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Lincoln – the first fascist

By: diakrioi (Diary)  |  October 20th, 2009 at 07:37 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

In the introduction to Liberal Fascism, Goldberg makes the point that a fascist type of governing got its start right here in the US.  He proposes that the Wilson was fascist in deed if not in word.  Goldberg describes the Wilsonian administration as having “the first modern propaganda ministry” and in Wilson’s America  “political prisoners by the thousands were harassed, beaten, spied upon, and thrown in jail simply for expressing private opinions; the national leader accused foreigners and immigrants of injecting treasonous ‘poison’ into the American bloodstream; newspapers and magazines were shut down for criticizing the government” and the list goes on.

I propose that Goldberg did not go far enough back in history to find his fascist example.  I suspect he might have purposefully done so because the Lincoln myth is so strong and Lincoln worship is so prevalent.  Wilson is a much easier target.

Regardless, Lincoln used many of the same tactics as Wilson on his fellow countrymen and so deserves the label just as well.  You won’t find these facts in your history books because they don’t fit with the accepted myth of Lincoln the Emancipator.  Lincoln also had opponents arrested and held indefinitely, he had a congressman deported because he spoke against Lincoln’s income tax, he sent the military into New York City to shut down newspapers and arrest their editors.  To curry political favor Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution in US history – 38 Sioux indians were hanged on his order.

The start of the highly centralized federal government that we are struggling against today had its birth in the Lincoln administration.  No single event in hour history stripped away the constraints on the federal government like the war between the states did.  Lincoln was at the helm of this consolidation of power in Washington.  For all of these reasons, Lincoln was the first fascist.

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  • Third Street

    Literally. Period. End of story. No other President in the history of America (with the possible exception of Washington) can claim to have done that. I have little patience with the latter-day condemnations of Lincoln, made as though the Civil War wasn’t happening.

    Perhaps you’d have preferred Lincoln sat there and did nothing as the Union dissolved, state after state. We had a President who did that, and his name was James Buchanan. Had he run for and won a second term in 1860, we would not now have a United States. Neither the CSA nor what remained of the USA would have survived the horrors of the 20th Century; of this I have no doubt whatsoever, and God only knows what kind of nightmare we would be living in today.

    Lincoln took every extraordinary measure he could toward a successful prosecution of the war. He jailed Northern traitors. He shut down seditious papers. And yes, he signed the execution papers of 38 Sioux. (He pardoned the other 265.) He did what he had to do under the most extraordinary and dangerous circumstances the nation had ever faced, before or since. If he hadn’t, we wouldn’t now be here talking about it.

    Abe Lincoln’s name has been revered down through the ages. (Wilson’s sure as hell hasn’t.) The GOP has long been proud to identify itself as “The Party of Lincoln”. There’s a reason for all this. To condemn him as a fascist (a concept that didn’t even exist in his time) is simply insane.

    And by the way, I say all of this as a native Southerner.

    • diakrioi

      Your comment is filled with so much illogic and hyperbole that I’m not sure where to start.

      Your period is in the wrong place. Lincoln saved the union, there is no disputing that. But the union that he saved was not the union created by the founders. In “saving the union” Lincoln created the federal leviathan that we have today. Much of what is wrong with our government is the creation of Lincoln and his like. In his day it was called mercantilism; today we call it corporatism. It is Lincoln’s gift to us.

      The intertwining of a central government and business that Lincoln so favored bears greatest resemblance to what modern form of government? Think about it.

      You ask, “Perhaps you

      • Achance

        and I’m the kind of guy who gets a kick out of wearing my Sons of Confederate Veterans lapel pin to the local Lincoln Day dinner.

