Cuomo’s Lincoln

I WAS CLICKING AROUND wsws.org, the “World Socialist Web Site,” the other day–and how do you kill time at the office?–when I came across a stirring defense of Abraham Lincoln. The WSWS is a publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International (both of which seem to have been named by someone at the Department of Redundancy Department). The author of the article on Lincoln was a woman called Shannon Jones. She was upset that many of her fellow socialists blame our sixteenth president for “the delay in the victory of the socialist revolution.”

Nothing could be further from the truth, Comrade Shannon explained. Rather than impeding the socialist revolution, Lincoln was its forerunner. “They”–meaning these anti-Lincoln socialists–“tear events out of their historical context in order to deny the obvious progressive content of Lincoln’s actions,” she wrote. That Lincoln was an incipient socialist, if not a completely self-conscious one, seemed as plain to Shannon Jones as the beard on Karl Marx’s face, and she looked for the day when a more rigorous understanding of Lincoln’s proto-socialist achievement would inspire, as she put it, “a new revolution in property relations.” Then we could strive to finish the Lincolnian task of “attacking poverty, oppression and inequality by placing finance and industry under the democratic ownership and control of the working population.” With malice toward none, of course.

I enjoyed Jones’s essay, if only because her portrait of a Marxist Lincoln was new to me. I knew that groups ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the First Church of Christ, Scientist, had retroactively tried to enlist Lincoln as a member of their club, but suddenly seeing Old Abe the Dialectician rise up from the Fourth International was especially rewarding. What’s next, I wondered? The Vegan Lincoln? Lincoln, the champion of the Tridentine mass? The Rail-splitter’s hidden support for the Strategic Defense Initiative?

A day or two later the galley proofs of a new book landed on my desk and I got my answer. Here’s what’s next: Why Lincoln Matters, Today More than Ever, by Mario Cuomo.

This is not Mario Cuomo’s first book, far from it. As one of those politicians who mysteriously acquire a reputation as a bookish fellow, the former governor of New York has–no, written isn’t the word. It is more fitting to say that as an intellectual-politician, he has had his name placed in close association with a number of books: two or three wonkish tomes on public policy, a collection of his own ghost-written speeches, and two thick volumes of excerpts from his personal diaries that were, by painful contrast, self-evidently written by him. A children’s book, too, rolled off the Cuomo production line a while back.

In fact, this is not even Mario Cuomo’s first book on Lincoln. In 1991 he hired the historian Harold Holzer to commission and assemble a collection of scholarly essays by Lincoln enthusiasts in honor of communism’s collapse–nota bene Shannon Jones–and the volume was released with both Cuomo and Holzer listed as editors. (But only Mario got to be interviewed by Larry King.)

Still, Why Lincoln Matters stands alone in the Cuomo corpus. As with the diaries, much of the book shows signs of having been written by its author. Cuomo acknowledges that one chapter was “written with” Holzer, and the hand of the expert collaborator is consistently visible, especially in the citations from Lincoln’s Collected Works that appear artfully throughout, hung like deadweights to the floating zeppelin of Cuomo’s prose. All in all I’d bet this is Mario’s favorite of his many books.

The idea for it came to him, he says, at a ceremony marking the first anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Instead of delivering their own remarks, George Pataki, Michael Bloomberg, and Rudolph Giuliani all chose to read passages from the works of Lincoln. Cuomo marveled at the restraint of his fellow windbags. “That inspired an obvious question,” he writes. “If Lincoln can be helpful in providing insight and comfort concerning one of the most significant events in our history that occurred 136 years after his death, why not consult him concerning other serious challenges we face? . . . My hope is that this book brings Lincoln back into the current conversation of American politics where he so firmly belongs.”

I’M NOT SURE about that firmly. Lincoln is a quicksilver character, always squirting out from beneath the hand that tries to seize him, and this is not through any fault of his own. It’s just that he’s so big and the “current conversation” is so small. Anyone who tries to read him into it will likely make a hash of things, or at least of Lincoln. Disarmingly, Cuomo himself acknowledges the problem. “For generations,” he writes, “politicians have twisted themselves–and Lincoln–out of shape to make it appear that they are standing next to the sixteenth president. Articles and books have been written claiming him as a liberal; others have been written claiming him as a conservative.” However: “Conservatives and liberals alike should always resist the impulse to make Lincoln over in their own image.”

