Another Stark Contrast Between The Republican Party's First and Last Presidents: Lincoln, Trump and Time

I've previously argued that Lincoln was the Republican Party's first president (okay, that's not an argument) and Trump will be its last.

The simplest framing of that argument is simply that in 1860, the brand new Republican Party's plan for a national (rather than rural) industrial economy dependent on capital (rather than slavery) was truly visionary, an advance on every front. The decades that followed were unprecedented in terms of productivity growth, improvement in quality of life and the rapid growth in products and wealth. Now, in 2020, Trump's plan for a national (rather than global, as the economy dependent on a worldwide web and container ships has become) industrial economy dependent on financial and industrial capital (rather than an information economy dependent on intellectual capital) is reactionary, representing regress rather than progress. The telegraph was awesome once upon a time but today people prefer to text or video conference. Factory work once represented the future of job creation. Not today.

Lincoln had to create a national, industrial economy. Trump is trying to destroy a global, information economy.

Here is another way that Trump and Lincoln differ.

The conversations to create a new world have to be thoughtful, sustained, and zoom out to big pictures and zoom in to the small details; explore consequences and nuance and paint a picture of the new world proposed. Construction takes sustained planning, execution, and coordination with others.

The Lincoln - Douglas debates that brought the Republican Party's first president into the national limelight had a curious format. They were adversarial but each speaker had sufficient time to make his point. "The first speaker spoke for 60 minutes, the second had a 90 minute rebuttal, and then the first speaker had a 30 minute rebuttal/time for closing arguments."

I was unable to find what was the longest time Trump made it without interrupting or speaking in last night's debate but I don't think he remained silent for even one of Biden's two minute windows. For Lincoln, 30 minutes was the shortest time slot and 90 was the longest. In last night's debate, 2 minutes was the longest window and Trump could not even remain silent that long.

Singer and Brooking in LikeWar share a study that in 2000, the average attention span of an internet user was measured at twelve seconds. By 2015, it had shrunk to eight seconds - slightly less than the average attention span of a goldfish. We barely have time for tweets and memes. (What does a goldfish think? "Oh look! A castle." Pause. "Oh look! A castle!")

Lincoln had time enough to speak a new world into existence. Trump only wants time enough to destroy one. And the less time you have to think about what he's doing, the less likely you are to see how destructive he is, much less have time enough to imagine the next one.

The Republican Party's Mission is Done

About a year ago, I was at the Nixon Library. I had been to the Reagan Library months before and compared to that, the Nixon Library had very few visitors. Something to do with Watergate and resignation.

The docent said that about a quarter of the visitors to the Nixon Library are from China. The Chinese remember Nixon as the president whose visit helped to open up China to the rest of the world; Nixon visited China in the early 1970s and by the end of the 1970s, Deng Xiaoping had become China’s leader. Deng would begin the economic changes that began China’s amazing economic growth and opened it up to the rest of the world.

From the time of Lincoln – their first president – to about WWII, Republicans were focused on a domestic policy of making ours an industrial rather than agricultural economy. After WWII, Republicans were focused on a foreign policy of spreading capitalism to the rest of the world.

Eisenhower’s Marshall Plan helped to rebuild Europe and Japan after WII. Nixon visited China. Reagan stood in Berlin and told Gorbachev “Bring down this wall.” Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq, promising to make it a beacon of democracy and capitalism.

But a curious thing happened.

As Republicans were busily exporting policies for an industrial economy to the rest of the world, that industrial economy was – like the agricultural economy before it – being eclipsed by a new economy.

Trump’s policy seems weird but has an odd kind of logic seen from this perspective. It is quite possible that in his mind, seeing that the industrial economy has been successfully exported around the world (particularly in China), it is now his job to revive the domestic policy of creating an industrial economy here. This shift in focus to foreign countries has caused us to lose the industrial economy that made us great, made us a world power. It is his mission to recreate it.


But of course, the Republicans are where the Democratic Party was at the time of Lincoln: promoting policies for an economy already eclipsed. At the time of Lincoln, the agricultural economy had been eclipsed by the industrial economy At the time of Trump, the industrial economy has been eclipsed by the information economy.

Republican identity is so bound with capitalism (which I would say is a crude synonym for industrial economy), that it is not clear that they can shift to a new identity now that their mission is done. In any case, reviving the past has never seemed a particularly effective way to create the future.