Asked what Abraham Lincoln might have to say to Americans in 2024, an election year in a country as divided as at any time since the civil war Lincoln won, the NPR host Steve Inskeep said the 16th president would advise that a big part of “building a political majority is making alliances with people you believe to be wrong”.
“One of the things that drew me to the topic of Lincoln was the present and the dilemmas and difficulties of democracy right now,” Inskeep said on Saturday, appearing in connection with his book Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America, at the 27th Annual Abraham Lincoln Institute Symposium, at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC.
“I did feel like Lincoln had something to say,” Inskeep said, “and I’ve tried to express it. And it has to do with dealing with differences in a fractured society. And it has to do with building a political majority, which is a skill that I think some of us perhaps have forgotten, or we’re being told to forget.
“And part of building a political majority is making alliances with people you believe to be wrong. And hopefully you don’t believe they’re wrong on everything. But maybe out of 10 things, you think they’re very wrong about three things and can find some way to agree on some of the other seven and move forward and at least agree fundamentally on the idea that we have a constitution, we have a republic, we have a democracy. We have a system to mediate our differences. We have institutions and we should uphold them.”
The 46th president, Joe Biden, has made Donald Trump’s threat to that constitution, republic and democracy a central plank of his re-election campaign.
Trump, the 45th president, refused to admit defeat in 2020, inciting the deadly January 6 attack on Congress in an attempt to stop certification of that election. Despite that – and while facing 88 criminal charges, multimillion-dollar civil penalties and attempts to keep him off the ballot by constitutional means – he stormed to a third successive presidential nomination by the party that still calls itself the party of Lincoln.
Three weeks short of the 159th anniversary of Lincoln’s death – he was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s on 14 April 1865, Good Friday, and died the following morning – Inskeep and other historians gathered in the very same theatre. James Swanson, author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, now the basis for an Apple TV drama, was among those in the stalls.
The event took place at the end of another tumultuous week in US politics, in which Trump railed against Democrats while struggling to pay a $454m bond in his New York civil fraud case; sought to have federal criminal charges over his election subversion dismissed; was accused by the White House of employing “unhinged antisemitic rhetoric”; called for the jailing of Liz Cheney, a conservative opponent; and stoked huge debate over what he meant when he predicted a “bloodbath” if Biden beat him again.
Appealing to the better angels of Americans on both sides of the partisan divide, Inskeep said Lincoln’s example, including his magnanimous approach to defeated Confederates after the civil war, might help voters decide not “to simply denounce, isolate or ostracise those we believe to be wrong.
“It is an approach to political difference that I think is a little bit out of fashion now, but it is fundamentally what Lincoln did. It is fundamentally the reason we decided the civil war” and thereby ended slavery.
Lincoln “understood that the north had the population, they had the economy, they had the advantages that become real in wartime, that eventually come to tell on the battlefield. And Lincoln had to keep enough people unified to have that political majority, and in order to have that majority win.
“It’s a central message and matter for our time.”
Also appearing were Callie Hawkins, chief executive of President Lincoln’s Cottage, a national monument in Washington; Gordon Leidner, author of Abraham Lincoln and the Bible; George Rable, author of Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War; and Michael Zuckert, author of A Nation So Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty.
As moderator, Lucas Morel, professor of politics at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, returned to a persistent theme of audience questions: how can Americans use Lincoln’s example today.
Inskeep said: “Lincoln … understood that people would act in their self-interest but tried to harness that into something larger. And part of recognising that people have self-interest lay in trying to work out who that person was, which I feel is another thing we’re discouraged from doing.
“We’re encouraged to speak our truth, which is great, because there’s lots of truths, lots of experiences that were suppressed and ignored and less so now. But the next step is to put yourself in the shoes of the other person, to understand where they’re coming from. And an additional step for a politician, of course, is to appeal to them.”
Rable, meanwhile, said voters could learn from viewing Lincoln not as some perfect figure from the past, but as a politician and leader with faults like any other.
“Here you have a full-bodied human being” Rable said. “He has strengths, he has weaknesses. And I think [we should] look at leaders that way, rather than saying, ‘OK, this leader does this, I’m just going to dismiss him,’ or, ‘I’m going to believe everything that this leader says’.”
