The radical Republicans of Lincoln’s Party with their reform zeal and moral interventionist vision would be to the left of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It was the party of strong federal intervention and moral directive against the institution of slavery and Southern secession, the party of federally funded higher education, federally funded national transportation, and social welfare. Lincoln’s party was not one of small, non-intrusive government, minimal taxation, traditional social mores, and white supremacy. And, one must ask: whose freedom? But, if Republicans understood that Lincoln’s party is the origin of the modern, interventionist, administrative state, they would condemn it as socialist.īig government began with President Lincoln’s Republican Party, which in fundamental ways is the progenitor of the modern Democratic Party of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They contend that small government is morally virtuous and good for liberty and freedom-epithets from Barry Goldwater’s 1960 Conscience of a Conservative, Movement Conservative’s manifesto.

The Republican Party has spent decades shouting, among other hollow slogans, that big government is bad and small government is good. During this election season, they keep evoking the hallowed connection again saying “the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln.” Republicans want to imagine that there is a grand tradition between the Republican Party of the Reagan era and Abraham Lincoln’s federal interventionist party of 1861. Republicans are fixated on the idea that their party is connected to the party of President Lincoln, whose party also bore the name Republican.

Rex hamilton as abraham lincoln