{"id":13813,"date":"2016-08-22T08:23:59","date_gmt":"2016-08-22T14:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=13813"},"modified":"2016-08-24T08:28:46","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T14:28:46","slug":"opinion-will-gop-be-party-of-lincoln-or-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/08\/opinion-will-gop-be-party-of-lincoln-or-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion: Will GOP be party of Lincoln or Trump?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"EB\"<\/a>

Evan Barrett<\/p><\/div>\n

Political parties change over time, sometimes reversing roles, sometimes disappearing. Today\u2019s GOP has undergone many transformations since its birth in the 1850s as the successor to the Whig Party.<\/p>\n

The Republican Party was founded on and ultimately found its legitimacy as the abolitionist, anti-slavery party before and after the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, America\u2019s 16th and arguably greatest president, was its voice and identity.<\/p>\n

Today we wonder if the GOP is going to be Abraham Lincoln\u2019s party or Donald Trump\u2019s.<\/p>\n

In the years following Lincoln, because of the Republican commitment to ending slavery and reforming the South, and because of the vestiges of slavery and racism there, we saw a century in which \u201cthe solid South\u201d was reliably Democratic.<\/p>\n

Republicans didn\u2019t stand a chance in the South, but their party led the rest of the nation in the progressive era, peaking in the period of Republican President Teddy Roosevelt.<\/p>\n

As the Democratic Party sought support in northern cities, it struggled for an identity not based on the Jim Crow racism of the South\u2014often cloaked in the rhetoric of \u201cstates\u2019 rights.\u201d The crisis period that changed the Democratic Party came between 1948 and 1968.<\/p>\n

At the 1948 Democratic National Convention, Hubert H. Humphrey urged the Democratic Party to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.” Strom Thurmond Dixiecrats bolted the party. Yet, in the 1950s it was still a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, who sent the federal troops into Little Rock to enforce school desegregation.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Real change, the role reversal based on civil rights, began during the 1960 campaign when John F. Kennedy called Coretta Scott King, who feared for the life of her husband, Martin Luther King, then being held in Georgia State Prison for a probation violation. Then Vice President Richard Nixon, the GOP presidential candidate, decided not to make that phone call.<\/p>\n

After JFK was elected in 1960, he tried to walk a line between Southern and Northern Democrats, but ultimately bent toward that \u201csunshine of human rights.\u201d After Kennedy\u2019s assassination, Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner, became a profile in courage when he pushed through the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.<\/p>\n

Racially tinged Southern Democratic opposition to that legislation and to the direction of the party in general led to a long-term loss of Democratic strength in the South.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the noble history of Lincoln\u2019s GOP was radically altered in 1968 by politically reincarnated Richard Nixon\u2019s electorally driven \u201cSouthern strategy,\u201d which used racial code words, dog-whistles and states\u2019 rights rhetoric to secure, for the long term, the Southern vote for Republicans (described in Kevin Phillips\u2019 1969 book \u201cThe Emerging Southern Majority\u201d).<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been awhile since the GOP was Lincoln\u2019s party. A Republican Party identity crisis looms today, thanks to Donald Trump, who has gone way beyond dog-whistle politics to outright appeals to racism and intolerance and who strikes out at all kinds of people and peoples.<\/p>\n

In her book, \u201cTeam of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,\u201d historian Doris Kearns Goodwin noted Lincoln\u2019s \u201cextraordinary array of personal qualities\u201d and said \u201cthat in the hands of a truly great politician the qualities we generally associate with decency and morality\u2014kindness, sensitivity, compassion, honesty, and empathy\u2014can also be impressive political resources.\u201d She pointed out that under \u201cappalling pressures,\u201d Lincoln \u201crefused to be provoked by petty grievances, to submit to jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights.\u201d<\/p>\n

Goodwin\u2019s book, written in 2005, could not have anticipated the GOP ascendency of Donald Trump. Yet it seems he could be undone by utterly lacking the very attributes Goodwin described as supreme assets for Lincoln.<\/p>\n

Trump is known as the candidate who can be \u201cbaited by a tweet\u201d to react in ways that are not just counter to his own good but also to the good of the country. Trump\u2019s instability and uncontrollable reactivity contrast directly with Lincoln\u2019s studied calmness in the face of the most strenuous assaults.<\/p>\n

So, has the GOP just lost its way? Will it, following this election, find itself returning to being the party of Lincoln, or even the party of Nixon? Or will it find itself, in Trump victory or defeat, permanently changed, having lost its soul? And, if so, will good-hearted Republicans stay with such a party?<\/p>\n

Evan Barrett, of Butte, recently retired after\u00a047 years of involvement in\u00a0Montana economic development, government, politics and education. He currently writes columns and commentaries, is an award-winning producer of Montana history films and occasionally teaches.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Political parties change over time, sometimes reversing roles, sometimes disappearing. Today\u2019s GOP has undergone many transformations since its birth in the 1850s as the successor to the Whig Party. The Republican Party was founded on and ultimately found its legitimacy as the abolitionist, anti-slavery party before and after the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln, America\u2019s 16th […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":95,"featured_media":13814,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3864],"tags":[2735,2853,4871,4869,4868,4870],"class_list":["post-13813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-abraham-lincoln","tag-donald-trump","tag-hubert-h-humphrey","tag-john-f-kennedy","tag-lyndon-johnson","tag-strom-thurmond","prominence-category-featured"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/95"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}