Thanks to former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, Abraham Lincoln is enjoying a resurgence as a sage for our times.
In his new op-ed columns for The Washington Post, Gerson has dropped the Lincoln name four times since May, as an example of how Republicans ought to be thinking, but aren’t.
Gerson’s Lincoln advises the party to keep its voters happy, read Shakespeare, not separate politics from religious beliefs and throw over Rudy Giuliani, because his tangled position on abortion resembles political loser Stephen Douglas’ on slavery.
But all these lessons Gerson draws from Lincoln — well, except his take on slavery — are effortfully squeezed from minor elements of his history and philosophy.
The instructions for how to mollify restless voters come from an obscure letter Lincoln wrote in the mid-1800s, before he was even a Republican.
And though he believed in natural rights, Lincoln was no religious man in any sense we would recognize today — in fact, many of his close friends thought he was secretly an atheist.
Gerson clearly loves Lincoln, and looks to him for political wisdom. But why such oblique references to his life and thoughts? Maybe it’s because Gerson doesn’t want to face the big lesson Lincoln has to teach.
In 1845, Lincoln wrote what would become a famous and controversial letter to an Illinois Whig colleague who was a die-hard abolitionist.
He chastised his friend for bringing down the presidential candidacy of Whig hero Henry Clay the year before because Clay owned slaves.
By voting with his conscience, Lincoln lamented, his friend had actually damaged the greater cause of freedom by allowing a different candidate to win, one who supported the annexation of Texas as a slave state.
“By the fruit the tree is to be known,” Lincoln wrote. “An evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit. If the fruit of electing Mr. Clay would have been to prevent the extension of slavery, could the act of electing have been evil?”
Lincoln recognized that sometimes political compromises that are not morally pure are necessary to bring you that much closer to the end goal you want.
Now apply this idea to the Republican presidential primary. From a Lincolnian perspective, the desperate rush to find someone with pure-enough conservative credentials resembles those Whig abolitionists’ absolutism.
Sam Brownback, the purest on abortion, has no hope in a general election. If the fruit of electing Romney — who is constantly attacked for his alleged impurity on the abortion issue — would be to prevent the extension of abortion rights and the appointment of liberal judges to the Supreme Court, should Republicans view the act of electing as evil, even if his wife once donated to Planned Parenthood?
I know some people will laugh at me for this, but I think Lincoln would have voted for the immigration compromise bill, too instead of killing it by deriding it as “amnesty,” as Republicans did.
Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., just introduced a hard-line enforcement bill designed to address the objections held by the compromise’s opponents.
But even he admitted it had no chance of being enacted into law, because the chance to enact tougher laws lay in giving the Democrats some of what they wanted, like a solution to the 12 million illegals already here. Now, that chance has been wasted thanks to excessive purism.
Throughout this congressional term, Republicans have balked at and filibustered legislation because it isn’t perfect.
It’s true that Congress wasn’t created to pass laws without concern as to whether they are bad or good. But it was created to tackle major national problems, like immigration and Iraq, not merely to discuss them.
What kind of tree is it that doesn’t produce any fruit at all?
Examiner Columnist Eve Fairbanks is an assistant editor at The New Republic.
