The Party of Lincoln AND Calhoun? The Right and the Civil War

“When the intellectual authors of the modern right created its doctrines in the 1950s,” wrote Sam Tanenhaus in The New Republic, “they drew on nineteenth-century political thought, borrowing explicitly from the great apologists for slavery, above all, the intellectually fierce South Carolinian John C. Calhoun…. The party of Lincoln… has become the party of Calhoun.” At first glance, such a statement sounds laughable. The Republican Party is indeed the party of Lincoln, a fact it has fully embraced over many years.  A 1992 political button for the campaign for president of George H.W. Bush in my possession claims “a proud tradition” for the GOP, featuring photographs of party luminaries Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.


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