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History Does Not Happen All at Once
If you haven’t already, you will hear and see arguments from the Party of Lincoln about how the politicians and voters of the Democratic Party are the “real racists” in our two-party system because it was historically the party of slavery, secession and the Ku Klux Klan back in the 19th Century. Republicans like to bring this history up because over the same course of our history their party had dramatically devolved from the abolitionist roots of its founding in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854. Republicans today might even have a sound argument about their Democratic Party rivals had they themselves remained consistent to its policy priorities of the 1860s; or had the national Democratic Party not finally severed its legislative dependence on the southern “Dixiecrats” when LBJ signed sweeping historic Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s. But they did; and they did it while the Republicans willfully degenerated into the party of voter suppression, union busting and religious fundamentalism.
History does not happen all at once. Indeed, once upon a time, Abraham Lincoln developed, through correspondence and diplomatic messages, a friendship with and an admiration for Karl Marx and his political ideas.
“Labor is prior to and independent of capital,” Lincoln wrote in his first message to Congress (the forerunner to the State of the Union address) in December, 1861…