In 1859 Abraham Lincoln was invited to Boston for a speaking engagement, but could not come. Instead, he wrote a Letter to H.L. Pierce and the Boston Republicans in which he mused upon how the political parties had switched positions over the years on the questions of liberty and property. The Democrats had been the Jeffersonian party, honoring liberty over property, and the anti-Jeffersons differed.
Lincoln wrote:
The democracy of to-day hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing, when in conflict with another man’s right of property. Republicans, on the contrary, are for both the man and the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man before the dollar.
The parties have switched once again. The Republican Party is now the party of radical property supremacy. Prior to and during for the Civil War the South fought for the right to hold property rights over other humans, depriving them of their liberty. Today, the Republican Party agitates for the rights of property over the lives of Americans. The result is over 205,000 deaths and 7 million infected.
Republicans have made it clear that they want to “reopen” without consequence to the health and safety of Americans. That is property supremacy. Property over human lives.
Who could forget this pronouncement?:
Dan Patrick, Texas’ Republican lieutenant governor, on Monday night suggested that he and other grandparents would be willing to risk their health and even lives in order for the United States to “get back to work” amid the coronavirus pandemic.
We’ve seen the same thing here in Massachusetts with the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance serving as a cat’s paw for Charles Koch, challenging Governor Baker’s emergency public health powers that have tamped down coronavirus. The reopen movement is driven and underwritten by extreme property supremacists like Koch and Robert Mercer.
And so is Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. The radical right funders that sustain the Republican Party expect Barrett to vote to strike down environmental, worker, health and safety regulations, etc. First to go will be the Affordable Care Act. Eviscerate the New Deal and Great Society. Reopen. Property supremacy.
And who is bankrolling the campaign to confirm Barrett? Charles Koch, that’s who.
Read the entire Lincoln letter. It’s a gem, with great comic moments. He closed out with “All honor to Jefferson” the man who embedded the idea of human liberty and human equality into an otherwise “merely revolutionary document.”
The man and the dollar, but the man before the dollar.
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, oligarchy, and democracy.]