Rich Lowry's new book on Abraham Lincoln's lasting example of principled leadership.

A Lincoln for Our Times

by Matthew J. Franck

In his new book on Abraham Lincoln, Rich Lowry depicts our famous president as a lover of freedom, commerce, and progress whom we revere on the same plane as the founders because he, like them, articulated enduring principles that we still value.

One of the curiosities of American politics is the extent to which we look to our history explicitly in search of guidance from great statesmen of the past as we think through the problems of the present. It is hard to imagine an Englishman addressing himself to a contemporary issue by asking what Edmund Burke or Winston Churchill would do; or a Frenchman seeking guidance from the papers of de Gaulle, or a German communing with the shade of Bismarck or Adenauer.

But in the United States we not only look back to Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt, but to Abraham Lincoln and to the greatest of the founders (Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and Adams), whose lives and political actions are the subjects of endless books, articles, and arguments, and whose departed spirits we readily enlist in our current debates. Why do we do this? Do they really have something of value to contribute to our present wrangles?

We do this because Americans are "people of the text," formed into a nation and a people not by our having inhabited our land from time immemorial, not by having been all descended from the same ancestors, and not by all belonging to the same religious faith--instead, by the power of a shared commitment to certain ideas captured in words scratched out on parchment with quill pens in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. America is truly constituted by its Constitution, which begins "We the People," and which in turn draws all its vitality from the Declaration of Independence, the credo or "I believe" that states its principles with the words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . ."

Owing to our shared consciousness that these documents and the ideas they express truly make us one united people in a republican experiment, Americans never tire of invoking the revolutionary founders who created those documents and brought the nation into being, through blood and treasure as well as ink and paper. 

We still live under their Constitution, trying to fulfill the promise of their Declaration, and so as facile as it may sometimes seem, it can make a good deal of sense to ask WWTFD--what would the founders do?

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