Jack Ross:
a sincere abolitionist, he campaigned explicitly on simply limiting
slavery to the territories and on a Constitutional amendment
that would have enshrined slavery within the South. And as for the
franchise, he was notoriously quoted at the end of the war saying
"maybe the New Orleans creoles".
There may in fact be interesting parallels to Obama here. Maybe he did cynically use the Iraq War and related issues to galvanize a base to him the same way Lincoln did
with slavery. As for emancipation, I frankly consider the Gettysburg Address to have been perfectly analogous to the speech(es) by which Bush cynically changed the subject in Iraq to democracy and proclaimed a "global democratic revolution".
Still,
Lincoln did clearly want a conciliatory reconstruction policy, and
indeed I believe had he lived he would have fallen victim to a perhaps
less successful version of the fate of Andrew Johnson.
And as for the changes that the war ultimately wrought, it is already
well nigh conceivable how in a contradiction worthy of Lincoln the
ultimate internationalist Obama may by force of events usher in an era
of isolationism.
Weiss. Jack: I differ with you on the pre war period. Of course he wasn't an abolitionist. He was an ambitious pol, and there was almost no room in the mainstream debate for abolitionists. Abolitionists were the far left. I would have been one; but Lincoln was becoming a candidate for national office. He hated slavery. That comes thru in the speeches and in this private reflection by Lincoln, at age 48, on the younger Stephen Douglas's far outstripping him in achievement:
Lincoln was a man of ambition and principle. His adherence to principle– hatred of slavery, of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise–fired his ambition. The analogy to Obama, which I'm about to write about, is that Obama knows that Israel/Palestine is everything in the Middle East, and must be resolved, with justice to the Palestinians, in order for the U.S. to cool off the fervor in the Islamic world. He learned that at Rashid and Mona Khalidi's dinner table, as Lincoln learned his lessons about slavery from seeing slaves in chains.
Ross responds (and I'm giving him the last word here cause I'm going to return to this some other day):
There is scant evidence to suggest that Lincoln was morally moved by
slavery, what he was really committed to was the historic party program
of economic nationalism. Though I suppose his view on slavery itself may have been exactly that expressed by Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia, that slavery must be ended but that the two races could never live together, thus favoring colonization.
Talk
about "transfer"!!! To say nothing of what the idea led to in the
black community, the vogue of Herzl's uncanny doppleganger Marcus Garvey, whose absurdly grandiose parades and costumes eerily mimicked Herzl's demands in Basel that the unwashed Poale Zion
delegates attend wearing the season's finest evening wear – A. Philip
Randolph unsparingly mocked Garvey as a "negro with a hat".
Sorry,
couldn't resist that swipe. Anyway, I don't know what Obama is truly
committed to and thus I'm a bit lost. He may well be a closet black
nationalist who wants to bring the mother (empire) down, but that
doesn't mean he wants to do so out of principle or even intervene in
any particular third world dispute – be it Darfur or Israel/Palestine – out of principle.
Or
maybe, on a less macabre note and more likely, he just wants to
vindicate the honor of the American left, in which case he would also
be indifferent in terms of principle to the empire, but knew it was the
issue with which to galvanize, getting back to my original point, as
did Lincoln with slavery.
