The following is an excerpt from page 267 of my 2005 edition of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, a book which formed the basis for the movie Lincoln. The setting is the 1860 presidential campaign, shortly after Lincoln secured the Republican Party nomination.
[Lincoln] recognized that anything he said would be scanned scrupulously for partisan purposes. The slightest departure from the printed record would be distorted by friends as well as enemies. Even his simple reiteration of a previous position might, in the midst of a campaign, give it new emphasis. He preferred to point simply to the party platform that he had endorsed. His few lapses justified his fears. A facetious comment to a Democratic reporter that “he would like to go to Kentucky to discuss issues but was afraid of being lynched” was made into a campaign issue.
Underlying this policy of self-restraint was another important but unvoiced political reality: Lincoln had to maintain the cohesion of the new Republican Party, a coalition of old Democrats, former Whigs, and members of the nativist American Party. Informing a Jewish friend that he never entered a Know Nothing lodge, as accused by Democrats, he cautioned that “our adversaries think they can gain a point, if they could force me to openly deny this charge.” Although Lincoln himself had disavowed any sympathy with nativists, and had actually invested in a German paper, many Republicans remained hostile to immigrants, and their support was essential.
What lessons should we take from this little slice of history? We could focus on Lincoln’s shrewdness. He understood very well what it would take to win the White House, and he was willing to get in bed with one devil (anti-Catholic xenophobes) in order to deal with another one (slavery). That’s interesting, but I’d rather focus on the persistence of this alliance in the Republican Party.
The Know Nothings were angry about cheap labor from Germany, Italy, and Ireland. Those immigrants happened to be Catholic, for the most part, and that was also a source of concern. The preponderant Catholicism of the 11 million undocumented Latino workers in this country seems to actually be one of the few things the modern GOP holds in their favor. Christian sectarian differences are less important than they used to be, but race is still a big deal.
In its formative stage, the Republican Party enjoyed a fairly healthy (although inherently corrupting) relationship between Wall Street industrialists who had money to invest and western states that were thirsty for infrastructure. But that wasn’t enough to get them over the top. They needed the nativists to get them there. Even as the Republican Party slowly rotated from a northern party into a southern party, the nativists never really left. All that happened is that their numbers were bolstered by the remnants of the Confederacy.
Other things have changed. It’s appropriate that Obama’s first-term Secretary of Transportation was an Illinois Republican. The modern GOP doesn’t believe in investing in infrastructure anymore. That healthy link between Wall Street investors and the GOP is broken. Perhaps it is the square peg of nativism that broke it. Rather than being an unfortunate, yet necessary, coalition partner, the appendage became the feature. I don’t know if the nostalgia of the Know Nothings was quite as ahistorical as the nostalgia of the Tea Party, but everything else seems the same. The ahistorical feature of the modern GOP perhaps comes from the heavy dollop of Christian fundamentalism that was introduced in the 1970s and then combined with the anti-science interests of certain energy industrialists. Whatever the case, the result is a truly toxic brew.
I didn’t think I’d be saying this two or four years ago, but I don’t think the modern Republican Party is redeemable. The signs that it is in retreat come every day, but yesterday was a particularly bad day for them.
Sen. Jefferson Sessions of Alabama spent hours on the floor yesterday, railing against the confirmation of Jack Lew as Treasury Secretary, but in the end he could only get 24 Republican colleagues to join with him. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was humiliated by a Milwaukee police chief during a hearing on gun violence held by the Judiciary Committee. The previously feared and revered journalist Bob Woodward was busy trashing his own reputation as he transformed himself into a Donald Trump caricature. Sean Hannity had his ass handed to him by a black Muslim congressman from Minneapolis. Justice Antonin Scalia made one of the most racist and inappropriate comments from the bench of the Supreme Court that we’ve seen in modern history. Meanwhile, the whole world is aligned in stupefaction that the GOP would rather trash the economy than make modest compromises with the president on the budget.
There is no party left for the center-right. I think that that one will be created.
