Steve Inskeep: Kevin Is No Lincoln

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. It is October tenth two thousand twenty three, and we are continuing to Get our heads around the fact that the world has changed, in in so many dramatic ways, in my morning shots newsletter. I quote an Apple bomb writing in the Atlantic, saying, don’t be fooled into thinking that this is just a continuation of the same old cycle. This is something much worse. It is something uglier.

It is as if ISIS has been reborn. And so we’ll we’re going to be talking about that at Great Lane. We are joined today. By Steve Inskeep co host of NPR’s Morning Edition, and the author of a new book out just last week differ we must how Lincoln exceeded in a divided America. And I have questions about that, Steve.

I have questions about Lincoln succeeding in a divided America because there was that whole civil war thing.

There was a little civil war thing.

There was, like, eight hundred thousand Americans that died during that civil war.

Yeah. It’s pretty bad. Yeah. If you wanna talk about this now, I am happy to have that raised because I am not saying in this book that Abraham Lincoln was a can we all get a long guy? Or kiss and make up guy or peace at any price or compromise at any price.

Right. What Lincoln did, though, was when the south made war on the United States, on the union, when the south rose in rebellion, he worked to build as brought up as possible a coalition to uphold the constitution. He didn’t try to get along with everybody, but he talked with everybody. He listened to everybody. He empathized and understood everybody he could, and he made all the allies he could, which is what democracy is about.

You make the observation. I think it’s the first line of the book that Abraham Lincoln was a politician. And and being a politician has become a dirty word these days. And, obviously, we’re we’re thinking a lot these days about, you know, what is statesmanship? What are politics?

What are we looking for? And so you emphasize the fact that Abraham Lincoln was a politician and was willing to get into the messy business of politics. Yeah. He didn’t mind sitting in a room and cutting deals that might have been a little sketchy in in different in different contexts.

Yeah. A little sketchy dealing with people that are can feel morally perilous to deal with. We do have a very negative image of politicians. We have certain politicians whose behavior encourages us to have a very negative image of the profession. But I think sometimes we disrespect the wrong things about politics.

We have this view, and I think this is true on the left and the right in somewhat different ways. The parties are not the same, but they each have a variation on this, a feeling that if you talk with the other side, if you deal with someone who differs with you at all, You are weak. You are naive because they’re never gonna change their mind. You are even morally tainted by the association with the other person But the reality is that in a democracy, that other person who is wrong, still has a vote, which is the way it ought to be as long as we’re gonna have a democracy, And so you have to deal with them because they are a person with power, a little fragment of power perhaps, but you have to deal with them on some level or outnumber them. Defeat them.

And outnumbering them may call upon you to make allies that you may not consider to be perfect. And I think Lincoln definitely understood that he needed allies that he didn’t agree with on everything, but maybe even just one out of ten things they could work together.

Well, he also understood that politics and government were deadly serious things, and we we live in this very unserious time. Where, you know, you you think about the things that we have been debating, the the kind of, you know, food fights we’ve been having, the the

Are you suggesting that it’s unserious to overturn, say, the speaker of the House of Representatives without anybody lined up to be the replacement. Is that the kind of thing?

It’s a radical thought. But, I mean, we have an entire class of politicians that don’t think that politics is about actually doing anything. It’s all about performance. It’s all about the clicks. It’s all about the dopamine hits.

And, you know, you go through all of the ephemera and the trivia and just the personal back and forth. And you would think that this week would be one of those massive reality look, the world is a deeply dangerous place. You know, we are seeing this axis of evil rising up. And then maybe we have been feeling that we could indulge this kind of politics or performative demagoguery because we’ve been so complacent, right, that we can burden things down without consequences. What’s interesting about this book is the is the contrast between the politics of someone like Abraham Lincoln and the politics that we are unfortunately having to endure right now because he understood that there were deadly consequences.

It was not just a show. He just couldn’t say them, you know, throw some shit up against the wall and then go on cable television that night. Know, to try to raise funds off of it. That was not what government was.

I mean, I’ve been very interested in the course of Kevin McCarthy, the Yes. Former house speaker because there have been a couple of moments this year where he acknowledged the seriousness of events. There was a period in which he was trying to accommodate his right wing and accommodate his right wing and keep his job and saying things that appeared to be untrue and on and on and on. But then the debt ceiling approached, and he made a deal, which is what is necessary. It is the system we have in politics.