        You’re right, there’s a lot of mythology in popular/government school history about the War and about the almost canonized Lincoln. I have ancestors in unmarked graves all over Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsyvania because they didn’t see the World the way Mr. Lincoln saw it. They lost,

        I agree that America in 1860 is to America in 1870 as Repulican Rome was to Imperial Rome, though I attribute that fact mostly to the Reconstruction Era amendments and the settling of the territories, not so much to either Lincoln or The War. And if you object to what Lincoln and Lincoln’s soldiers did to Border State and Confederate civilians, you don’t want to look to far into what they did to themselves. That Home Guard character in Cold Mountain didn’t come from thin air. The Confederate States didn’t formally suspend Habeas Corpus, they just did a good job of ignoring it – and they did a pretty good job of ignoring that and a whole bunch of other Constitutional rights for another century after The War as well.

        The US at least tacitly recognized the heavy-handedness of its actions by never prosecuting the Confederate leadership and never re-visiting the issue of wartime incarcerations after ex parte Milligan. And if you’d like a really good swat by a federal court, bring up the subject of how the 14th Amendment was “ratified” by the States. None of it matters. Faulkner was right that in the minds of many Southerners, “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.” I’m not one of them; the past isn’t dead and I honor my ancestors but both it and they are past. And, whatever the past, we won the lotter of life; we were born with a US Passport.

        • http://www.examiner.com/x-1597-Charlotte-Law--Politics-Examiner Mike gamecock DeVine
  • Achance

    to borrow the words of the widow of Gen. N. B. Forrest, but this diary is wrong both in its understanding of President Lincoln and it’s understanding of fascism.

    Fascism, whether the true Italian Fascism, true because that’s what they called it, or it’s step-brother German National Socialism is predicated on “coordinating” business and industry with the will of the state. Whereas communism and its milder form socialism contemplate state ownership of business and industry, fascism and National Socialism left business and industry, and their profits, in the hands of the owners so long as the government had control over that business or industry.

    By the ’20s and ’30s, both Italy and Germany had adopted many attributes of socialism particularly regarding labor laws and social welfare. Both had strong and growing Soviet influenced communist parties. In both countries, the capitalists were given the stark choice of acceding to the nationalization of their property by the communists or finding common cause with the Fascists or National Socialists who promised them continued ownership so long as they bent to the Party’s will.

    What Wilson did during WWI is closer to fascism in that while the government didn’t confiscate vital industries and make them state property, it did nationalize them and devote them totally to war aims and war production. FDR did much the same thing in WWII.

    Lincoln never nationalized industry in the US during the Civil War. Many industries sprang up that were totally devoted to war production but they remained private businesses. In fact, profiteering and poor quality goods were a real problem for the US Army. The word “shoddy” remains in our vocabulary from the CW period because unscrupulous manufacturers would use a very short staple wool, basically the waste from higher quality, longer staple wool, called “shoddy” to make US uniforms. When placed under any stress or when wettened, the shoddy uniforms would simply fall apart. Because of the abuses of war contractors, it was said of Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, that he would steal a hot stove if he could get his arms around it.

    Lincoln did exercise almost dictatorial control during the War but he did it on the sufferance of the Congress and the Courts. He never asked either and neither ever told him no; perhaps the first “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The US never recognized the CSA as a beligerant power and consequently Lincoln never asked for a declaration of war. The US conducted the CW as a very large law enforcement operation aimed at suppression of a state of insurrection that was beyond the power of local authority to contain. Congressional approval was basically in the form of giving him the appropriations and authorizing the debt to conduct military operations on a vast scale.

    • diakrioi

      As you say, Lincoln did not take control of the means of production as did Mussolini and Hitler. He was, however, a proponent of greater funding of industry through the central government – a weaker version of fascist methods. But the point I made was based on the tactics used on citizens and the similarity to the tactics used by Wilson. If Wilson used fascist methods then so did Lincoln but maybe not to the same extent.

      The cult of personality surrounding Lincoln is another link to fascist means of control.

      • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

        …when you act happy that Achance calls you wrong both on Lincoln and on fascism.

        • diakrioi

          whether there is a friend here.

      • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

        Let me guess: You consider it to be America’s enabling act?

        • diakrioi

          But the answer is no.

          • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

            You say there is a personality cult around Lincoln.

            If that’s true then reconstruction would reflect that.

          • Achance
          • mbecker908

            not only keep digging but show up with a steam shovel…

          • Achance

            Bad part is I agree with him somewhat but he just couldn’t let it go and wanted to get in the wrong people’s faces about it – or at least got in their faces the wrong way. Can’t say I haven’t exchanged a few harsh words on this subject.

          • mbecker908

            of fighting… don’t start one you have no hope of surviving.

        • aesthete

          The 14th Amendment radically changed the way that the Federal government’s amendments apply to the various states. Granted, that doesn’t make it fascism, but one can’t overlook the historical implications of the amendment as it pertains to federal encroachment on state authority.

      • Achance

        in popular discourse.

        Fascism and National Socialism are foremost an economic system; some have called it State Capitalism. The fact that both the Germans and to a lesser extent the Italians used totalitarian methods is irrelevant. Likewise, the fact that Lincoln also used totalitarian, or at least un-democratic, means doesn’t make him a fascist.

        The comparison between German and Italian fascism and the war means of both Wilson and FDR are apt because in both instances, the means of production remained in private hands though those means were put to uses dictated by the government.

        • Vise77

          In the case of National Socialism, that’s not really the case. National Socialism was foremost a system designed to promote the purity of the German race; everything else was secondary, including economics and economic ideology. In fact, most of the real committed and leading Nazis were either bored with or ignorant of economics (Speer is, of course, one major exception, even though his interested in economics mainly came from mid-war armament reorganization), especially once you get past the Munich putsch and certainly after the Night of the Long Knives in ’34, when any old remaining Nazi from the ’20s who had really believed in the socialism part of National Socialism was disposed of one way or another.

          As well, totalitarian methods in the case of the Third Reich were hardly “irrelevant”; totalitarian government was a means to the end of racial purity and German national rebirth, according to the Nazi point of view as expressed in myriad documents, including Mein Kampf, and resulting actions.

          I’ll grant you “state capitalism,” but you are wrong about the “foremost an economic system” idea.

          • aesthete

            It was, quite interestingly, one of the first countries to use war motifs to inspire nationalist sentiment in the people (“Battle of the Grains”, etc), and in Europe was largely in competition with Marxism for which economic system to use after capitalism had “broken”. Virtually all of the countries in Europe (UK was mostly exempt) had this debate, and it wasn’t until Hitler became the leader of both the Nazi party and Germany that Nazism became associated with anti-Semitism. Also, it should be noted that, while militarism was a theme of Nazism (part of the reason for their split from international socialism), it generally took a back seat to economics and “fixing” the Great Depression until Mussolini decided to involve himself in the Balkans.

          • Vise77

            did not take a back seat in the Third Reich, no matter the time period. The whole goal was to make Germany strong enough to 1) shake off the “shame” of WWI, as expressed mainly through the 1919 peace treaty; and 2) gain land, materials (largely but not exclusively in order to “purify” the race). Economic benefits–which may not have been as strong as the popular imagination would have it–came directly or indirectly from the need to make Germany stronger militarily.

            Everything about the Nazi vision for Germany revolved around racial purity expressed through militarism.

            A good recent discussion of this is included in Richard Evans’ three-volume history of the Third Reich (The Coming of the Third Reich is the first book). It’s a deep but very quick read if you are interested.

          • aesthete

            Everywhere else in Europe, though, nazism was primarily formed as a rival up-and-coming economic movement to communism and socialism (they were more alike than they would have cared to admit, though). In point of fact, the economic policies of both countries were tremendous failures, and it was only good timing in the NSDAP’s rise to power that allows for the myth of nazism as a good thing from an economic standpoint. Certainly, Austria and Italy weren’t privy to the apparent economic blessings of fascism :)

          • aesthete

            I see my mistake now: I was using Nazi and fascist interchangeably! Bad form on my part; I apologize and agree in full with you.

