Balkinization  

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Abraham Lincoln as Myth and Symbol

Sandy Levinson

Bill Moyers has published an eloquent denunciation of the current political scene in a piece called "Lincoln Weeps," and another law professor has asked "Where is Today's Lincoln" with reference to Lincoln's willingness, at the cost of his nascent political career, to challenge the legitimacy of the Mexican War in 1847. This is all fine and good, but we should be extremely wary about embracing Abraham Lincoln as the potential cure for the most truly fundamental debate we are having today, which concerns the very shape of the American constitutional system. The central danger to American constitutionalism does not come from pedophiles or people who are on the take from corporate interests, objectionable as both are; it comes from dedicated patriots--think John Yoo and David Addington, for starters--who have a radically different conception from many of the rest of us as to how to respond to genuine problems posed by genuinely evil people.

So we should be prepared to address the possibility that "today's Lincoln" is in the White House, i.e., a president determined to use every conceivable power at his disposal, including extravagant interpretations of the "Commander-in-Chief" power, to impose his vision of politics and justice on the nation and world. I have long believed (and written) that Lincoln is the most important single figure in the entire tapestry of American constitutionalism, and he presents an endlessly complcated, often contradctory, set of images. I have described him also as the most "Nietzschean" figure in our history, using his powers to "trasnvalue" the basic meaning of the American experiment (see, e.g., the Gettysburg Address and Garry Wills's book on same). In any event, one should not embrace Lincoln as a role model without being prepared for people like Michael Stokes Paulsen, who uses Lincoln as the main source for his depiction of what he terms "The Constitution of Necessity," 79 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1257 (2006). One can, of course, defend Lincoln on the grounds of his substantive commitment (eventually) to anti-slavery, but, then, George W. Bush constantly invokes the values of "liberty" and "freedom" as the justification for the war on terror that certainly does involve some people who are every bit as evil as any of the slaveholders could have been thought to be. And it was Lincoln who basically initiated, as Commander-in-Chief what we today have come to call "total war," including the devastation wreaked by Sherman's march through Georgia.

Indeed, why shouldn't we be hoping that judges today will display the courage that the despised Roger Brooke Taney manifested in Ex parte Merryman, which, of course, involved Lincoln's unilateral suspension of habeas corpus? Or is it thinkable that we might even find a model for our present time in the even more despised James Buchanan, who believed that secession was unconstitutional but also believed that the national government was without power to prevent it by the exercise of armed force. Thus he wrote in his final message to Congress, "The fact is that our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it can not live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish."

This ultimately raises the question, of course, of whether the conflagration of 1861-1865, caused as much by Lincoln as by the secessionists, was "justified." The initial justification, of course, was maintaining the Union. I confess to having serious doubts about the legitimacy of Union preservation per se, though Michael Lind, in What Lincoln Believed (2005), makes the best case for the proposition that in the immediate years after the brutal suppression of liberal movements in Europe, maintenance of the American Republic really was perceived as "the last best hope" of the republican experiment world wide. The other justification for the war is what we would today call "humanitarian intervention," i.e., the desirability of eradicating the brutal and immoral regime of chattel slavery. I'm more drawn to that justification for the War, but it should be obvious that proponents of the Iraq War could and did make similar arguments with regard to the equal desriability of eradicating the brutal and immoral regime of Saddam Hussein. To condemn the invasion of Iraq as incompetent, as Tom Friedman is now willing to do at every opportunity, is altogether different from condemning that use of American power in the first place, which he supported and continues to find reasonable.

In any event, it should be obvious that worshippers at the shrine of the Lincoln Memorial may come up with radically different messages from the legacy of their Holy Figure.

Comments:

Some times it seems to me that we might have been a lot better of if we'd just let the South go or the Confederacy had won the Civil War. Southern rascism, hubris, and gangsterism are still poisoning us today -- most recently, as the life-blood of the Republican Party.

But that was then and this is now, and like Dan Jenkins said in Semi-Tough: "What could have happened, did."
 