I won’t even say because I’m a journalist that it was the right thing or the wrong thing, but it is the normal and expected thing. It is the way the system is supposed to work. This happened again on September thirtieth. The government is supposed to stay open there. Serious things to deal with.

He could not get agreement on his own side, so he made a deal with the other side, which is the kind of thing that you do that is the normal and expected thing in a democracy. It’s recognizing the seriousness of the situation. But the second of those times, he had just enough of his colleagues in the house who had a different idea of things that you should never compromise, that you should never make a deal, that there’s never a moment that the overriding needs of the country are greater than my personal view of what my party should do, even if I can’t really express what that is.

And here we are. This is the the moment that, has has been coming for so long and is probably going to get worse. Interesting you we bring up, Kevin McCarthy today because Kevin McCarthy is not willing to let this particular crisis pass. And I’m not a betting man on these things anymore. My prediction skills are quite limited.

A week after he becomes the first speaker in history who’s to be ousted. He’s essentially saying he’s willing to come back because there’s a crisis in the Middle East and I’m still here, which by the way is, I would say unlikely, but not impossible because right now nothing is impossible. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this morning on the day that we’re talking here, we spoke with Susan Davis, our excellent congressional correspondent, who sounded skeptical that McCarthy could round up the votes. There’s still that hardcore that dethroned him once who could dethrone him again. But there are also a few lawmakers who are saying, I’m not gonna vote for anybody, but Kevin Carthy, and who knows what could happen?

We have no idea.

Yeah. I mean, the key is how do you get to two hundred and eighteen or two hundred and seventeen? I I lose track of how many votes you need given the efficiencies. Nobody is really close to that. So let’s come back to that just a little bit later.

And I also wanna come back to Lincoln a a little bit later because this moment that we’re in right now where we are watching the world order be, I would say, certainly transformed. Any hope that the Middle East was going to become that there were going to be new accords that were going to usher in a new era of Kumbaya, completely destroyed. The world seems to be lining up behind Israel for the moment. We know that the retribution’s gonna happen. On Monday, you spoke with Ron Durmer, the former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, and he he put this in the context of it being Israel’s nine eleven, which we discussed on the podcast yesterday.

So tell me what he said.

Yeah. Yeah. I’ve had an opportunity to visit Israel and the West Bank and Gaza over the years and I’ve interviewed, Netanyahu over the years a number of times. I’ve tried to pay attention to that story. It really is striking what we learned about Hamas over the weekend.

I was last there in two thousand eighteen, which was an occasion you may recall this there were Hamas people lashing up then, and their efforts were so pathetic compared to Israel’s power that it was almost sad. There were random unarmed civilians effectively marching into machine guns. There were people sending kites over the Israeli lines hoping some kind of incendiary device would would set a fire. I mean, really, really weak ways to lash out at Israel. And we discovered over the weekend that they were far more capable, I think, than anybody thought, that they had developed more capability over the last couple of years The brutality of this is hard to get your mind around.

The targeting of civilians is hard to get your mind around. And, I mean, I’ve been around. I was I covered the Pentagon on nine eleven. I get that people do, what people do, but it’s still I I never get used to it. I never am unsurprised that that someone would kill women and children or take hostages in the way that that Hamas has done.

And then, yes, on Monday, we interviewed Ron Durmer, who’s a close advisor to netanyahu, was the ambassador to the United States, is now their minister for strategic affairs. And one of the questions in my mind, going into this interview, Charlie, as it would have been yours, I’m sure, is what about civilian casualties How are you going to strike this densely populated area without killing a lot of innocent civilians? And he effectively preempted my question by saying we’re gonna do something very, very forceful, and we’re gonna kill civilians. And it’s just gonna happen, and you better deal with it. You better accept it.

And he demanded the support of the world in spite of his expectation that civilians will be killed. I’m hard pressed to think of another interview where someone has been that frank about the reality of damage to civilians. And of course, the Israeli defense minister has said we’re cutting off food, we’re cutting off water, we’re cutting off electricity to a couple million people. It is an excruciating situation, the solution to which I certainly don’t know.

And there are hostages.

Yeah.

There are hostages in in Hamas’s hands, which obviously complicate this tremendously. No. There was once a time when, was the Israeli policy that we not negotiate with terrorists at all. And I’m hearing a lot of that again that if we negotiate for these hostages, we will simply have more hostages. So What do they do?

What happens now? What are the prospects you can rescue these people? I mean, this has been horrible. But it seems likely with your description that it’s gonna become even more horrible.