Having delivered this admonition, the author then strides boldly onward, ignoring it entirely. No reader will be surprised that Mario Cuomo, in surveying the span of Lincoln’s life and absorbing the vast expanse of Lincoln’s writing, has discovered that Mario Cuomo and Abraham Lincoln have one hell of a lot in common. The discovery has been humbly made, and for the most part Cuomo wants us to understand that in the firm of Lincoln & Cuomo, he’s happy to assume the role of junior partner. Even so, Why Lincoln Matters seems as much about its author as about its subject. After the introduction, Cuomo takes us on a tour d’horizon of “today’s challenges.” (Challenges has always been one of his favorite words; more dramatic than problems, more abstract than difficulties, more Kennedyesque than issues, it is used by him as a synonym for all three.) Page after page floats by before the reader remembers that the book was supposed to be about Abraham Lincoln. Of Cuomo, however, we get a lot, and also a lot–say, here’s a surprise–of George W. Bush.

Around page fifty or so, Lincoln makes a reappearance, and it turns out that Bush has very little in common with him, unlike some other former governors I could name. As Cuomo reckons them here, the differences between Bush and Lincoln are stark, though what Cuomo sees as contradictions will appear to a less partisan eye as non sequiturs tossed up by a not-terribly-careful history buff. Bush, Cuomo notes, has proposed faith-based initiatives; Lincoln, by contrast, “was the first commander in chief to commission non-Christian military chaplains.” Bush favors tax cuts; Lincoln wanted to preserve a government that “afforded all an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” Bush invaded Iraq; Lincoln refused to attack England as a way of forestalling Southern secession. Indeed, Cuomo announces, “Lincoln would have urged President Bush to continue, at least for a while longer, the diplomacy needed to create a coalition with the United Nations.” Except he’s dead.

Yet he speaks still, from beyond the grave. Occasionally, Cuomo’s invidious use of history is not merely crafty, in the way polemical tricks often are. It can be genuinely repulsive. He reasons that because Lincoln opposed the Mexican-American war, which began in 1848, he would have opposed the invasion of Iraq, which began in 2003. “Lincoln’s disinclination to go to war unless absolutely unavoidable made the notion of preemptory war abhorrent,” Cuomo writes. But in an eerie coincidence, another politician of Lincoln’s era did favor preemptory war. Cuomo quotes Jefferson Davis on the decision to fire on Fort Sumter: “To have awaited further strengthening of their position, with hostile purpose now declared, would have been as unwise as it would be to hesitate to strike down the arm of the assailant who levels a deadly weapon at one’s breast, until he has actually fired.”

Cuomo concludes: “But Lincoln’s keen mind, inveterate caution, and strong aversion to violence would have insisted on inarguable proof. In the end, it is fair to say that President Bush settled for much less than that and so did Jefferson Davis.” Bush had his war, just as Davis had his. And note the phrase, “it is fair to say.” This Cuomo is a mean little man.

No one could make Abraham Lincoln a contemporary liberal without distorting either 2004’s liberalism or 1860’s Lincoln, and so the distortions of Why Lincoln Matters show up everywhere, in large matters and small. Cuomo says that “with the prescience that was another of his great gifts, Lincoln made clear that the need for government would grow as the people’s interactions grew more intense,” but even the scholarly Holzer, frantically thumbing his Lincoln books in the back room, can’t find a quotation to support this assertion. (Conservatives have had as much trouble trying to make Lincoln a small-government man–it is fair to say.) Lincoln would have opposed “corporate welfare,” Cuomo says, though this would be news to the president who signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, one of the most expensive government giveaways in history. Cuomo says Lincoln, like Cuomo, was a “passionate” advocate of “inclusion” and “diversity.” “At the heart of his struggle and his yearning,” he writes, “was always the passion to make room for the outsider and the insistence upon a commitment to respect the idea of equality by fighting for inclusion. Diversity, he said, was not a matter of discord but a bond of union.”

