Honest Abe’s Advice to Conservatives
by Jeremy Rozansky
Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream—and How We Can Do It Again, by Rich Lowry (Broadside Books, 288 pp., $26.99)
Republicans have spent much time since last year’s election discussing what went wrong and what must change for the party to prevail in 2016. Some have focused on unlocking the critical Latino vote, others on de-emphasizing social issues to attract younger voters. Perhaps the most persuasive argument among conservative intellectuals is that the Republican Party must adjust its message and its policies to appeal to the working class. But political parties shouldn’t be just compounds of interest groups, forever trying to get to 51 percent. They are—or should be—vehicles that reflect an array of sentiments about what is good for our society. And so the party of conservative sentiments must see its pitch to the working class (or the young, or Latinos) as emanating from its conservatism. One must begin from conservatism’s meaning and build outward toward an agenda that conservatives can support. In this effort, much can be learned from the example of America’s greatest conservative: Abraham Lincoln.
Lincoln described himself as a conservative in his famous 1860 speech at Cooper Union, which so impressed Republican graybeards that they made him their presidential nominee. He asked: “What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?” Lincoln was referring to his dual intellectual inheritance: the natural-rights syllogisms of the Founders and the frontier ethic of his Midwest boyhood. In Lincoln Unbound, Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, describes how Lincoln melded the two into a coherent idea of America. It’s an ambitious book, seeking to bring Lincoln’s ideas to bear on twenty-first-century policymaking.
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