Yeah. I mean, one possibility is that they do attempt to rescue. Right? And again, we’re I have no insight information. And if if I did, it would be probably wrong of me to talk about it in public, and I don’t have insight information.

But we know that the Israeli military has a lot of capabilities. They, in fact, have a history of rescuing hostages on more than one occasion. Netanyahu himself part of his life story is rescuing hostages who were held on a plane, being involved in that that operation. It’s the opening of his biography, which I got a chance to talk with him about last year when that was published. His auto biography.

Yeah. That

one. Yes. Exactly. The Entebi rate. And that was a long time ago.

But there have been other occasions over the years. So I don’t regard it as impossible that the Israelis would go in and try to get anybody they can, but it’s gonna be very difficult for the very reason that Durham was forecasting civilian casualties because it is a crowded urban area. It’s not an airplane alone on a char mac. You have no idea what situation you may be going into, but that’s one way this gets solved is a rescue. But if it doesn’t get everybody, If that fails, then you have excruciating decisions to make if you were the prime minister of Israel.

Okay. Let’s talk about the prime minister of Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu has been around a very, very long time. A veteran politician, has had his challenges. At the moment, you know, he obviously is trying to rally the world around his support, but the failure of intelligence, the failure to stop this attack is really extraordinary.

And it would be extraordinary for anyone, but especially for someone who’s been around as long as Benjamin Netanyahu. So what is your sense In Israel, are they looking at Likudin saying you had one job? You had one job which was to protect us. And well, what do you think?

That is one of the reactions. And I’ll just report our correspondent, Daniel Estrin is on the ground in Israel. Really, really excellent reporter, and he immediately in talking with people who lost relatives and talking with people who have hostages now in Gaza has found extreme anger with the government. Why would they allow this failure? I’m trying to remember back to the fog of nine eleven in the United States, and there certainly was anger at the US government for this failure and if I was George w Bush reading to a kindergarten class or whatever questions people ask.

But I remember a very wise statement by Tom Rick, maybe he’s been on this program at some point. The, writer about military affairs and now historian, friend of mine, wonderful guy. He came on our air, after nine eleven. And he said, I’m not sure that I would wanna live in a country that was ready for nine eleven, meaning that the security that would have been necessary to prevent that and foresee this very creative and horrible attack would have made it almost a totalitarian state that was his view. He would rather live in a free country and face the risk than live in an unfree country and not face the risk.

I think there were people who had that perspective. And there were also people, of course, who supported George w Bush’s response to the attacks. His approval ratings were like ninety percent and remained that way for a year or two. This seems to be a different immediate reaction. Netanyahu’s own government had divided the country, was pursuing an agenda that a very large number of Israelis opposed.

That they were in the streets over for months and months and months, which he modified somewhat but would not abandon and that led to anger against Netanyahu. And also the idea of an attack out of Gaza is not a surprise. The scale and ferocity is a surprise. At least it surprised me. I did not realize they had that kind of capability.

Anyone. But

if you’re the Israeli military, that’s what you’re paid to know, and they knew just where the enemy was. And so there is some anger.

It is incomprehensible. Now there’s a long and complicated history, which I don’t wanna go deep down the rabbit hole. But Israel has, in many ways, well, encouraged Hamas in the past that they saw Hamas as a counterweight to the Palestinian authority, which has been weak. And as a result, there’s been a little bit of pussy footing around with Hamas, a little bit of appeasement of Hamas. So that policy now has been utterly discredited.

Obviously, a certain amount of naivete on the part of the Netanyahu administration that they thought that Hamas was not posing an immediate threat that that they gave work permits to people in Gaza somehow that that would lessen the pressure. So They obviously did not understand what was about to happen in terms of the logistics of this attack, the missiles, the hang gliders, the, the bulldozers, all of that. But they also completely misread the mood of Hamas. I mean, so this is like a multiple cascading series of failures, isn’t it?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I don’t wanna comment too thoroughly on the history. I mean, there are people who will say Israel created Thomas. I can’t verify that sitting here.

But in any case, Israel has dealt with Hamas. There’s an argument to be made that Israel needed to deal with Hamas because it’s just a reality. They were there. They controlled some territory. It’s territory that Israel withdrew from in two thousand five and did not find it in its continuing interest to have a troop presence literally inside of of Gaza.