CUOMO PRINTS THIS PASSAGE of his twice, once on page ten and then again on page ninety-six, for reasons unknown; he must think it really sings, or maybe he just forgot. In any case, you’ll notice that he is deploying the words inclusion and diversity in their contemporary sense, as the cant phrases of identity politics. It should go without saying, but probably doesn’t, that Lincoln didn’t understand inclusion and diversity in this way. Identity politics–like raising the minimum wage, tightening environmental laws, subsidizing stem-cell research, or any number of policies Cuomo would force upon him–simply didn’t occur to him. At the risk of pedantry, I’ll point out that Lincoln scarcely used this “language of inclusion” at all. The Collected Works contains one use by Lincoln of the word inclusion, five of diversity, and then only in two senses: diversity of opinion, and the diversity of local governmental arrangements that federalism encourages (not one of Mario Cuomo’s pet causes). Next to Mario, Shannon Jones begins to appear as a model of historical modesty.

Every once in a while, junior partner Cuomo hitches up his trousers and walks right into Old Man Lincoln’s office and gives him what fer. It’s not pretty but it has to be done. These are revealing moments. There are the unhappy matters of Lincoln’s many recorded racist remarks and his problematic suspension of various civil rights during the Civil War. “Notwithstanding Lincoln’s clever attempts at exculpation,” Cuomo writes, “I still wish the great Lincoln had stood by the Constitution despite the strong temptation not to. . . . His transgressions during the war were political heresy, a heresy that made it easier for later presidents, including FDR and George W. Bush, to put aside the law for convenience sake.” Ah, Bush. Quickly Cuomo regains the firmer ground. It may be that President Lincoln shuttered newspapers, threatened the arrest of an entire state legislature, deported a troublesome political opponent, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus. But: “President Bush’s excesses are worse than even the serious misappropriations of power by Lincoln.”

In such moments, the most unattractive quality of Cuomo’s historicism comes plainly into view. Cuomo may be blasting Bush, but he is patronizing Lincoln. How do you condescend to such a personage? It could be possible for Cuomo only if Lincoln isn’t real to him, except as a rhetorical cudgel. Lost in the solipsism of the modern polemicist–you can easily imagine the book serving as the basis for a special episode of the O’Reilly Factor–Cuomo can’t come to terms with either the figure of history or the man of myth. When Lincoln seems to agree with him, Cuomo lapses into sentimentality, misty-eyed at the thought that a man so like himself could have once been president; when Lincoln’s record is deficient, Cuomo turns into a scold, snarling at his own political opponents. Whichever way the analysis swings, it’s all about Mario. Lincoln himself remains untouched.

But let’s hop off this train. (We’ve probably stayed on too long as it is.) Let’s assume for the moment that Cuomo has written this terrible book in good faith and not as an exercise in political opportunism; it’s not a safe assumption, but let’s make it anyway and, in closing, briefly take his argument seriously, if only because it so well reflects how history and Lincoln are commonly used in an age and a country so disdainful of history.

If there’s a single confusion in Why Lincoln Matters that underlies the others, it is Cuomo’s misuse of Lincoln’s idea of equality. Cuomo writes of equality as a goal or a dream, an unfinished program or a will-o’-the-wisp, beckoning us to ever-more ingenious attempts at reshaping the world. Lincoln took equality to be simply a fact. Human equality is built into creation; it is the premise of self-government, not its end. And the purpose of politics and government is to encourage the flourishing of what is already the case.

The distinction between these two ways of looking at the American creed is crucial and, nowadays, unexpectedly pertinent. Cuomo’s idea of equality requires endless schemes to force upon the country an equality of condition–let’s say, to take one of Cuomo’s recurring examples, a government-administered system of universal health care. Lincoln’s idea of equality, on the other hand, though nobler than Cuomo’s, is in practice more modest. Universal health care run by the government may or may not be a good idea; nearly two centuries after his birth, no one can say how Lincoln, a fleet and wily politician, would address the question if he faced it today. But the question itself, like most political questions, is prudential, not a matter of fundamental principle–and it draws no particular answer from the life or work of Lincoln. You can’t enlist him in a cause so small.

As a scriptural authority, in other words, Lincoln offers wide latitude. He comes to us as the best kind of hero, an exemplar looming over our history even as he throws us back on our own resources, mindful of the overspreading principles he preserved and made clear.

This is why Lincoln matters, and will for as long as the country lasts. He is much bigger than Mario Cuomo knows.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.