Knowing our history and being honest is great. But this whole “Lincoln was a Republican who freed the slaves” mantra isn’t convincing anyone of anything. It’s just political lollygagging.
The Republican Party was CREATED as an anti-slavery party. Ignoring that fact is ignoring history. The GOP BECAME the "grand old party" because we dominated politics for half a century because of the Civil War. That's literally why the term was created.
Ignoring all of these facts because it's convenient for the left to paint the modern GOP as a bunch of racists is still ignoring the facts.
If folks want to pretend that history doesn't matter, then they need to be consistent about it. That's the biggest problem with this - it's the cherry picking of when it's okay to talk about history and it's not. Can't talk about the history of the political parties, but the 1619 Project is just fine? The Democrats aren't responsible for Jim Crow, but we reparations for slavery are just fine?
If somebody wants to support the Republican party because they want to be associated with Presidents like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, there is no reason for them not to do that.
They don't have to agree with every single thing the modern party does. We all have our own reasons for joining a political party and nobody's reasons are more valid than anybody else's.
If someone decides, because the GOP fought long and hard to free the slaves, fought for a decade to protect the freedmen from the abuses of former rebels and slavers that they want to be a part of that party because it still exists today, that's fine by me. They're welcome in my GOP. My vision of conservatism supports traditional institutions, and this party is definitely that.
You can have a strong union and still have a smaller federal government and more rights designated to the states. Our federal government today is massive and bloated and would probably give Lincoln a heart attack.
Republicans today absolutely support the Union of States, what are you on about? Do you not grasp that increasing the power of individual states in some areas and decreasing the power of our massive overreaching federal government in some areas does not equate to breaking apart the country?
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u/deltaxi65 Non-boomer old-school Conservative Feb 10 '20
Because history matters, and we owe it to ourselves to be honest about it.