NO DOUBT IF he were alive and running for the presidency in 2024, Abraham Lincoln would have been effectively shut out for what he said during those iconic Lincoln-Douglas debates during his campaign to get a Senate seat, one which Douglas won in the end. You know, the ones that are often named but almost never read or studied. The debates that were real debates about the most important issues of a campaign, not the stupid show in which media talking heads lob gotcha questions at the Democrat and puffs of eiderdown to the most fascist of Republicans.
Lincoln would certainly have been shut out during the first one, held in Ottawa, Illinois in which he used the "N" word as he ridiculed the fear tactic that Douglas employed, like a Lou Dobbs or Donald Trump holding out the fear of Illinois being swamped with free Black People if Lincoln's proposals for the promises of the Declaration of Independence were to become law.
Admittedly, it is jarring to read Lincoln using that word and also denying that he held that Black People were the complete equals of white People, no doubt knowing that even a good number of those who might agree with him that slavery was evil would, nonetheless, be highly offended if someone pointed out that Black People were their equal if not their superiors in some regard. I'd guess a lot of them would have been as offended if someone said that the Irish or other groups of white People were their equals, certainly if Native Americans were, though that didn't come into the debates.
It's one of the truths of American history that the two presidents before Lyndon Johnson who did the most to further equality in reality instead of theory, Lincoln and Harry Truman, are on record as having uttered that very detestable word and probably others. Today the idiotic political discourse would concentrate on that use of a word and not on the substance of what they did. Thurgood Marshall once said that Harry Truman integrating the military was, up to that point, the most radical single action a president had ever undertaken in the move towards equal rights, I would guess he meant since Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. I don't know if he said that before or after the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts were passed, which I think are even more important. If Lyndon Johnson is on record as having uttered that word, I don't know but it wouldn't surprise me if he had, being of his time and place and provenance. Real American democracy starts with the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, before that it was a everything from a total to growing less than the sham it started out being. Which is why the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have been dismantling them, especially the all-important Voting Rights Act.
I've been looking hard at what Lincoln said in his political speeches and am struck, repeatedly at how often he was playing the crowd while he was leading them beyond where they likely were. I found his use of the Declaration of Independence, the language of Thomas Jefferson that convicts him of hypocrisy in his increasing dependence on and enthusiasm for holding Black People in slavery (including his own children) after the Revolution was won and the government set up. The following passage from the first debate held in Ottawa, Illinois is especially interesting in that regard. Answering an hour and a half of political slamming from Stephen Douglas, he said:
I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, either directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.
I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence-the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.
To a real abolitionist, certainly to all Black abolitionists (who history still wants to ignore to focus on White abolitionists), Lincoln's statements in that political debate would be highly and deeply offensive even if his argument for freedom couldn't help but be welcomed. His argument that the Declaration of Independence claimed sufficiently equal rights for everyone, Black People and anyone who anyone claimed wasn't as smart as they were, to enjoy freedom and the right to the fruits of their labor were more radical than the Constitution was and where things were in 1858. I would point out that there were certainly many white People who were not held to be the intellectual equals of others, Women, for example, many of the immigrant population, others in the various regions of the country. Certainly some of them, hearing or reading those arguments would have understood they applied to their condition, as well. Though that was certainly not the law of the land.
I recall reading somewhere that Lincoln was faulted by the most ardent abolitionists of his day as being behind their thinking and slower to act to issue the proclamation banning slavery in the Confederate States than they would have liked, some probably slammed him for not banning it in the states that just barely stayed in the union during the Civil War, Maryland being one of those.
But it is impossible to not note that whatever the Garrisons and Phillips did to push on abolitionism, they never held office to make it happen. They didn't deal in the raw materials to make that happen, persuading voters to vote them into office and to keep them in office long enough to make it happen. They were able to remain pure, or purer than a politician can if they have any hope of getting a House or Senate seat or doing what's hardest of all, winning the presidency with the national vote and the engine of corruption baked into that, the Electoral College.
In a public speech, be it in a debate or a State of the Union or any other, it's very easy to make a gaff or public statement that will offend a part of the audience you are counting on to vote for you and contribute to your margin of victory. Live performance of something as generally unrehearsed as a speech, especially one containing improvisation, is very hard to pull off with total success.
The American left, the one that most often gets called "the left" has never been in a position to make the most radical change that can be made, it has never controlled anything much more than a few city councils back in the days of the old Socialist Party - the one the "real radicals" destroyed in 1919 - they don't have much of any ability to do anything but talk and rage. They don't engage in reality, they don't choose to do the hardest work of all to make real change, get elected in numbers large enough to even make themselves essential to the political success of those who can move things in the right direction. There's a reason that such a "left" finds its greatest appeal among teenagers and young adults, they are the most callow and those who imagine that there is some distant horizon towards which they can insist things be pushed to RIGHT NOW! That they have, repeatedly during my lifetime, done exactly the opposite by getting Nixon, Reagan, Bush II and Trump elected, not to mention the House Senate and State offices they've played spoiler in, and so they are not the progressive force they advertise themselves as being but are, in fact, useful idiots, useful tools for the worst among us. That's such a useful tool for them that they are rather openly aiding the brain-dead candidacy of RFK jr. and have repeatedly financed Green Party politics. What they don't get from them directly in terms of electoral spoiler candidacies, they reap in highlighting the ballot box poison that is provided by play-lefties with mouths bigger than their intellect playing the game of "most lefty in the room."
The play-left has been a lot more useful to Republican-fascism than it ever has been the effective and so real left, the ones who get and hold offices, gain real power and can make real laws. So they buy themselves not being taken seriously by real leftist politicians who know at best they'll have to try to cajole them along but who know, full well, they will turn on a dime and enable fascism.
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