Yes, Republicans started as the party of Lincoln, but they didn’t stay that way | Opinion

The Chairman of the Republican Party of Kentucky has, in a recent op-ed, proclaimed that the party’s electoral gains in 2022 demonstrate that a growing majority of our state’s electorate align themselves with the anti-slavery party which first formed in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854. He would have us believe that the legislature, in this past year, acted very much according to the principles which animated President Abraham Lincoln and his party in prevailing over the Confederate attempt to establish an independent nation whose cornerstone was the institution of slavery. Would that history were so linear!

According to Brown the Ripon upstarts chose “Republican” for their party name because they were motivated by the Founders’ “ideas about American liberty.” But this is to distort badly the republican (small r) roots of our nation. Republicanism was an ideology that valued community interests over individual liberties. In 1860 this republicanism was at the core of the northern-based Republican Party’s platform, the most notable plank being its goal of abolishing slavery in the country’s territories. In sharp contrast, the Southern Democrats (the party, like the Congressional Republicans today, was badly divided) stood for the absolute freedom of individuals to take their property, including their human chattel, wherever they chose.

When, in a four-way race, Lincoln subsequently secured the presidency, most Kentuckians wanted the Union to endure; they also wanted slavery to survive. And so, when war came in 1861, Kentucky first tried to be neutral, as though that were a possible option. Then went with the Union on the expectation that the South would fail to gain its independence, but that slavery would remain a legal institution.

Imagine the shock when Lincoln, in September 1862, announced that, unless the Confederacy returned to the Union by the beginning of the next year, he fully intended to free all the slaves within the territory controlled by the rebels. Kentuckians saw the handwriting on the wall: slavery was doomed everywhere in the country. That marked the beginning of the state’s identification with the Confederacy and the rise of the hegemony of the Democratic Party in Kentucky, whose collapse Mac Brown celebrates in his op-ed.

What he chooses to overlook is the inversion of the two parties in the course of the 20th century. The Democratic (not Democrat, thank you) Party, particularly under the pressure of the Civil Rights movement, shed its racist past to embrace diversity and social justice wrought by a strong central government. The Republicans, for their part, increasingly abandoned their Ripon heritage. No surprise then that the Republican Party embraced states’ rights and became increasingly white. The Solid South now became a Republican reality.

The shifting political identification of Kentuckians became eminently clear in 2012 when, in the Democratic presidential primary, forty percent of voters chose to support “none of the above” rather than cast their ballots for the incumbent of their own party, Barak Obama. It had taken the election of a Black Democratic president to alienate Kentuckians from the party which had dominated their state’s politics for well over a century. Political inertia being what it is, it took another decade for these new “Republicans,” these inheritors of the historic Democratic mantle of white supremacy and libertarianism, to gain control of the state.

Chairman Brown sees the growing Republican supermajority in Frankfort as the voters’ endorsement of “Republican values” and the legislature’s “work of transforming our state.” What, one might ask, are these “values?” What is the “transformation” of Kentucky that Brown has in mind? Substituting regressive sales taxes, which disproportionately fall upon the poor and middle class, for a progressive income tax in which the rich pay their fair share? Starving public education in order to fund charter schools, too many of which are for-profit operations for privileged whites? Assuring that unions are undercut by right-to-work laws that allow businesses to suppress wages and benefits? Minimizing unemployment benefits? These “values” are actually wildly unpopular in this state. The truth is that Republicans have gained their hegemony primarily in the same way that pre-modern Democrats gained theirs, in Kentucky and elsewhere, by demonizing the opposition and by fear- and conspiracy-mongering. Plus le change, plus le meme.

Robert Emmett Curran is Professor of History Emeritus at Georgetown University. This spring the Louisiana State University Press will publish his “American Catholics and the Quest for Equality in the Civil War Era.”