The Lincoln ModelToday there are many Republicans who blame Trump for the de-Reaganization of the Republican Party and wistfully pine for the 1980s era of gentleman’s politics. This is, by the large, the main source of anxiety about Trump in some Republican quarters, and it is also the driving momentum of the so-called “Never Trump” movement.
I came of age in the Reagan area, and I too prefer a more civil political climate. But that is not the America we live in now. Reagan’s policies and style were perfectly calibrated to deal with the specific problems and specific political environment of the late 1970s. Today, however, a good deal of Reaganism is obsolete. Not only has stagflation disappeared and the Soviet Union collapsed but Reagan himself would be a fish out of water in the dark, roiled currents of today.
But Lincoln wouldn’t. His political environment was even more roiled than the one we have now. And Lincoln would have seen that, in this environment, an environment made by a gangster clan of Democrats like Obama and Hillary, you don’t get very far with Reagan’s gentlemanly style. In short, Trump is the man of the hour, not Reagan. Trump has the chance to do what Reagan never even dreamed about, taking a page from Lincoln and smashing the Democratic plantation.
When we consider Trump’s two big Republican “heresies”—his positions on trade and immigration—we can see that they might be heresies from Reagan’s point of view, but they were not heresies from Lincoln’s point of view. As Gabor Boritt shows in Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, Lincoln’s GOP was unabashedly protectionist and viewed tariffs as a necessary and valid economic strategy to protect American workers and American industry from mercantilist competition from European powers.
And while many progressives as well as conservatives insist that tariffs have never worked, Trump seems to be making them work, as evidenced by the recent agreement with the EU to lower its tariffs. Historically, Boritt shows that America had tariffs from Hamilton’s time through the end of the 19th century, and it was during this period that America grew most rapidly and became the largest economy in the world, surpassing Great Britain.
On immigration, too, Trump and Lincoln can be seen as generally aligned. This point is hardly obvious, but we get a vital clue about how Lincoln would have thought about today’s immigration debate but considering the position Lincoln actually took on extending civil rights—the right to full citizenship, the right to vote, the right to serve on juries—to blacks. Lincoln basically held that it is wrong for any people, anywhere, to enslave another people because slavery is wrong or, to put it philosophically, against natural right.
But natural rights are not the same as civil rights. Civil rights are the product of living in a particular community. The community is a social compact between the citizens who have formed that community. These existing citizens have the right to decide who gets to be a member of their club, and on what terms.
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