History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but it Rhymes
In his First Inaugural address President Abraham Lincoln closed optimistically, saying, “…We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
Four years later, Lincolns Second Inaugural address was measured and less optimistic. In the bloody Civil War, Lincoln saw the justice of God being meted out upon a disobedient and sinful nation, saying “…Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continues until all the wealth piled up by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, and still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous all together.’”
Lincoln closed his second inaugural on a healing note: “With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nations wounds …”
Today, there is at least as much malice -and as little charity - towards those who hold different views on the issue of abortion as there once was towards those who held different views on slavery.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” With these words Margaret Atwood calls Americans to reflect upon our times to see if we can discern undercurrents from our nation’s past that “rhyme” with America’s present.
Consider the 1850’s, America was in turmoil. The moral issue dividing the nation was slavery. The country had been torn apart by an 1857 U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that African slaves were “beings of an inferior order” so much so that they had “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” These legal conclusions were rooted in the belief that Black slaves were not fully “persons.”
Against this backdrop, Abraham Lincoln ran for president against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas in 1860. Lincoln opposed slavery while Douglas was pro-choice. Douglas argued that whatever states wanted slaves they had the right to choose: “If any organized political community, however new or small, would enslave men…neither any nor all may interfere.”
Lincoln’s politics were anchored in another viewpoint: “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.” Lincoln understood America was not founded upon the shifting sands of a political truth but on the bedrock of a transcendent theological truth: “That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
In 1860, theological differences divided the candidates and the nation. They still do.
In 1973, the nation was again torn apart by a Supreme Court ruling, this time a decision legalizing abortion. Dr. Alveda King, niece of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., sees a link between the issues of slavery and abortion saying, “abortion and slavery are evil twins, born of the same lie…both (are) symptoms of a fundamental error…(both) spring from the lie that certain human beings are not fully human… (this lie) corrupts our mind into believing we are right to treat others as we would not want to be treated.” Like her uncle, Ms. Kings politics are grounded in her theology.
Theological differences remain at the heart of what divides America. For example, during a January 18, 2021, podcast, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized pro-life voters who supported Donald Trump saying, “…I think Donald Trump is president because of the issue of a woman’s right to choose.” She accused pro-life voters of “being willing to sell the whole democracy down the river for that one issue” saying, their votes cause her “great grief as a Catholic.” Pelosi’s theology is grounded in her politics.
Pelosi has said she believes in the “dignity and worth of every person.” Referring to undocumented aliens she said, “We’re all God’s children, there’s a spark of divinity in every person.” When do humans acquire the “divine spark”? According to Pelosi’s Catholic Church, at conception. As President Barack Obama said, quoting Dr. Suess, “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”
Hillary Clinton believes, “the unborn person does not have Constitutional rights.” During one shameful period in this nation’s history, neither did African slaves. Clinton has forgotten America’s founding principle: the right to life is not given by the Constitution, it is given by God.
In his day, Lincoln said, “The real issue in this controversy, the one pressing on every mind, is the sentiment on the part of one class of people that looks on slavery as wrong and of another class that does not look upon it as wrong.” Today, the real controversy is between one class of people that looks on abortion as wrong and of another class that looks upon it as a right.
Lincoln conceded that if slavery is not wrong - no more consequential than a vote on a blueberry law - then Douglas’ pro-choice position was correct. But, said Lincoln, “if you admit that slavery is wrong, you cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.” Paraphrasing Lincoln, if abortion is a morally neutral obstetrical procedure - like the surgical removal of a gallbladder - then the pro-choice position is correct. But if abortion is wrong, Americans cannot logically say anybody has a right to do wrong.
President Lincoln risked selling the whole democracy down the river over that one issue. Today, Americans – especially the descendants of African slaves – are grateful he did.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Stephen A. Douglas was a prominent figure within the national Democrat party. In 1858, Douglas, ran his Illinois Senatorial campaign against his upstart Republican challenger Abraham Lincoln. Between August and October, Lincoln and Douglas crisscrossed the State, engaging in a series of seven formal debates in a campaign for one of Illinois’ two United States Senate seats.
Douglas was an ambitious political animal and ran his Senate race with one eye on the White House. Running from the free State of Illinois, Douglas knew he could never carry the slave States he would one day need to win the presidency by opposing slavery so, when it came to the issue of slavery, he was pro-choice.
