MAGA and the need for new leadership
During the 1970s, the word went out: The country needed a Lincoln, not a Ford. That’s even truer now.
Can the U.S. produce a public figure who combines politically savvy and principled leadership as well as Old Abe did? Probably not. In our history, there’s only been one Lincoln.
Commenting on Lincoln’s rise in the 1850s, historian Allan Nevins writes, “In part [his] discourse was an historic exposition; in part an argument posited on moral, social, and economic foundations … intellectual originality and moral force.”
Lincoln’s “voice, as fresh as the prairie world itself … lifted the argument at once to a new plane; to the level of high moral considerations…. Among the plain people of Illinois were multitudes who instinctively comprehended its force.”
Not everyone. Minds “closed to the highest moral considerations,” Nevins says, listened but did not understand. They were not moved.
In Lincoln’s day, the issue was American slavery, its contraction or expansion. In our time, the issue is Trumpism, and whether the country can survive MAGA’s assaults on the Constitution and the rule of law.
You scoff. Don’t be so dismissive. Even for those who believe that the country needs a thorough going over, and that Donald Trump is doing God’s work, last week’s events in California and elsewhere should cause alarm. Unbridled presidential power is not in anyone’s interest. The use of the military in a civilian setting is especially alarming.
At a ceremony marking the founding of the U.S. Army in 1775, Trump, speaking of the Los Angeles disturbances centered on dissent from the administration’s deportations of illegal immigrants, said, “We will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy…. Very simply, we will liberate Los Angeles, and make it free, clean and safe again.
“…. What you’re witnessing in California is a full-blown assault on peace and public order and our national sovereignty … by rioters … continuing a foreign invasion of our country. We’re not going to let that happen.”
Thus, Trump justified his mobilization of California National Guard troops, followed by the deployment to Los Angeles of U.S. Marines.
Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, announcing a curfew for a section of the city’s downtown, noted “many businesses … have been vandalized, 23 businesses looted, graffiti is everywhere…. Law enforcement will arrest those who break the curfew.”
“Not wishing,” she said, “to minimize” the vandalism, Bass went on to point out that Los Angeles is a city of 502 square miles, and that protests, including peaceful ones, are taking place in one square mile. Los Angeles, the Democratic mayor said, is not being invaded.
The conservative commentator, William Kristol, wrote on X, “You know when things were pretty quiet in LA? Before [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] started arresting residents who were bothering no one and going to their jobs. And before [Department of Homeland Security] and Guard troops … made the situation worse.
“Of course, Trump and [immigration aide] Stephen Miller want the situation worse.”
The darkest supposition, promulgated by the likes of the anti-Trump Republican David Frum is that the president hopes to “seize control of local” policing “in 2025” in anticipation of seizing local election machinery in time for the midterm elections of 2026.
Trump knows the midterms are coming in which he may lose majorities in Congress, Frum writes in the Atlantic. “Why isn’t he more worried? This week’s events suggest an answer.”
Even disregarding Frum’s bleak assessment, we are in desolate territory when the president of the United States can suggest that even peaceful protesters at Saturday’s planned military parade in Washington, D.C., (coinciding with Trump’s 79th birthday) will face “heavy force.”
It’s imperative that the opposition to Trump unconditionally condemn looters and other “bad actors” in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Lawlessness must not stand. Democrats must be especially vigilant in this regard.
In his time, Lincoln supported enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act while despairing of its consequences.
In 1854, Lincoln said, “I hate slavery because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate slavery because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world, enables the enemies of free institutions with plausibility to taunt us as hypocrites … and especially because it forces so many good men among ourselves into an open war with the fundamental principles of civil liberty.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com