Abraham Lincoln Warned Us About The DSA
Steve McKee
The duty of our generation is to respect and protect our Constitutional order.
In an 1838 speech entitled “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” Abraham Lincoln warned that if America were ever to fall, it would come as a result of internal decay rather than foreign conquest. “If destruction be our lot,” he said, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” Little did he know how prescient his remarks would prove to be, and the heroic and tragic role he would play in unfolding events.
While the crucible Lincoln led America through was unique in its scope and consequences, every generation must be alert to the dangers of internal decay. In ours, the battle is being fought on two fronts.
The first we have been aware of for some time: Progressivism. Nearly a hundred years ago, building upon Woodrow Wilson’s arrogant modernism, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a cowed Supreme Court bound and gagged the Constitution, and their intellectual descendants have held it captive ever since. That’s how our government became so big and bloated, encroaching into cultural and religious spheres for which it has no Constitutional jurisdiction.
Recently, and somewhat mystifyingly, a second front against self-government has opened, this one on the far Right. Call it the Post-Liberal or “Regressive” front; a mix of intellectuals, reactionaries, and pot-stirrers who view our Constitutional order not as something to be renewed but, at a minimum, “remodeled” (especially with regard to religious freedom).
What both sides have in common is the mistaken belief that they can improve on a political order that has unfolded over thousands of years of trial and error, repression and resistance, reformation and revolution.
Historically speaking, the ordered liberty we enjoy in America is a new development. For most of time, it was humanity’s lot to be ruled by chieftains, potentates, and kings. The cultural and political advances of Western Civilization lifted whole nations out of this tyrannical mud, creating self-governing polities informed by the ideas of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem.
America became the supreme example, “We the people” ratifying the Constitution to secure principles of self-government articulated in the Declaration of Independence, which itself codified ideas rooted in the moral and intellectual foundations of the Old and New Testaments.
Weaken or remove any one of these supports, as both Progressives and Regressives are intent on doing, and the American experiment risks sinking back into the morass. And as goes America, so goes Western Civilization.
Regressivism’s adherents correctly diagnose the problem of cultural decay, but they prescribe some sort of “friendly” authoritarianism that has been tried and repeatedly found wanting. Fond of pronouncements about “the common good,” they are coy about pinning down what exactly that means, by whom it will be determined, and whether (and to what extent) the rest of us will have a say.
We can all rue the toll rampant individualism has taken on our society, but 250 years ago government by the consent of the governed was finally and justly recognized as a natural right. Consent, like eternal salvation, cannot be coerced, and is and always will be an individual matter.
The Trump/MAGA movement was an overdue and necessary (if imperfect and incomplete) populist reaction to a pendulum that had been swinging leftward for a century. The question is what comes next, and this is the ground on which today’s battle of ideas is being fought.
Will populism, up for grabs as populism tends to be, lead to the renewal of Constitutional norms, or will its enthusiasts be hoodwinked into throwing out the proverbial baby (limited government, freedom of conscience) with the bathwater? Will Americans pay heed to what G.K. Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead,” respecting the wisdom of the centuries that led to the greatest experiment in self-government ever divined, or will we ignore the lesson of Chesterton’s fence, removing the planks whose value some don’t properly grasp?
The duty of our generation is to restore the limits on government articulated in the Constitution and ensure continued respect for natural rights as avowed in the Declaration of Independence. It’s to stand not only with Lincoln, but with Adams and Hamilton and Madison and “the indispensable man,” George Washington, who after winning the war to establish American self-government notably refused a crown.
One hundred years ago, on the occasion of America’s 150th birthday, President Calvin Coolidge said, “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed, that is final.”
You can’t progress from “final,” nor can you regress from it. You can only respect and protect it.
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