School children are taught that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves — and he is rightly remembered for the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, etc.. But it is not widely understood how Lincoln brilliantly married abolitionism with economics to make the moral case for capitalism.
I’m reading Rich Lowry’s “Lincoln Unbound” (he’ll be on the podcast soon to discuss this further), and it seems The Great Emancipator was ahead of his time in more ways than we understood.
Lowry quotes Lincoln as saying: “I want every man to have a chance — and I believe a black man is entitled to it — in which he can better his condition — when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him!”
The notion that a slave could one day have people working for him must have been an incredibly radical notion for the time. But it also had the benefit of giving the Republican Party a sort of populist economic message.
As Lowry observes, Lincoln “democratized Whiggish economics. He took an economic point of view descended from Alexander Hamilton — with all the elitist baggage that implies — and baptized it in the great, rolling Jordan River of American democracy. In Lincoln, the banks and the log cabin met. In Lincoln, the laboring man became the master of his own economic destiny.”
First, that’s some good writing. But more to the point, Lincoln — aside from his many other attributes (which have rightly been praised for a century and a half) — should serve a model for today’s conservatives who struggle to explain why our economic policies are best for all Americans, not just the rich.
Lincoln wasn’t selling the Whig version of capitalism — he was selling the American Dream.
To be sure, today’s tea party set wouldn’t approve of Lincoln’s penchant for infrastructure spending, and free marketers wouldn’t care much for his affinity for the protective tariff. But his inclusive and aspirational rhetoric about the virtues of capitalism was ahead of its time.
One hundred and fifty years later, Republicans are still struggling to do precisely what Lincoln did.