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Michael Lind has made so many, and such glowing, references to me in What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President that I am not sure whether I should have appeared as a co-author of the book rather than its reviewer. So let me say at the outset that there are two things about this book which I think are worth admiring—and one very large questionable thing which may render the admirable parts moot. Those who are satisfied with this as an example of disinterested benevolence are invited to read on in safety.
What Lincoln |
As a pundit, a columnist, and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Lind is looking for the sort of thing in Lincoln which most people outside the analytical realms of academe look for, and that is some form of guidance about the nature of democracy. You might think that this looking would be better directed to the Founders—to Madison, Hamilton, Washington, and the Revolutionary generation. But we have become accustomed to the notion that an élitist republic rather than a democracy was the real goal of the Founders, and that democracy was something which was happening outside their circle, and not with their approbation. And so people turn, like Mr. Smith at the Lincoln Memorial, to what bearings on democracy Lincoln can give them.
Therein lies one of the great points Lind scores in What Lincoln Believed, because Lind understands how very, very perilous the status of democracy was in Lincoln's day. In the middle of the 19th century, the United States was the only large-scale, functioning nation-state in the world living under anything that approached the idea of democracy. "In Europe," Lind begins, "the dominant region of the world, monarchs and aristocrats were securely in command." And with, apparently, good reason: the most recent attempts at popular self-government—the French revolutionaries of 1789 and 1830, and the German and Austrian revolutionaries of 1848—had collapsed the moment one faction's notion of self-government differed from another faction's notion. Democracy seemed to possess a lethal, and unavoidable, centripetal force, based on the sheer perversity of human nature.
That democracy survived the Civil War has permitted us to forget that it was ever in serious jeopardy, and forced us to explain Lincoln's goals in more fuddled and contradictory terms—as the Great Commoner who wanted to raise up the little guy, as a willing dupe who paved the way for the emergence of the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age, as a mystical Unionist, as a prophet of the New Deal, as the Great Emancipator. What Lind sees, and sees with hairline accuracy, was that for Lincoln all of these were subordinate to proving to the theater of the world that democracy was fully capable of resisting the pressures democracies generated from within, without losing its democratic soul. "This is essentially a People's contest," Lincoln explained to Congress. "On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men."1 The war was thus more than a war, or even a civil war—it was an ideological test, to see whether the American experiment in self-government, "or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure."
This much forms Lind's first cheer for Lincoln; the second cheer emerges at the end of the book, when he extends Lincoln's defense of democracy as a defense, not of an airy theoretical principle, but of the democratic nation-state. Formed in the mold of Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Clay's Whig Party, Lincoln believed profoundly in the right of Americans to self-government. But it was Americans, as Americans, who possessed that right. Lind's Lincoln is not an internationalist—he is perfectly happy to have other nations follow the American example into democracy, but he does not think that Americans have any special ownership of the idea of democracy, and he has little interest in forcibly exporting it, on the pattern of a Wilsonian or a Rooseveltian internationalism. It was democracy in America, not American democracy, which Lincoln sought to defend, and sought to hold up as the "last, best hope of mankind."
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