Paywall:

Amid the chaos of America in 2020, a number of opportunistic political operatives have been inspired to “rebrand” in an effort to convey some sort of timely political realignment.

Not so much the major players of the Democratic Party. Most of them have either remained staunchly opposed to anything from the Bernie Sanders agenda, or they have doubled down on the party’s rightward drift to appeal to those elusive “moderate Republicans in the suburbs.”

No, it’s a number of enterprising Republicans who have acquired a new coat of paint — namely the “Never Trump” faction of conservatives who bemoan the incivility and chaos that Donald has wrought upon our country and their party. Of the Never Trumpers, among them high-profile conservatives like Max Boot, Bill Kristol, and Jennifer Rubin, none are quite so seemingly counterintuitive as the Lincoln Project, the political action committee formed in 2019 to “hold accountable those who would violate their oaths to the Constitution and would put others before Americans.” In practice, this means a massive press and social media campaign to support Joe Biden, the sort of Democrat that many wealthy Republicans would love to see in office.

As is so often the case with Republicans selling their moral bona fides, the Lincoln Project invokes our sixteenth president, who oversaw a devastating war to preserve the Union and abolish slavery. Of course, Republicans love to claim they belong to “the party of Lincoln,” even as the party itself bears absolutely no resemblance to Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans. And though this point may be obvious, it does raise a bewildering question: What the fuck is a republican, as distinct from a Republican?

Richard Bensel’s classic 1991 history, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877, explains the trajectory of the former into the latter — from the Party of the Union to the Party of Finance — with a thorough account of Civil War party politics and the subsequent failures of Reconstruction. It’s true that it was the Southern Democrats who led the charge to secession. At the time, these were whites who favored Jacksonian democracy, meaning they endorsed the “democracy” of extending suffrage to all white men, alongside laissez-faire economics and limiting the role of the federal government to do things like, say, abolish slavery.

By contrast, Abraham Lincoln was the first president elected on the Republican ticket, a brand new party favored by Northerners who opposed slavery for any number of reasons, often in combination: some recognized it as a moral abomination, some saw it as the feature of a corrupt oligarchy in Washington, DC, and some were concerned about its devastating drag on economic development. All, however, advocated limiting the expansion of the institution westward. These Republicans also favored economic protectionism, investment in infrastructure, and building the sort of active, planned state necessary for developing a diversified and increasingly industrial economy.

The kind of state Republicans were trying to construct is, unsurprisingly, called a “republic,” and it was met with fierce resistance from Southern leaders. Secession was an attempt to thwart this larger project, but as Bensel shows, Republicans continued working to build a republic during the war — not only by crushing the slaveholding class and strengthening federal power over the states, but by coordinating a war finance plan, improving national infrastructure, and using federal aid to spur diversified economic development.

Spoiler alert: the Union won, slavery was abolished, and the ambitiously named period of Reconstruction should have set the stage for that great American republic the party of Lincoln had dreamed of. But this was not to be.

In the defeated South, the white planter elite fought the Northern occupation tooth and nail, mounting a deadly resistance to Republican efforts to extend civil and political rights to former slaves. Meanwhile, the rapid ascendency of finance capital had no use for the broader industrial and economic ambitions of Reconstruction. Bensel notes that the decimated and still underdeveloped South required massive investment to reintegrate itself into the United States, but instead of sending capital down to the region, Northern Republican Party politicians began to side with high finance by the 1870s. In direct opposition to their supposedly republican ambitions, they voted against planning, infrastructure, investment, taxes, and tariffs. Republicans also made disastrous concessions to Southern elites — and so the grand ambitions of Reconstruction were smothered by Northern economic conservatism, while racist violence, disenfranchisement, and segregation were codified in the South.

Republics were passé, and laissez-faire capitalism was the future.

That’s how the Republican Party became distinctly anti-republican. It’s why Joe Biden doesn’t horrify the GOP, why he even has a few “big names” in the Republican punditry and campaign industries boosting him, and why we have two political parties that you can barely distinguish from each other on economic policy. In fact, the abandonment of republicanism is the first — but not the last — barricade to anything approaching a workers’ party in the United States.

