Lincoln's lesson for today's culture wars

Democracy must be more than two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for lunch.

from the September 26, 2008 edition

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But Lincoln responded that majority rule will never actually "settle" a question that disturbs the moral balance of the universe. "Is it not false statesmanship," asked Lincoln in the last of the debates, "...to build up a system of policy upon the basis of caring nothing about the very thing that every body does care the most about?"

A democracy without a sense of the sacredness of those rights was like a tornado, hollow at the core and purposeless in direction. "[T]he real issue," in the slavery controversy, Lincoln said, was "the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world," and anyone who ignored the "real issue" in the name of secularism and choice was eroding the moral capital on which democracy relies.

Our reverence for what Lincoln achieved keeps us from seeing that it is not his, but Douglas's attitudes that have come to rule modern American politics.

We deify democratic choice, and then try to restrain choice's excesses by rules and guidelines rather than by right and honor. For example, we smear violence and sex on television and then write behavioral codes to prevent harassment.

We imagine that glorifying process is the safest resort, so we stare at genocide and refer it for discussion by the United Nations Security Council. And we conflate rights and privileges to the point where the right to life becomes a "choice" but a national healthcare system becomes a virtuous necessity.

To a certain extent, we (and Douglas) may be perfectly reasonable in making process what we live by. After all, Lincoln's implacable insistence on treating slavery as a question of right and wrong really did help bring on civil war.

Suppose we set up a moral test for public policy. Whose moral test should we use? Much as our righteous souls may be vexed by porn shops and abortion clinics, we can always retreat within our own private castles and repeat Thomas Jefferson's soothing explanation that "it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

Or can we? Civil wars and culture wars are not the only threat to the survival of a democracy. When democracies define themselves purely by process rather than principle, they lose all passion for solidarity and all interest in the self-restraint and self-sacrifice that serve as the precondition for self-government.

Democracy shuns moral absolutism; but it does not shun all absolutes. Which is why, 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln didn't shun them either.

• Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College and the author of "Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America."

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