Abraham Lincoln Would Fuck Up the Shit of Today's Republicans (Served with a Side of Washington):
At the beginning of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln, whose Republican Party wasn't filled with barking madmen, went to Congress to ask for the funds to pay for the brutal lesson the Confederacy was going to have to learn. In the speech he gave at that special session of Congress, the tall dude with the hairy face mole laid out what he thought the purpose of a nation, a "United States," was. And it is antithetical to everything that Republicans and, indeed, many Democrats believe. He delivered this message on the Fourth of July, 1861, because the man knew symbolism:
"[The seceding states] invented an ingenious sophism, which, if conceded, was followed by perfectly logical steps through all the incidents to the complete destruction of the Union. The sophism itself is that any State of the Union may consistently with the National Constitution, and therefore lawfully and peacefully, withdraw from the Union without the consent of the Union or of any other State...
"This sophism derives much, perhaps the whole, of its currency from the assumption that there is some omnipotent and sacred supremacy pertaining to a State-to each State of our Federal Union. Our States have neither more nor less power than that reserved to them in the Union by the Constitution, no one of them ever having been a State out of the Union. The original ones passed into the Union even before they cast off their British colonial dependence, and the new ones each came into the Union directly from a condition of dependence...Much is said about the 'sovereignty' of the States, but the word even is not in the National Constitution, nor, as is believed, in any of the State constitutions. What is a 'sovereignty' in the political sense of the term? Would it be far wrong to define it 'a political community without a political superior'? Tested by this, no one of our States, except Texas, ever was a sovereignty; and even Texas gave up the character on coming into the Union, by which act she acknowledged the Constitution of the United States and the laws and treaties of the United States made in pursuance of the Constitution to be for her the supreme law of the land."
(Quick George Washington sidenote, from his letter transmitting the Constitution to the Congress: "It is obviously impractical in the federal government of these states, to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all: Individuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest.")
Continuing with Lincoln, he said that the war, for the Union, was "a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life. Yielding to partial and temporary departures, from necessity, this is the leading object of the Government for whose existence we contend."
Essentially, Lincoln was saying, "You can go fuck yourselves with your secession, Confederate states. You would not exist if it were not for the nation as a whole." And he presented as blindly obvious that the objective of a government was to promote the general goddamned welfare, not make it so that we are a country of assholes only concerned with ourselves.
He was saying this shit even before he was president. This is from an undated fragment of something the Great Man wrote: "The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves-in their separate, and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere. The desirable things which the individuals of a people can not do, or can not well do, for themselves, fall into two classes: those which have relation to wrongs, and those which have not. Each of these branch off into an infinite variety of subdivisions. The first-that in relation to wrongs-embraces all crimes, misdemeanors, and non-performance of contracts. The other embraces all which, in its nature, and without wrong, requires combined action, as public roads and highways, public schools, charities, pauperism, orphanage, estates of the deceased, and the machinery of government itself."
Lincoln scribbled this at the end: "From this it appears that if all men were just, there still would be some, though not so much, need of government."
The presidents we celebrate today believed in the power of a federal government and the necessity for that government to act on behalf of the people to make our lives better. They would wonder who the fuck libertarians and GOP anarchists think they are in trying to contort the United States into something else, especially when they claim Lincoln or Washington as their ideological ancestors. Shit, if zombie Lincoln saw Ted Cruz daring to quote him, he'd eat Cruz's face just to shut him up.
