Lincoln Unbound (25 page)

We should focus on market-­oriented changes to make health insurance more affordable, since its ever-­escalating cost is a millstone on ordinary workers and a contributor to inequality. No unnecessary regulatory barriers should be put in front of good, roughneck jobs, especially in the energy sector. The welfare state's reliance on the regressive payroll tax—­to maintain the fiction that Social Security and Medicare merely pay back what ­people put in—­should be rethought.

We should stanch the flow of poorly educated immigrants, who compete for jobs with and suppress the wages of low-­skilled workers (these were the effects of the wave of immigration in the 1840s and 1850s, and one of the reasons it stoked such a strong political reaction). And, to counteract the way the age-­old entitlements disproportionately burden families with children (their children will be the workers who pay for entitlements for everyone else), the tax code should have an even more generous child tax credit. It will benefit all families, but especially those struggling most with costs.

Regardless, the Lincoln standard is the right one, consistent, as he said in that same 1861 talk, with achieving “the greatest good to the greatest number.”

SUPPORT CAUSES OF SOCIAL RENEWAL.
Lincoln's Whigs self-­consciously sought a higher civilization. The crusading of a Michelle Obama or Michael Bloomberg on obesity is in the same key as Whig social movements, and has the same odor of elitism. Emerson lampooned the Whigs in the same terms as the critics go after the First Lady and the New York City mayor—­as “nannies.” He wrote that their “social frame is a hospital” where they dress everyone in “slippers & flannels, with bib & pap spoon” and administer “pills & herb tea,” among other Whig remedies.

It's not hard seeing Lincoln the temperance advocate finding the nudging and nagging from on high about weight and diet congenial (although he didn't care what he himself ate). But he surely would have found it odd that almost all the moralizing tendencies of society are now directed toward health, and very few toward the habits that directly affect the ability of ­people to get ahead.

It is well established that adherence to rudimentary cultural norms is the most effective of all antipoverty programs. If the head of a family graduates from high-school, works full-­time, and waits until age twenty-­one and marries before having children, it almost guarantees his family will avoid poverty. According to Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, only 2 percent of the families who adhered to all three of these norms were poor in 2007 (a year of low unemployment, it must be stipulated). Of the families who adhered to one or two, 26.9 percent were poor. Of the families who adhered to none, 76 percent were poor.

In her book
What Money Can't Buy
, University of Chicago poverty expert Susan Mayer found that once basic needs are met in poor households, it is the values of parents, rather than additional income, that are most important to the prospects of children. Even if their families are poor, children whose parents are honest, diligent, and reliable—­among other things—­tend to do well. Basically, they benefit from middle-­class values before they are middle class.

It seems certain that Lincoln would be alarmed by the unraveling of middle-­class morality in contemporary America, and loathe to accept its inevitability. Mores can change. It happened with temperance. Historian Charles Sellers notes the astonishing amount of alcohol imbibed annually by Americans over the age of fourteen in 1830—­9.5 gallons of hard liquor and 30.3 gallons of hard cider and other drinks, for 7.1 gallons of absolute alcohol all told. By 1845, the amount of absolute alcohol had fallen to 1.8 gallons, diminished by a mass temperance movement that spread the word about the social and personal costs of alcoholism. The
Temperance Recorder
warned, “The enterprise of this country is so great, and competition so eager in every branch of business . . . that profit can only result from . . .
temperance
.”

Our own social renewal has to come first from civil society. A cultural revival must rely on cultural institutions. Yet they have been mostly missing from the field. As Yuval Levin writes, “American social conservatism has almost entirely lost interest in the cause of order—­in standing up for clean living, for self-­discipline and restraint, for resisting temptation and meeting basic responsibilities. The institutions of American Chris­tian­ity—­some of which would actually stand a chance of being taken seriously by the emerging lower class—­are falling down on the job, as their attention is directed to more exciting causes, in no small part because the welfare state has overtaken some of their key social functions.”

Government should pitch in at the margins, with what might be called a bourgeois paternalism. It should be confident in promoting the qualities necessary to success in a free society. It's not as though government doesn't already align itself with certain values, and advance them through suasion and law. It has launched effective crusades against drunk driving, domestic violence, and smoking and on behalf of recycling. Yet government is neutral or implicitly hostile toward the twin bedrocks of American aspiration: work and family.

If you are an able-­bodied person of working age who is interacting with the government—­either as a ward of the state or a subject of the criminal justice system—­you should get a good dose of the basic values that might keep you from indigence or lawlessness in the first place. Every means-­tested welfare program, not just Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (successor to the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children welfare program) but food stamps and others, should have a work requirement (for either actual work or a closely supervised job search). Parole and probation should be much more restrictive. Mark Kleiman of the University of California, Los Angeles suggests an ankle bracelet to monitor compliance with conditions, with swift and certain punishment for breaking them. And so on.

Government should tell ­people that marriage is important, as poverty expert Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation argues. National leaders should speak about it, something that Bill Clinton did quite courageously in the 1990s. We should tell kids in high-school of the disastrous consequences for their lives of having children out of wedlock. We should include similarly frank information at every government-­funded family planning clinic. We should run public-­ad campaigns touting marriage as an indispensable tool for fighting poverty. We should reduce the rewards of single parenthood in the welfare system.

The first step is to frankly acknowledge the cultural contribution to our lack of mobility. For Lincoln, our social breakdown would represent America going back to seed. In the rustic world he left, Jean Baker writes, illegitimacy was more common than in the middle-­class world he joined. It was back in that world that his relatives “idled away time.” For Lincoln, our social ills would be reason to redouble his commitment to improvement—­since we have so much to improve.

