link between the Know Nothings and the Republican party of Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene has been made before, including by Avlon himself.
“It’s obviously safe to say that Lincoln wouldn’t recognise today’s Republican party. His Republican party was the modern progressive party of its time, it was a big tent party, dedicated to overturning slavery.
“I think, as you are trying to root Lincoln in the context of contemporary politics, you definitely need to go beneath the party label. And the fact that the Republican party now finds its base among the states of the former Confederacy is a clue … The labels may change but the song remains the same, to a distressing extent.
“I was struck by what [Ulysses S] Grant said in 1875. And I checked that quote three times, because it seemed too on the nose: ‘If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.’”
‘Our nation is not evenly divided’
Many observers think a second American civil war is possible, along fault lines widened by a white supremacist far right which may see Putin and Putinism as a model for negating demographic change. Avlon, whose book has been well received in the political centre and on the never-Trump right, does not think civil war is imminent.
“I thought Jamelle Bouie made a great point in a column a few weeks ago,” he says, “where he said, ‘Look, we don’t have structural issues like slavery.’
“I do think that the current trend of polarisation, where politics becomes a matter of identity and the incentive structures move our politicians towards the extremes, rather than finding ways to work and reason together, is incredibly dangerous.
“But first of all, if you look at the numbers, our nation is not evenly divided. We’re not a 50-50 nation on most issues. We’re 70-30 nation and many issues, whether it’s gay marriage, marijuana, [which] run through the country [with 70% support].
“The section that believes the big lie [that Trump’s defeat was caused by voter fraud], they’re very loud. But they’re 30%, a super-majority of the Republican party. We often forget that a plurality of Americans are self-identified independents.
“That does not diminish the danger to democracy when one party buys into a self-evident lie. Or when around a quarter of the country refuses to get vaccinated during a pandemic.
“But you have to have faith in American democracy, when you look at history, because we have been through far worse before. Every generation faces great challenges. And if you’re overwhelmed by them, or pessimistic … that will not help solve them. You know, difficulty is the excuse that history never accepts.”
Histories like his, Avlon says, can help readers “draw on the past to confront problems and then aim towards a better future”. His book aims “in part to give us perspective on our own problems. We’ve been through worse. We’ll get through this.
“We need to be aware it’s dangerous to play with these tribal divisions for short-term political gain. And that we have an obligation to form the broadest coalition possible to defend democracy and our deepest values, which we forget sometimes.
“Rooting things in the second founding and Lincoln, I think, can be clarifying and can help build that big tent again.”
Lincoln and the Fight for Peace is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