And so they pulled away and and built their walls. And Hamas is there, and you have to deal with them in the same way that you would have to deal with any group of people or just realities like the weather. I mean, it’s a reality there are these people who live there and feel that Israel is or many of them feel that Israel is an illegitimate state and also know as just a matter of literal fact that they don’t have equal rights, don’t have freedom of travel, don’t have a very free economy and are surrounded by walls. So you you have this group that you need to deal with, and they did make an effort when possible to deal with the Moss and to deal with Palestinians and the West Bank. At least economically.

This was part of Netanyahu’s policy during his prior prime ministerships and part of what he’s at least spoke for in the present one that he was happy to encourage prosperity for Palestinians, but less and less willing to allow anything that looked even remotely like independence for Palestinians. I don’t blame them for trying to deal with Hamas just as a reality, but they did not see the attack coming. That’s for sure.

So this is a far right government since we’re gonna be talking about politics in the in the messy business of politics. Netanyahu presides over a far right government that has engaged in, you know, as push policies that are really torn this country apart. I mean, that there was actually talk about the possibility of, and maybe metaphorical civil war, but you had people in the security services, people in the military who were saying that, look, this is weakening in the country. This is making the country more vulnerable. This was as divided a country as we have seen since, I think, nineteen forty eight.

You may have a different impression. So to what extent did that contribute, either to Hamas’s perception that Israel was weakened divided or to the reality that in fact, that Yahoo and his small circle had become so isolated from the security services or people in the military that they weren’t listening, that they weren’t paying attention, that they had become connected from this apparatus. What do you think?

I am reluctant to draw that conclusion as many people instantly did because you want to report you wanna be based on facts. But the reality is that the government did have a giant distraction, a very divisive I think about this often in terms of the United States. I even think of it in terms of the story of of Lincoln. We create these giant distractions for ourselves and we really need to be worrying about other things. Why did we spend the spring in a pointless debate over the debt ceiling when we needed to pay attention to China?

Why did we almost have a government shutdown when we needed to be paying attention to things? Why did we then have a deposing the speaker of the house and freezing the house of representatives when there might be a crisis any minute, and suddenly there was one. Why are we having a lot of the arguments that we have over cultural memes and social media messages when there are other more serious things to argue about. This is a question that I have. My research about Lincoln makes me think about this too because Lincoln tried to focus on one central goal.

He’s the president of the United States. There was a rebellion. He wanted to focus on that. He wanted to keep people united on that one goal preserving the union he tried to shove other controversies to the side, not always successfully, but he was trying for the one big goal. And while I am reluctant, as I said, to say, the distraction in Israeli society made them more vulnerable It is no doubt, though, a distraction from serious threats that they were aware were in the neighborhood.

I thought it was interesting what, Ambassador Germer told you when he was describing this forceful response. He he said the last time we saw something like this was when ISIS came out on the stage, You saw that in the trucks with these fighters wearing the jihadi banners going in indiscriminately mowing down people. This is an interesting analogy that that what we are seeing is kind of Isis writ large. We’re seeing this new style of just pure raw terror, aren’t we?

I don’t know what to make of the civilian casualties here. Like I said, no matter how often it happens, I I never get used to it. Yeah. And there is a bit of an analogy here as well because we’re talking about a group that has an identifiable strip of territory that they control. And that complicates the the challenge of of addressing it.

Let’s talk about, Lincoln, because what I find saying about this is, of course, we feel that we live in these incredibly divisive dangerous times, which I think is true. I I do think that there’s a challenge to a national unity that is as great as anything we’ve seen in in decades. And so I think it’s very valuable. To look back at other moments of crisis and division in American history and how we got through it. It often does feel that the decade that seems most parallel to what we’re going through right now might be the eighteen fifties.

What do you think of that analogy? This is the country bubbling, bubbling, bubbling, and the divisions becoming, you know, more and more raw.

I think there’s a little something to that. Analogy. I mean, this is the third book I’ve written on nineteenth century America. I wrote a thing about Andrew Jackson, the Cherokee, John Ross, the Cherokee chief I wrote a thing about an eighteen fifties presidential candidate, John C Freeman and his wife, Jesse, and now I’ve written this Lincoln book where a lot of the action takes place in the eighteen fifties. And maybe one of the reasons I’ve come to dwell on that part of history is because I feel the parallels as a news reporter covering the news today.