          • Achance

            I was trying to limit the discussion to that relating to government control of the means of production. I wrote about the coordination of the NSDAP and German business here: http://www.redstate.com/achance/2009/02/20/gleichschaltung-a-german-word-we-should-understand/

          • Vise77

            The argument just struck me in an odd way.

            Thank God the NSDAP did such a poor job of economic coordination, including the mineral and agricultural exploitation of the conquered areas.

    • http://www.examiner.com/x-1597-Charlotte-Law--Politics-Examiner Mike gamecock DeVine

      Fascinating comparisons Ac, but what really interests me is the statement you made that I put on the subject line. But first, let me remind that I actually do favor a strong executive in terms of protecting the nation against enemies, foreign and domestic. And that therefore, when we elect a president, we should understand that judgment and character matters.

      I guess my question is that even if Congress and the courts and the president all agree on actions that take our liberty, especially outside the context of war, at what point should We the People consider action outside an obviously failing system.

      I do not think we are close to such a circumstance. I think we can defeat the ObamaDems in the next two election cycles and probably reverse much of their damage to institutions (the wealth is long gone and the dollar may follow). But I agree with you and others that there is a REAL threat of permanent damage in the health care bill and other bills and actions already taken.

      more later

      • http://impudent.blognation.us/blog kyle8

        They were allowed to get away with things that no modern president could.

        • Achance

          couldn’t get away with what Lincoln or Wilson did and more? You’re right, a Republican or other conservative couldn’t get away with it and there’ll be no Seven Days in May in this Country, but a leftist President can get away with pretty much anything as long as he/she gets along with the MSM – and Comrade Obama is proving it every day.

          • http://impudent.blognation.us/blog kyle8

            the press might love him, but they love getting a great story even more. And they are usually forced to go along with a story after it is broken by the alternate media. They might cover up some things, but like a pack of sharks they will be all over him as soon as he shows blood.

          • Achance

            because the media allowed him to marginalize those people. The US mounted a military attack on those people on a pretext, pure and simple.

            So, let’s suppose that the skillfully placed (meaning made up) FBI informant reveals to his/her masters that a group of Tea Party rebels are planning to attack a radio station that carries Air America. To prevent that act of domestic terrorism, the FBI, DHS, BATF et al. swoop down on the group and since we all know that people like that cling to guns, it is an armed attack without warning. They kill all they encounter, swearing, of course, that the rebels fired first, and then begin rounding up all their friends and associates and treat them to the tender mercies of a well selected federal jury in a doughnut city. The media will applaud the “heroes” in law enforcement and all but a few miscreats like most of the people on this board will think that well maybe it was a bad thing but it had to be done because people can’t go around attacking freedom of speech by attacking radio stations. You won’t have to do much of that and never will be heard a discouraging word about the Administration. Those few who refuse to submit are easily marginalized and the government will just have to deal with this uptick in domestic terrorism and root out all the bitter gun and Bible clinging sorts out there.

            And I use the radio station example because that is precisely the excuse the Germans used when they invaded Poland.

          • http://impudent.blognation.us/blog kyle8

            I think the fallout from those incidents were big factors in later republican success. At any rate the doubts about the government’s actions were widely reported.

          • Richard Mullins

            even though his first term was pot marked with complete Mistakes, The incident in Rural McClenen county was forgiven even though it started only 2 days after the First Attack on the World Trade Center. The news media has been fully behind leftists since the “Remember the Maine” Incident.

          • Streiff

            to the extent that anyone “got away with it”. It happened in August 1992.

          • Achance
          • janis

            destroying America as we’ve known don’t pan out for him, i.e., if they somehow don’t get voted into existence. If they do, then the chill on our First Amendment rights will continue and the MSM will fall in line out of fear this time, not out of adoration. If he fails however, well, all hell could break loose.