During the debates, Lincoln tried to pin Douglas down on whether he believed the institution of slavery was right or wrong. Douglas knew that if said slavery was wrong, he would offend the Southern States he would need in the future. And if he said slavery was right, he would offend the citizens of Illinois, whose votes he needed if he was to return to his Senate seat in Washington, D.C.
Douglas, the cagy incumbent, refused to take the bait; he refused to take a stand on the question of whether slavery was right or wrong. Instead, he dodged the central issue of the debates by adopting the pro-choice position he called “Popular Sovereignty” …let the people decide:
“The principle of self-government is that each community shall settle this question (of slavery) for itself …and we have no right to complain, either in the north or in the south, whichever they do… I hold that the people of a State have the right to decide for themselves whether slavery shall or shall not exist within their limits…. It is none of my business which way slavery is decided. I care not whether it is voted down or up.”
Douglas’ Doctrine of “Popular Sovereignty,” said his critics, was the glorification of raw political power over the rule of natural law.
In Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America, Lincoln Scholar Allen C. Guelzo, explained the reasoning behind Douglas’ pro-choice position on slavery: “The fundamental premise of Douglas’ popular sovereignty was that democratic decision-making, in order to be free, has to be unencumbered by the weight of factors which are non-political in nature, such as kinship, ethnic identity, or moral or religious obligations. The purpose of politics is not to lead the ‘good life’ or to pursue what is good and true but to ensure fair play, toleration, and personal autonomy….”
For Douglas, Democracy existed to provide a procedural framework for exercising rights, with the desires and lifestyle preferences of political majorities always controlling. In his political ideology, no one path to virtue was laid out and no single morality was held out against others, so that conflicts over differing standards of virtue and morality are held to a minimum.
The ‘procedural republic’ treats its citizens as independent individuals who have rights, which always outrank any appeal to morality, to personal responsibility, or to the general welfare of everyone else. It was this commitment to the procedural republic, wrote Guelzo, that “…pointed Stephen A. Douglas in the direction of arguing that slavery was a constitutionally guaranteed and morally neutral right (and) that it was no business of anyone in the free states to interfere with the exercise of that right…”
For Douglas, the essence of Democracy is process. In this view, noted Guelzo, “Democracy entitles majorities to decide all questions, purely on the grounds they (are) majorities and without respect to theories of political right and wrong.”
In the reasoning of Douglas, all laws enacted by a political majority - or decisions reached by a majority of a court - are always just and right because they were reached by the majority. This approach to politics is known as the “tyranny of the majority” in which the claim to rule, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “is based on numbers not upon rightness...”
Many Americans still broadly share the views held by Douglas, namely that in a Democracy the majority ought to determine what is right and wrong. As President Obama told the Howard University Class of 2016, “People try to make this political thing really complicated (but) it’s math. If you have more votes than the other guy, you get to do what you want.”
But this view raises larger questions: Does democracy exist only to ratify the desires and decisions of its majorities or is American democracy wedded to a set of fundamental propositions that those majorities are accountable to? And where do those propositions come from? Is there a moral core to our American Democracy?
In contrast to Douglas, Lincoln saw politics as a moral pursuit, a virtuous end in itself, not just a procedural means for satisfying individual preferences, lifestyle choices, or community desires. “…He was not a moral absolutist,” wrote Guelzo, “and did not doubt that popular majorities were the essence of free government. But there were certain moral lines even majorities could not cross, certain transcendent truths which no vote could repeal, and some preferences which no amount of Romantic passion could justify…”
Guelzo affirmed that for Lincoln, “… politics was not about helping people exercise rights apart from doing what was right; and slavery was so clearly a violation of the rights of Black slaves it was tantamount to a moral wrong…He transformed the debates into a moral reply to liberalisms preoccupation with process and unencumbered individualism…”
In the debates, Lincoln took the principles of self-government and wed them to a common morality which made the resulting propositions universally right – not merely convenient or useful but transcendently right. He did this by going back again and again to the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence has been called America’s Birth Certificate. The Declaration reminds Americans that their nation was founded upon a God-centered proposition, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Logically, America’s founding proposition is either true or false. If it is true, then American democracy was never concerned with the exercise of rights apart from doing what is right. If it is true, then no one in their pursuit of happiness may deprive another of their right to liberty or their right to life.
