John Burt

Lincoln teaches two lessons for the age of Trump, first, a morally responsible but unself-righteous strategy for occasions when one discovers the American people engaging in behavior that undermines the mores upon which democratic political culture depends, and second, a realistic and moderate method of approaching opponents who seem to have closed themselves off from persuasion. The results of the 2016 election unsettle many assumptions about the domestic and international politics that the United States has practiced since the Second World War. They require us to see the American people without illusions and to ask what the proper course of action should be when they betray values that had been widely taken as fundamental and reject the mores and habits that stabilize liberal democratic republics. Lincoln faced a similar shock when he discovered, after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, that many Americans saw slavery not as an intractable evil that one could attack only with caution, but as something positively good, something to be defended and expanded. Even though they failed to prevent civil war, Lincoln’s efforts to keep alive the possibility of persuasive engagement with those with whom he was in profound moral conflict provide a model that our era would be wise to emulate.

All the King’s Men (1946) is the most important novel about politics in the American tradition. It is also one of the key texts of the renascence of Southern literature in the twentieth century, alongside the fiction of Faulkner, Porter, O’Connor, and Welty. Although it is often seen as a novel about the possibility of totalitarian dictatorship in the United States, it is best seen as a novel about the temptations and problems of populism, particularly as populism developed in the post-Reconstruction South, and as a meditation about the problem of reconciling means and ends in politics, about the temptation to overturn the political order in order to serve an urgent call for justice and an urgent responsibility to remedy human need.

Lincoln’s 1838 address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” was not his first political speech, but it was the first articulation of many themes that would become prominent in his more mature oratory. Among these was the claim that stable political institutions require the cultivation of habits of thought and behavior that fit people for democratic living. Further, these habits, though arising from the demands of reason, must ingrain themselves beneath reason into the structure of popular feeling so as to become an intuitive, and never fully reflected on, ground of habit—