Presidential historian Jon Meacham appeared on CNN where co-host Alisyn Camerota set him up to tell their viewers that voting for Democrats is similar to how former REPUBLICAN President Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and saved the union.
Okay, first of all, some historian—He conveniently failed to mention Lincoln’s political affiliation, but also the show is claiming that a vote against Stacey Abrams in Georgia is somehow racist. As if Lincoln would have voted for her for the color of her skin. Abrams isn’t qualified—Period.
kicked things off by inviting Meacham to “tell us why you think that this is the most important election since 1850.”
Meacham replied that, “Well, I think it’s the most important election, easily, since that period, because we are facing a stress test for the rule of law. And democracies run not just on policies, not just about what a particular policy or tax rate is.”
He would go on to confess, “as George W. Bush might say, I mis-underestimated the power of the big lie here. But it — it’s burrowed in and democracies do not long endure if everything becomes about power at the expense of winning humbly and losing graciously.”
In his attempt to mock Bush, Meacham naturally glossed over that Bush was the subject of not one, but two election conspiracy theories from the party that he now demands the rest of us vote for to save democracy.
Co-host Laura Coates followed by starting analogy train, “You know, speaking of the big lie, and I thought it was really interesting in your book that you touch on this notion, I think maybe people would not — would not occur to them that both Lincoln and Biden are grappling with, or at some point we’re grappling with their own version of the big lie.”
If Lincoln is Biden, then the GOP is the Confederacy, “In Lincoln’s case, it was the big lie that slavery was a justifiable institution that ought to be maintained. And you write in the book, there were three moments where had he succumbed to the pressure, had his vice president succumb to the pressure, had he turned over the Fort Sumter to try to placate the Confederacy and delay the Civil War, the course of history might be very different.”
Waxing poetic, Meacham ironically warned, “If we go entirely political, if it’s entirely, every moment is this battle where it is cataclysmic, then the system doesn’t endure.”
Getting to his own Lincoln analogies, Meacham declared “Abraham Lincoln, if he had been solely a politician, he would’ve made several — could have made several different decisions that would probably have sustained slavery, certainly late into the 19th century and possibly into the 20th century.”
However, “Lincoln said no. And partly it’s kind of like what Churchill did in 1940. He saw that appeasement had not worked. And that if, in fact, you gave in once more, that the south, the white south where I come from, wasn’t just interested in slavery in its limited sphere.”
Reaching for the most eccentric analogy yet, Meacham explained, “There was an ambitious plan to take slavery to add Cuba to the empire, to add Mexico, Nicaragua to build this, it’s called the Golden Circle. And it was going to expand and it would’ve fundamentally changed the course of everything. And Abraham Lincoln, flawed, fallen, and fallible, said no. And he said no, because he believed fundamentally that slavery had to die and the union had to endure.”
Erica Carlin is an independent journalist, opinion writer and contributor to several news and opinion sources. She is based in Georgia.
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