In When It Was Grand, Lee Anna Keith reminds us how today’s Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln. As she shows, Lincoln was on the moderate wing of a party whose founding principles concerned the abolition of slavery. After the Civil War, the “Radical Republicans” tried to engineer a society with equal opportunity and civil rights for all men, regardless of color. They were soon thwarted by guerilla warfare conducted by the Ku Klux Klan (and other Southern terrorists) and the growing reluctance of Congress, courts and the White House to enforce constitutional amendments intended to bestow citizenship on all natural born Americans. “Starting in 1968, the party openly fomented racial divisions in pursuit of partisan advantages,” Keith writes. The “alternative America” once envisioned by the GOP is anathema to the party of Trump.
