We need a new Abraham Lincoln by 2024
Lincoln was the first one to get elected as a Republican in 1860. He was president during a civil war and emancipated the slaves. We really need another president like him!
Happy(ier?) New Year! I just read a news item that said both the Republicans and the Democrats are close to imploding. I agree. I hear from virtually everybody I know, across the political spectrum, conservative or liberal, that they are worried about our political system, that the center can’t hold. We are so polarized as a country that we cannot agree on how to move forward. Both party leaders are geriatric; younger politicians can’t figure out how to emerge as leaders. Crime is rampant in major cities, homelessness is worse than the Great Depression, the Haves have so much more than the Have Nots that the middle class is disappearing, and so forth.
I’m an optimist at heart. I’ve been working on this idea, that we need a new leader who, like Abraham Lincoln did in 1860, will guide us through a dangerous period of civil conflict. The analogy is not perfect. Lincoln himself was flawed. (I just read in The 1619 Project how he recommended to a Black delegation to the White House that Black people should move out of the country!) He was elected as a Republican when that party was new and represented liberal politics. including emancipation. The Democrats were slave-owners. The country actually did go to war and 750,000 people died, almost as many as have died from COVID-19 in the past two years. It took years to repair the damage done, if it has been wholly repaired.
But here we are, 150 years later, divided, pissed off and fearful for our future. What Alana Newhouse said when she observed that Everything Is Broken. What Leil Leibovitz described as “politically homeless”. (Thank you, Bari Weiss for both references and to Alana Newhouse for publishing both). While these are opinions written by liberals, conservatives have similar concerns. Neither understands the other. The media seems to have failed in its most fundament obligation to help us stay informed and, as a result, we are trusting it less and less.
Who can lead us into a better world? Better times are born out of crisis. I believe that the polarization we are going through now will lead to a common belief of what “being American” means, one that blends fundamental values with progressive ones. One that leads us to a place where all of us are proud to be Americans first: risk-takers, innovators, tolerant, open to immigrants and diversity, but disciplined and competent in our social, fiscal and foreign policies.
We need an individual to lead us there, and it would be very timely if that individual emerged by the time we go back to the national polls at the end of 2024. Who is that individual? One might hope that that person is younger than, say, 55. A better leader in fact than Barack Obama. More like John F. Kennedy than Beto O’Rourke. Perhaps inherently diverse?
I focused on Abraham Lincoln as the model for this individual after Barak Obama cited Team Of Rivals when he was running for president the first time, in 2008. He cited that book as a guide for an outsider getting elected; it was controversial because he was a Democrat citing a Republican. But, from reading that book, I learned that the Republicans were the liberals in 1850, that The New York Times was a Republican newspaper, but most important in this context, that Abraham Lincoln managed to become the first Republican president, stepping into the void created by the implosion of the Whigs in the 1840s.
Now we face an even more ominous situation, where both political parties seem to be imploding at the same time. Everyone predicts that the Trump-lead Republican Party will regain control of the House next year through gerrymandering and state-sponsored rules that make voting less representative. The Democrats are so desperate to achieve unpopular social objectives precisely when voters seem most concerned about the government being out of control.
More than 150 years later, our two-party system looks like it is having the same kind of crisis as the Whigs did back then. Can a new leader emerge who can both stand up to Trumpism and inspire traditional conservatives, independents and liberals?
If anyone is positioned to accomplish this, I think it’s Liz Cheney. She is the Republican who stood up to Trumpism at the risk of her own political career, and was promptly stripped of her party roles in the House of Representatives. Still she accepted Nancy Pelosi’s appointment to the select (meaning not bi-partisan) committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol. This took real backbone. Clearly, backbone isn’t what gets anyone elected these days. The voters in Wyoming appear poised to reject Cheney at the polls next year.
Thomas Friedman asked a similar question when he wondered Do Democrats have the courage of Liz Cheney? “At the end of our conversation, though,” he wrote, “I could only shake my head and ask: Liz, how could there be only one of you?”
Is Cheney the only one? The only individual, Democrat or Republican, willing to sacrifice her political career to stand up for what she believes in? Isn’t there someone, perhaps an experienced, younger, inspiring politician who can stand up for constitutional principles just as energetically as for diversity and inclusion, from either side of the aisle? Beto O’Rourke? Marco Rubio? Pete Buttigieg? Mia Love? Scott Wiener?
Isn’t it true that leaders emerge when they are most needed?