            But as Achance has pointed out more than once, these people are never more dangerous than when they think they are failing.

    • Third Street
  • http://impudent.blognation.us/blog kyle8

    for the answers given above, it really didn’t resemble fascism all that much and it is hard to retrograde an idea to fit a moment before the Idea was formed.

    On the other hand, unlike many others I concur that nearly everything Lincoln did was illegal and unconstitutional. In fact the founding fathers often discussed the possibility of states leaving the union voluntarily. To say this does not mean I would be happy living in a CSA. But it also is a bit much to make the argument that no other way was possible but one of the bloodiest wars in human history.

    • http://andrightlyso.com/ civil_truth

      As you were…

      • janis
  • http://politics4all.com/users/davidshockey thersites

    You goaded and dumped someone that you probably agree with 90% of the time on real issues. This is a recurring theme on redstate, i.e., mods insult someone and then ban them when they reply in kind.

    • The_Gadfly

      was reasonably restrained. Yeah, he might have agreed with us 90%, but the same was true of conservatives and the Birchers when Buckley effectively kicked them out of the movement. This article and his defense of it smell of similar conspiratorialism.

    • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

      And the quality of agreement from somebody who wants to undo reconstruction and malign the liberator of slaves, is not so good.

      Stuff like that is what gets a movement discredited in the eyes of the voters we need to sway to win elections.

  • http://andrightlyso.com/ civil_truth

    Lincoln definitely sought and succeeded in establishing the supremacy of the Federal union over states rights. He also used unlawful methods during his administration, though historians can debate about whether they were justified by the exigencies of war.

    However, you commit an assault on history when you take a 20th century political movement and apply it to the mid-19th century, since the societies were fundamentally different. If you stretch “fascist” to include all tyrants of the past, you have stripped the word of meaning, which is a loss for us all.

  • diakrioi

    I invite you to read Liberal Fascism. One of the premises of the book is that the meaning of fascist is still debated today. Many confuse the terms fascist and nazi – they are very different things.

  • Streiff

    This diary is nonsense at virtually every turn even within the context of Jonah Goldberg’s book.

    I feel like I lost 20 points off an already meager IQ by simply reading this.

  • http://www.nighttwister.com NightTwister

    This League of the South trash doesn’t belong here on RedState.

    In the words of President Obama, we won.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Sheesh. You’d never know from your post that the US endured during Lincoln’s presidency a large scale conspiracy to undermine the legitimate authority of the government, both in the states of the CSA and in the states that didn’t secede.

    This post is constructed entirely from a mindset that ign ores the facts on the ground, and reminds me much of the criticisms of John Ashcroft and George Bush post-9/11.

    Bush was no fascist dictator, nor was Lincoln.

  • The_Gadfly

    Since Mussolini wasn’t a political philosopher, we don’t actually have a definition of the word. I’ve decided the only person we will ever be able to be 100% sure was a fascist is Mussolini, because he’s the only one to describe himself as such. That being said, if we are to broadly use the term, we have to look at the characteristics of his government to broadly define the term. Here I believe the key characteristic was that he exerted government influence to control major industries and thereby control the entire country. Lincoln didn’t try to control industries, he opted for direct control. Therefore his actions might be described as tyrannical, but not fascist. And even then, given the context of war at the time and the accepted practices of war at the time, I believe it is inaccurate to apply that term to him.

    The Big 0 on the other hand is pretty much a perfect match.

  • http://andrightlyso.com/ civil_truth

    Unless you can plot out a historical and ideological continuity between Lincoln’s administration from 1861-65 during a time of war to the rise of Mussolini some 60 years later on a different continent, then you are just aiding an abetting in the left’s twisting of this term over the past 30-40 years to mean “someone I really disagree politically with” – reducing “Fascism” to meaninglessness.