I confess to being a worshipper at the shrine of Abraham Lincoln. Have been my entire educated life. The fact that Lincoln's heavy-handed invocation of presidential authority during the Civil War is now cited so eagerly by the Yoos and Addingtons of the world distresses me sometimes, I admit it. But in the end it is only evidence of their historical illiteracy. Lincoln's invocation of commander-in-chief powers was justified and necessary, to the country and the world, and Bush's attempts are the morally repugnant maneuvers of a wannabe tyrant. Does that mean I have double standards? Perhaps it means that I can accept a necessity doctrine at some point, but I see a very high threshhold for it, and I expect it to be used briefly - and then relinquished. The truly menacing aspect of the Yoo-Addington claim is that they do not claim a temporary suspension, rather they seek to change the constitutional order altogether. On the other hand, maybe Sandy's upbringing in North Carolina and many years in Texas are showing through...
Lincoln was in a struggle to the death for preservation of the nation. Conversely he was skeptical of foreign entangelements and wars of convenience, insisting that those seeking to wage them justify themselves in the democratic process called accountability. He is right about this in a very fundamental way. And the fact that he went to war surrounded with a army of veterans of the '48 revolution like Carl Schurz (not to mention the revolutionaries of the prior generation, like Francis Lieber) speaks volumes. They saw in America the sole vessel of democracy on earth. They were right.
 

What Scott said.
 

To put it mildly, I am no fan of George W. Bush! But I must say that I don't think we have any good reason to believe that he is indifferent at least to the loss of American lives in Iraq--I have more doubts about the loss of Iraqi lives--and I think there is something sentimental about saying that Lincoln is necessarily off the hook for the consequences of his actions because he anguished about the costs. It may be that the 1861-1865 war was worth it because of its consequences in getting rid of the legal institution of chattel slavery, but, as John Rosenberg valuably reminds us, even that is not a self-evident proposition, not least because the North utterly failed in its dedication to "regime change" during the period we call Reconstruction. The Ku Klax Klan "insurgency" ultimately proved stronger, both literally and metaphorically, than the willingness of the Grant Administration to pay the price of ruthlessly suppressing all of its supporters. (Aside: I have said in print that every supporter of our venture in Iraq should have been required to read Lou Faulkner Williams' marvelous book The Great South Carolina Ku Klux Klan Trials, 1871-1872 (U. Ga. Press), a 160-page monograph that explains the difficulty of imposed "regime change" better than any other single work I can think of.)

I also believe that Lincoln behaved indefensibly in failing to call Congress back into session until July 4. It allowed him to rule in a quasi-dictatorial manner--as was argued by Clinton Rossiter in his great book Constitutional Dictatorship, not to mention Carl Schmitt's admiration for Lincoln--in the interim. Even if one takes travel-time into account, there was no justifiable reason to hold Congress away for a full four months after his inauguration.
 

It seems to me - and perhaps I speak out of turn - that comparisons to Lincoln are being made almost as a plea to sacred icons. These things are nearly always two-sided swords. And evil, all evil, has only the power we choose to give it. If we think it can influence our thoughts, it does so only because we have attributed to the it ability to do so. If we believe it can influence behavior, that very belief fosters an idea that must then be suppressed. If we rush to collide with it directly, we have already assumed it has the power and substance to resist, and it will have more power by our choosing. To attempt to defeat evil by force is to fight oneself - the harder you push, the more powerful your opponent becomes. Evil never wins, really, its only that at some point one inevitably grows weary of fighting oneself.

That's not to say that people and groups who choose to do horrible things don't have the power to cause harm, but to posture the situation as our struggle against evil will give such people and groups even more power, while critically draining our own.

Perhaps the wise thing to do is to cast aside idealistic icons and ideological struggles against evil, and frame the fight against new forms of terrorism as an act of cooperative adapting, not a struggle between nations and groups. As a generation with a capacity to destroy ourselves as never before - an ability that will likely never diminish - we will either adapt as a species or we won't. It is tempting to simplify things by creating heroes and villains and conflicts between good and evil, but its just not as useful as taking each situation uniquely.
 

When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable.
Agen Judi Online Terpercaya
 

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