If socialists want to transform the United States in our lifetime, then they should first take up that small-r republican struggle for themselves. Because Reconstruction is not complete, and no one else is even up to the task. It’s clear that the Union is not whole, and that this fractured country based on regional economic competition and exploitation favors capital above all else. Capitalism is given unlimited growth over and across state borders, while left movements are largely penned in and restricted to one of fifty little semi-independent nations.

The more anarchist strains of left thought argue for the superiority of allegedly organic social formations like community, localism, regionalism, and municipalism — all of which were justifications for the succession of the American Confederacy as well. Not only are these ideals thoroughly and inherently conservative — a variation on “states’ rights” made palatable with a convenient left affect — they keep popular movements small.

It’s a grave error both politically and strategically to assume that “small is beautiful.” The tendency of smaller social units to be more socially and economically conservative, obstacles to mass politics in general and social-democratic reforms in particular, is not a coincidence — it’s a natural feature of smallness.

Nearly every major democratizing program and institution in our country’s history has had to fight to be big. The New Deal, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act were all major advances for American democracy — and they were all fought viciously by states’ rights advocates intent on controlling their bailiwicks through the formal dissection and segregation of the country.

Despite the obstruction of universalist New Deal benefits, often by a still-segregated South, the improvements in American life extended across racial lines. With these gains outsourced to states, however, their vulnerability to erosion has proven all too obvious. Redlining, public housing policy, education budgets, and voting laws — all determined at a local level — have consistently proven effective means by which to segregate and disenfranchise. Meanwhile, state attacks on Planned Parenthood and restrictions aside, no woman will ever truly have the right to abortion without a guarantee of free health care at the point of access. The laws aren’t useless, but without a big, fat republic to back it up, they have no fortification from reactionaries and retrenchment.

At the same time, state and community initiatives have always found champions among the liberal ultrawealthy. It was the Ford Foundation that advocated for and invested heavily in “developmental separatism” and “self-determination” for black people in New York City, granting them the “freedom” to experiment with local initiatives and programs among their own rather than “assimilate” — that is, desegregate, a project that would require both redistribution and a standardization of resources and funding. More recently, “school choice” was the preferred euphemism for disastrous charter school programs, another round of “autonomy” sold as the alternative to equality. At the international level, Bill and Melinda Gates invested in microlending to the Third World — as opposed to large-scale industrial development — insisting that it was better to have peasants take out small business loans rather than, say, investing collectively in developing an industrial economy and welfare state. Go ahead and search for “microfinance, repayment, suicide” to figure out how so many of those “entrepreneurs” fared.

Moreover, the deliberately byzantine nature of state variation absolutely paralyzes any popular movements. Labor law varies so wildly at a state level that organizing a national action or campaign immediately becomes a house of cards. Ever wonder why it’s so difficult to hold police accountable for violence or murder? Well, you’re looking at one of America’s finest “community institutions.”

  • glimmer_twin [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    I have a few thoughts on this, and I feel like I should say upfront I’m not just piling on because this is “Amber.” Click bait headline aside (which I’m sure wasn’t her choice), there’s some dogshit takes in here. Analogising between anarchists concerned with local community organising and states rights/the confederacy is... a hell of an eyebrow raising idea, for one. I’d be posting this response regardless who authored it.

    Despite the obstruction of universalist New Deal benefits, often by a still-segregated South, the improvements in American life extended across racial lines.

    It’s a shame she just throws this out there as if it’s general knowledge and doesn’t require proof, because I’ve literally read that the opposite is true and that the New Deal overwhelmingly aided white America.

    primarily because they generate revenue from industries that exist to commodify that which socialists fight to de-commodify

    For anyone that missed it (and it’s an easy, kind of innocuous sentence to just skim over), these few words tell you all you need to know about this liberal brand of “socialism” (aka opportunism and revisionism). Making some kind of distinction between states that “generate revenue from industries that exist to commodify that which socialists fight to de-commodify” and ones that don’t, and calling yourself a socialist, is the height of revisionism. Socialists, communists (not radlibs and succdems) fight to de-commodify labour. We fight to overthrow wage labour, workers having to sell their labour to someone who owns the means of production. As far as I’m aware, every single state in the union generates revenue from wage labour. This might just be one innocuous sentence but it tells you all you need to know about the limits of imagination of “socialists” of the Jacobin type.

