Did Lincoln lose his soul or save a nation?
And you don’t need to win over 100 percent of the people on the other side or on any side. In a democracy, what you need is a majority. — NPR’s Steve Inskeep to Anand Giridharadas at The.Ink
Aggressive gerrymandering by GOP-led legislatures means in many places it takes much more than a simple majority to win power. Otherwise, Inskeep is correct. What Democrats must do in such places is shave the other side’s vote margins.
That’s doable. Non-Democrats are not monolithic, nor are Trump supporters, as John Russell of The Holler found in Erie, Pennnsylvania. Democrats campaigning conservatively by avoiding all contact with such voters won’t cut it. Nor will giving potential allies the side-eye when they move in our direction. The left is too liberal with sticks and way too stingy with carrots.
Inskeep (“Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America“) makes a case for political frenemies in conversation with Giridharadas:
I don’t know if you’ve read Frank Foer’s new book on the Biden presidency. It’s called The Last Politician, and it struck me that, on a completely different topic, it was presenting this idea that’s kind of similar to yours. The idea is that Biden, in Foer’s telling, is someone whose gift is this now despised art of politics, of making deals, of talking to people you don’t like, of being able to hold your nose with ugly compromises. And that idea has gotten demeaned in our time. Part of what Foer’s arguing is that, actually, in a moment of anti-democratic threat, that behavior, while maybe crass and all those things we associate it with, is crucial; it’s actually what holds societies together. I wonder if you feel like you are making a similar case but drawing on a 19th century example for the 21st century?
I think there is a similarity there, and the common thread is this: if you think that there is a minority of people who endanger the country, you need to be the one to assemble a majority to outnumber them. If you’re going to defeat someone you think is doing something terrible, and also keep a democracy, you have to build a majority. And that might mean that you have to deal with people that you disagree with on some things, or many things, or even most things, but you find enough common cause that you can work with them on something.
You write in the beginning of the book that Lincoln has been sacralized, much in the way that folks like Martin Luther King are sacralized and all kinds of heroes are sacralized, so that we lose the texture of how they actually operated in the down and dirty reality of political life. Can you give us some examples of Lincoln’s lower-order behaviors and maneuvering and machinations that illustrate this kind of politicking that you’re trying to redeem?
We want Lincoln to be a heroic, unifying figure. And he ought to be; he is in many ways a unifying figure and a great democratic figure, but we overlook the things that he did that led to his accomplishments. And one of the toughest ones was his effort to win the votes of people who hated immigrants: so-called Know-Nothings in the 1850s.
This was a huge movement, it attracted a lot of support, it included a lot of Lincoln’s own political friends in the state of Illinois, it included a lot of voters in important parts of the state of Illinois, and Lincoln hated the ideology that was being expressed. There’s a quote in the book, from a letter to his friend, where Lincoln says, I’m not a Know-Nothing, that is certain, I despise their views as much as I despise slavery, and if they ever get into power, I would rather move to a country where they make no pretense of loving liberty, such as Russia.
And yet he realizes in 1858, when he’s running for Senate, that if he’s going to have even a chance of winning, he needs to attract some of these people into his coalition. And he reaches out to Joseph Gillespie, an old friend of his, who’d become a Know-Nothing leader, and says, I need votes in your state senate district. I need votes from your supporters to have any chance of winning. Will you help me? And Gillespie does. Now, I want to add that Lincoln tried to keep his integrity. As far as I can tell, from the records that exist, he talked to these crowds only about their common aversion to slavery. He never has a whisper, even a word, where he hints that he might like their Know-Nothing ideology.
But he was still taking this morally perilous choice to build the anti-slavery coalition. That’s a hard call. Are we entirely comfortable knowing that Abraham Lincoln, the guy in the Lincoln Memorial, was on a stage with a nativist leader a couple of times? It’s kind of uncomfortable, but it was part of building the Republican Party that ended up bringing about an enormous social change in this country.
Russell found areas of common agreement with MAGAs he met in Erie. The right is not monolithic. Out in red counties, accentuating areas of positive agreement (as the song goes) has potential for shaving the GOP’s margins enough to win a majority, at least in state or congressional district races (2006). Our frenemies don’t have to check off every ideological box. Just enough to vote with us and win us power to make change.
Inskeep says, “the challenge is not to be friends with everybody, it is to assemble a majority of people who will respect your humanity, who will uphold your rights. Or who will at least a little bit support your side of the argument, as much as you can do today, as much as you can do in the next election.” That involves “in some cases risking yourself to find alliances.”
Anat Shenker-Osorio (profiled in Giridharadas’ “The Persuaders“) tells students at Berkeley (timestamp 3:09), “In advocacy … you can choose to be right or you can choose to win.” The left loves being right. Shenker-Osorio doesn’t care.
“If I can get you to do the thing I need you to do and you still think climate change is fake,” she says, “then that’s a problem for you and the person who dropped you on your head. But it’s not a problem for me.”
I’m also in this for the win.