COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY ERIC ZUESSE IN RINF
Well, I do like what I read of Tulsi Gabbard.
And for me, good political qualities and values are never
found on just one side, Right or Left. Never.
People who think that way are naive in the extreme and
generally have no real grasp of history.
In the end, parties almost do not matter as guarantors for
the personal qualities of leaders. This has been demonstrated countless times
in history.
Indeed, parties frequently interfere with the natural
ability of some leaders to communicate with people in the interests of pure
partisanship.
Parties are control-mechanisms, they are money-raising
machines, they are organizational armies, and they are, for some, virtually
secular religious organizations.
They are not honest, sound, trustworthy organizations for
the assembly of people with similar beliefs.
Having said all that, I want to disagree with the author's
characterization of Lincoln as "progressive."
I have read many of the important biographies, and I do not
believe that word applies.
He was a decent, fair-minded person, a self-made man, well
liked for his humor and modesty and honesty, but he has come down to us as
almost a secular saint. He was not a saint and his politics were only
"progressive" if you stretch the word beyond its reasonable meaning.
He was moreover quite a hard man at times. His horse-like
work on his father's farm until he was an adult, and his hard work at becoming
a successful lawyer with less than two years of formal education made him that
way.
His big clients included corporate interests like the
growing Illinois Central Railroad. Those were the kind of fees that enabled him
to build a handsome house in Springfield, Illinois.
He is in fact responsible for creating the imperial colossus
America has become. He was a kind of later-day re-founder of America. The Civil
War, never about slavery or rights from his own words, welded America into a
more unified and industrialized and militarized society.