If America’s founding proposition is true, it continues to offer moral guidance for how we should view and treat our fellow man: every person has God-given dignity, meaning and worth and each person is entitled to have their God-given rights respected by others and protected by our government. The majority is never free to trample on the God-given rights of any person or minority.
If Americas founding proposition is false then, as Cole Porter said, “Anything Goes.”
The Lincoln - Douglas debates featured political candidates with radically different ideas concerning the purpose of democracy. For Douglas, Democracy was a means for creating a happy, free, and prosperous society, and what the people as a whole desired in the way of happiness, freedom, and prosperity was what democracy should enable them to get. But Lincoln believed politics should be moved by fidelity to a shared morality, the morality revealed in the Declaration of Independence, and he opposed slavery as a violation of that morality.
Against Douglas’ belief that liberal democracy existed only to provide a procedural framework for exercising rights, what Lincoln defended was the idea that there was a moral core to our American democracy; that American democracy had a higher calling because it was founded for a higher purpose - the realization of a morally right political order. No one managed to express this more clearly than Robert Todd Lincoln.
In 1896, Robert Todd Lincoln – eldest son of the then-assassinated president Abraham Lincoln - spoke at the celebration of his father’s debate with Stephen A. Douglas in Galesburg, Ill., saying,
“Now, as then, there can be but one supreme issue, that between right and wrong…”
The Civil War settled the issue regarding slavery, but this “supreme issue” remains a dilemma and a leading cause of our national division and disunity as America staggers into the 21st Century.
As a country, America has been so content to take the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a purely historical event, concluded Guelzo, “that we miss how much the great debates really are a defining moment in the development of (our) liberal democracy, and how much Lincoln is our greatest preceptor and Douglas our most tempting and disastrous alternative - for these are not the lessons modern liberal democracy wishes to hear.” The issues confronting Americans today are different than those challenging the nation in Lincoln’s day, yet we still struggle to find answers to the one supreme issue. Guelzo was right, “If we conceive of the struggle between Lincoln and Douglas as one which asks whether process or principle should be the polestar of a democracy, then the Lincoln-Douglas debate has never actually ended.”
In 1858, Douglas beat Lincoln in the historic Illinois Senate race but two years later Lincoln turned the tables on Douglass and was elected President, while receiving less than half of the popular vote nationally. In most polls on the subject, Lincoln is now considered to have been America’s greatest President yet, at the time he was elected, half the country hated him. We are left to wonder what kind of nation America would have become if Douglas had won that pivotal Presidential contest.
The contentious Presidential election of 2020 has come and gone. Since then, some things regarding the issue of abortion have changed, and some things remain the same.
In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturned its earlier decisions of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In Dobbs, the Court held there is no federal right to an abortion in the U.S. Constitution.
Many hailed the Dobbs decision as a victory for the pro-life movement, but they were wrong. The Dobbs decision simply returned the authority to regulate abortion to the people and the elected representatives of each state. Now that abortion has become a matter of “states’ rights,” Americans can expect that, like slavery before it, abortion will be legal and unrestricted in some states and restricted or banned in others.
The abortion conflict is far from over. It rages on - as strong as ever - in each state capital where the issue has animated democrat voters to turn out in record numbers to preserve “reproductive freedom” and protect “a women’s right to choose.” Following the 2022 mid-term elections, one headline read simply, “How abortion lifted Democrats.”
In the same way that slavery was always more than a racial issue or a matter of state’s rights, abortion is more than a political issue or a matter of women’s health. At its core, abortion remains a moral and religious concern. The religious nature of this conflict was confirmed in a June 2022 Study conducted by the Pew Research Center which found a definite link between a person’s religious views and their stance on abortion. This study found that pro-life Democrats were “much more” religious than pro-choice Democrats. Conversely, pro-choice Republicans were “far less” religious than pro-life Republicans.
The Pew Study confirmed for all time that while it is possible to separate church and state, no one can separate faith and politics. The Pew Study also showed that when it comes to deciding the issue of abortion in America, voting is a religious experience.
Before the 2022 mid-term elections, President Joe Biden told American’s, “Democracy is on the ballot!” The Pew Study confirmed that when it comes to abortion, God was also on the ballot - he always is.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.