    Especially since this term is etymologically a direct continuity to the symbol of authority of the Roman empire (fasces) – which made sense for Il Duce but is ludicrous for an American president (at least before nine months ago).

    All you’re doing is using an inflammatory term to poison any reasoned debate about the Lincoln administration.

    And equating mercantilism (which goes back to the 16th century, long before the existence of corporations) with 20th century corporatism is, at best, intellectual laziness and at worse, assault on the historical method. Unless you want to argue that the entire history of the West from the reformation to the rise of capitalism represents the advocacy and/or practice of fascism – which totally drains the life out of “Fascism”.

    Certainly Lincoln crysallized a relationship between the federal government and the states that, magnified by subsequent Presidents and movements (Progressivism, Wilson, both Roosevelts) and the courts has brought us to our present plight.

    But his wartime measures, such as suspending habeus corpus were clearly in the context of prosecuting the war. To argue that such were his preferred method of American governance in peacetime as well puts you on very thin ice indeed.

  • http://www.examiner.com/x-1597-Charlotte-Law--Politics-Examiner Mike gamecock DeVine
  • diakrioi

    Many on the left like that idea.

    Your attempt to link a criticism of Lincoln’s tactics to the relatively mild tactics of Bush and Ashcroft is a weak attempt to link my criticism of Lincoln with modern-day anti-war protests. I am not one of them.

    Somehow I don’t think that speaking out against an income tax within the confines of a legislative session warrants deportation. Yet it happened. I think that the justifications for the actions taken by the Lincoln administration are weak. Under what circumstances is it justifiable to shut down newspapers because they criticize the government?

  • diakrioi

    Care to debate the point? I am saying that Lincoln did many of the same things that Wilson did. If Wilson was, as Goldberg asserts, a fascist then so was Lincoln and for the very same reasons.

    Use your intelligence to refute this if you like. Casting insults only supports your admission of a meager IQ.

  • Streiff

    in a debate with someone who thinks the US economic system at the time of Lincoln was mercantilism and who is patently uneducated on the measures Lincoln used to prosecute the Civil War.

    False history and Martian logic, both found in abundance in your post and comments, don’t merit debate. They merit public humiliation.

    I don’t know what purpose you’re hoping to accomplish here but I’d strongly suggest that we all agree that this was an alcohol inspired rant and let it drop.

  • diakrioi

    Resorting to insults so soon? I have made a point that Lincoln’s tactics were unwarranted and resemble the description of fascism and now I am a neoconfederate? Give me a break.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

  • diakrioi

    “If you don’t know then I’m not going to tell you.”

    I believe I heard someone use that the last time in the 3rd grade.

    You are making the point that the Lincoln myth is so strong that anything negative said about him is instantly derided as crazy talk. This prevents examination of the mistakes and excesses of his administration.

    I’ve already been called crazy and it is suggested that I’m a neoconfederate. I suspect that next I’ll be called a racist since I’m quite obviously pro-slavery. All because I did what – suggested that Lincoln used the same tactics as fascists?

  • diakrioi

    are a logical fallacy.

  • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

    You will now apologize to Neil for trying to dismiss his argument by claiming that it’s similar to those made by lefties. Next post. Don’t try to be cute about it, either.

  • diakrioi

    Fascism, at least the Italian and Spanish versions of it were not the evil things that we think of today – post war. If you have read Liberal Fascism, perhaps you remember Goldberg’s long list of people who openly admired the Mussolini administration. Goldberg also points out that the meaning of fascist has never been concrete.

    Nazi is the term most and rightfully associated the horrors of the second world war.

    “All you

  • http://moelane.com/ Moe Lane

    http://www.redstate.com/diakrioi/2009/10/20/lincoln-the-first-fascist/#comment-32

  • janis

    Or is that just unwarranted bragging on your part. You should have learned at some point in your post-third grade life not to argue with people who patently know more than you do about a variety of subjects.

    And note that I’m not calling you a racist, just an idiot.