ELEVATE THE CULTURE.
A vast apparatus of cultural uplift undergirded mid-­nineteenth-­century America, grinding away to improve minds and inculcate good habits. Whatever else they taught, the readers that Lincoln absorbed as a boy provided a basic moral education.
Lessons in Elocution
contained “Selected Sentences” such as: “there is nothing truly valuable which can be purchased without pains and labor” (
Tattler
)
.
“You must love learning, if you would possess it” (Knox). “Good manners are, to particular societies, what morals are to society in general—­their cement and their security” (Chesterfield).

Murray's
English Reader
, which Lincoln thought so highly of, stipulated in its preface: “That this collection may also serve the purpose of promoting piety and virtue, the compiler has introduced many extracts which place religion in the most amiable light and which recommend a great variety of moral duties. . . . The compiler has been careful to avoid every expression and sentiment, that might gratify a corrupt mind, or, in the least degree, offend the eye of innocence. This he conceives to be peculiarly incumbent on every person who writes for the benefit of youth.” Another collection,
The
Kentucky Preceptor
, forewarned readers: “Tales of love, or romantic fiction, or anything which might tend to instil false notions into the minds of the children have not gained admission.”

These were books put in the hands of children. Charles Sellers writes (not favorably) of the more general spread of “potent agencies of middle-­class acculturation”: “Wherever Yankees migrated they outstripped natives in wealth and culture while pressing their example through multiplying churches, colleges, schools, libraries, voluntary associations, and a new perceptual realm of mass literacy and cheap print. Voluntary associations spread rapidly across the North to promote missions and Sunday schools, enforce morality and temperance, aid and uplift the poor, and maintain libraries and lyceum lecture series for cultural self-­improvement.”

What do we have that is remotely comparable to such middle-­class cultural evangelism? The ethic of the schools, from kindergarten through college, is a watery stew of environmentalism and multiculturalism. Who, to put it in Sellers's words, is enforcing morality or uplifting the poor? Who even thinks in such terms? Rather than joining the voluntary associations that once made America so distinctive, we are increasingly bowling alone, in the evocative phrase of political scientist Robert Putnam. American males, especially in the working class, are becoming ever more cut off from any institutions whatsoever. Once an instrument for the spread of information and instruction in the most literate country in the world, print is giving way to all things audiovisual, and its associated schlock. The overwhelmingly influential popular culture is a sewer and is proud of it.

It's not clear what can be done about any of this. The popular culture in particular won't change until such time as the country's cultural elite has a crisis of conscience, assuming, that is, it has a conscience.

Suffice it to say, Lincoln would be confounded that so much of our common life is meant to degrade rather than elevate.

LOOK TO THE FOUNDERS.
Lincoln's attitude to the Founders, as discussed earlier, bordered on the worshipful. He spoke of George Washington in his Lyceum address in 1838, and ended with the high-­flown hope “[tha]t during his long sleep, we permitted no hostile foot to pass over or desecrate [his] resting place” and “we revered his names to the last.” His temperance address a few years later soared even higher. Noting that it was Washington's birthday, he wound up with an extravagant encomium: “Washington is the mightiest name of earth—­
long since
mightiest in the cause of civil liberty;
still
mightiest in moral reformation. On that name, a eulogy is expected. It cannot be. To add brightness to the sun, or glory to the name of Washington, is alike impossible. Let none attempt it. In solemn awe pronounce the name, and in its naked deathless splendor, leave it shining on.”

Although these youthful sentiments were highly rhetorical, they weren't
entirely
rhetorical. The Founding became even more important to Lincoln's political advocacy as he matured. If Churchill mobilized the English language and sent it into battle, Lincoln did the same with the Founders. His truest blows against his opponents in the 1850s and 1860s were those he struck while wielding the Declaration of Independence. The purposes he identified in the Founders and their handiwork are continually ­relevant.

He believed that they drew us back to the deepest principles of our republic in the Declaration. And they gave us, of course, our foundational law in the Constitution. At any time and place in American history, there are those who find the Constitution an unacceptable encumbrance to their designs. In Lincoln's day, it was the abolitionists and the secessionists, both coming at the same controversy from opposite directions. For the abolitionists, the Constitution did too much to protect slavery; for the secessionists not enough. The abolitionists condemned the Constitution and sought extraconstitutional action to smite slavery. ­William Garrison burned the Constitution in 1854, and deemed it an “infamous bargain.” The secessionists, on the other hand, left the Union to write their own.

Lincoln had no use for the impatience with the constraints of constitutional government of either of the two opposed forces. During the war, he called the radicals in his own party “the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with,” even if “their faces are set Zionwards.” Unlike his more heedless friends, he would honor the Constitution even when it obstructed his most cherished ends. In his final speech of the 1858 Senate campaign, he said, accurately enough, “I have neither assailed, nor wrestled with any part of the constitution. The legal right of the Southern ­people to reclaim their fugitives I have constantly admitted. The legal right of Congress to interfere with the institution in the states, I have constantly denied.” When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he did it as an inherently limited war measure. Allen Guelzo notes how he never lost sight of its prospective legal vulnerability once the war ended. He finally looked to the Thirteenth Amendment—­an inarguably constitutional measure—­as a “King's cure for all the evils.”

Lincoln believed in the perpetual vitality of the Founders. They are never dusty, old, or out-­of-­date. Lincoln embraced change, but always around the central axis established by them. We must constantly rededicate ourselves to their essential principles, to free institutions and to the equality of all men, and if we do, those principles will ensure the vibrancy and justice of our society. “We understood that by what they then did,” Lincoln said in Chicago in 1858, “it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us.”