    Even if you could win universal health care in California, it would be weak, flimsy, and easy to cut

    Does this not apply to winning welfare/social reforms at the federal level also? Which, as far as I can tell is also the limit of succdem political imagination? On top of that, didn’t she just tell us that the much vaunted New Deal got destroyed by the states? Couldn’t that just happen to federal UHC? Unless the point of the piece is arguing that the US government should be MORE federally centralised...

    Speaking of “the point of the article”, besides those specific issues I have with the piece, generally speaking I find myself asking what exactly she’s arguing for?

    Maybe it’s because in the context of my country, being a “republican” means you are pro-republic, i.e. you want to become a republic and ditch the British royal family as our head of state, but I literally don’t understand what she’s advocating with this “socialists should become small-r republicans” turn of phrase.

    Is she arguing for MORE federal centralisation, except in the hands of a social democratic president? Because I’m sure that would work out excellently once your guy got the CIA heart attack gun and got replaced with some ghoul.

    Is she arguing that socialists should fight against U.S. balkanisation, which has become somewhat of a meme these days? If she is she doesn’t mention it or tell us how or why?

    Is she arguing that socialists should try to build a nationwide movement, rather than focus solely on local work? In which case... ok? That seems pretty obvious. Did anyone really need an article to tell them that?

    On the whole, typical Jacobin succdem shit. This opportunist is telling socialists the upper limits of their imagination should be a more centralised bourgeois democracy with nominal “socialists” pulling the levers of power. Nothing to do with doing away with the bourgeois state entirely, organising the USA in some other way more conducive to socialism.

    • crispyhexagon [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      you see, what we really need is that good ol fashioned lincoln era republicanism where we checks notes want to ship all the black people back to africa but settle for making slavery legal only when the judicial system, run by white supremacist (ex)slaveowners, says someone was naughty.

      the new deal was just sooo great, thats why black americans were immediately able to live full and rich lives and not at all crushed under the heel of capitalist exploitation, i am very smart.

      :amber-snacking:

      • glimmer_twin [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        It literally reads to me like she read that book she name checks early on, and then just shat out an article about how socialists should... like Lincoln more?

  • lib_0000429384 [any]
    hexagon
    ·
    4 years ago

    Continued:

    There is often a temptation to work toward passing major programs at a state level, particularly if you live in a wealthy, “progressive” state that you believe will be more amenable to a new social program than the country at large. But the idea that you could pass a single-payer health care program in a wealthy blue state not only over-estimates how progressive your state is, it forgets exactly why such states are wealthy enough to theoretically afford such a program — primarily because they generate revenue from industries that exist to commodify that which socialists fight to de-commodify. California is a Bernie state and a Medicare for All state, but more important, it’s the home of Kaiser Permanente.

    Even if you could win universal health care in California, it would be weak, flimsy, and easy to cut — California used to have free public universities, and look how well those held up. Meanwhile, as the only constitutionally authorized government service, the United States Postal Service has endured steady attacks from both parties, but as a fundamentally republican — and therefore strong — institution, it has weathered the onslaught longer than any state program.

    Over and over again, Democrats and Republicans alike have championed the idea of states as the “laboratories of democracy,” and over and over again, this has meant that human beings are little more than lab rats. These mercenary chop-shop artists are, of course, correct to fight on behalf of localism, “community solutions,” states’ rights, and every other political unit smaller than the nation itself. Their goal is to divide and isolate the working class in an effort to preclude the mightiest sum of parts.

    Today, socialists are faced with a choice: Do we want to be big and strong, or do we want to be small and weak? Should we choose the former, we have to finish the project that the very first Republicans began more than a century and a half ago.

    In the late 1930s, American Communists held their convention in a large arena in New York, under a giant bust of Abraham Lincoln’s head, dwarfing the Lenin and Stalin portraits below. It’s a patriotic decor that might surprise radicals today.

    But those party members understood something that eludes and rankles many liberals, conservatives, and even leftists in 2020: that it’s socialists who are Lincoln’s true heirs. And it’s socialists who will lead the fight to finally achieve the goals of an American republic: “A government of the people, by the people, for the people.”