Interesting piece about how Lincoln read Marx and agreed with some of what the German philosopher had to say. Of course, the broad founding principle of the Republican Party was "free labor, free soil, free men." The idea was that if there was no slavery, then the proper relations between workers and "capital" would be allowed to work itself out. The Republican Party was largely created out of a desire to keep slavery (and blacks) out of the west. It also sought to protect American workers with tariffs and to build the infrastructure necessary for labor and goods to move freely around the country.
The "free labor" ideology, however, crumbled on two pressure points: race and wealth.
Race was the abandonment after 1877 (if not sooner) of African Americans in the South. This was a political act both in the Compromise of 1877 and the larger movement of more conservative Republicans away from the cause of African American equality. The descent of Southern Blacks into debt peonage was a signal abandonment of the idea of free labor.
The other was the movement, led mostly by the Courts, to allow for greater and greater consolidation of wealth into industrial conglomerates. Free labor was supposed to re-invigorate Jefferson's ideas of personal independence in the face of growing urbanization and industrialization. No better example of this existed than Lincoln himself, the rough railsplitter who became America's greatest president. But the Courts continued to move American law away from the rights of working people and into the hands of people with great wealth.
The GOP was once the party of Lincoln.
It lasted about 20 years.
No comments:
Post a Comment