It was an increasingly divided time, an ideologically divided time culturally divided time and economically divided time. And a time when people were arguing over questions like equality and who belongs in America and who does not. And you can feel the similarities to today when you read the rhetoric that people use. The issues are different, but somehow the approaches and appeals to other human beings and are the same. I wanna do one caveat before we go on.

And that is people say, well, that you think we’re heading for a new civil war. And at this time, I do not. Mhmm. Because I feel that so many of our disputes are almost about nothing. They’re pointless.

They’re they’re performative to use your your absolutely chosen word. And it’s just hard to see people going to civil war over whose house speaker or, you know, over the debt ceiling. It’s just it’s hard to see some of these things being as gigantic and cutting through society as slavery. But political violence, I think, is very possible.

Yeah.

Just not a civil war, civil war.

So it may not be a civil war between states, but among within the states between red and blue mean. So what what is the context of January sixth? Because That was a violent uprising. And we do have this buzz about secession.

Yeah. Yeah. No. I mean, I think, the idea of some political violence is very possible because that’s really a lot of American history. Even if you set aside the giant civil war where people raised armies and set armies against one another, the more than a decade after the civil war included tremendous political violence across the Southern United States as Bulwark people gained the right to vote and then progressively lost the right to vote and got to serve an office and then progressively were kicked out of office often through various kinds of violent uprisings and terror campaigns.

And we could go all through history of even labor disputes that become violent. The civil rights movement, tremendous violence is in the nineteen fifth. We could just go on and on. Right. Right.

There’s a lot of political violence in this country. I think that more of it is to be expected because of that history and because of January sixth. I’m not saying it’s all gonna be peaceful and all gonna work out. I’m just making that limited claim that it’s hard to see. I do not at this time foresee the events that would break the country apart.

Check back with me in a year, and I’ll let you know.

Okay. So we started off talking about Lincoln’s political skills because and and I wanna talk about in terms of, you know, the that he was a politician. And this is something that I think is that’s what’s interesting about your book that you focus in on that yet at a time when when politics is in very, very bad order. So what were Lincoln’s political skills? I mean, you talk about how he wouldn’t ostracize people.

He didn’t have this puritanical approach to politics where he thought that we, you know, he should separate himself from people that he disagreed with. So talk to me a little bit about that because the flip side, of course, is that this is the man that presided over the ab absolute division of the country in which we killed hundreds of thousands of one another. So how do we reconcile those two things?

Absolutely. I mean, he did not virtue signal. He was not about showing that he was the most proper person with the most progressive views.

Yeah.

He did not demonize people. He was arguing over the greatest moral issue arguably that the country has ever faced slavery and he considered slavery a moral outrage, but he didn’t act like he was morally superior to other people or even tell his supporters to. There’s a quote from a speech in eighteen fifty four. He’s in the free state of Illinois. So he’s talking to an audience that at least notionally opposes slavery, but they probably got relatives and cousins back in Kentucky and other places that practice slavery.

And he actually says if we were in the place of slave owners, we might do exactly as they do. And if they were in our place, they might do exactly as we do. Essentially, he was saying people are shaped by their environment. They’re shaped by their circumstances. And their interests.

And slave holders had, in many cases, inherited a centuries old system, which they naturally defended out of self interest. So I think there’s something really powerful in that that’s really useful. I mean, I got a chance to talk just the other day about this book in a church. And I was thinking about that idea of all of us as being flawed. None of us being perfect.

All of us having imperfect beliefs on race or anything else that probably will be outdated in ten years anyway, whatever is we think is proper now. But what Lincoln was willing to focus on rather than the individuals was a system that degraded human beings and corrupted human beings and had to change. So that was one thing. I’ll mention another thing having taken this kind of modest view that he wasn’t, like, morally superior to everybody. He thought about who he was speaking with.

He empathized with them, and he considered their interests, their self interest in many cases. He had this view of humanity that everybody is guided in some sense by self interest, which sounds really grim, but it’s also understandable because if we don’t look after our interest that somebody has to. And so he would shape his arguments to appeal to that.

No. That’s interesting. I mean, you point out that he spoke carefully he did not demonize his opponents, and he shied away from the most radical responses to slavery because he had this No. This is their self interest. This is our self interest.

He had the moral principle, but he was careful not to do that. In practical terms, I could certainly imagine him today, you know, being being accused of being too squishy, too soft, too willing to not, you know, because he was an incrementalist. He wanted to abolish slavery, but he was very pragmatic. And in some ways, kind of, conservative in his approach to it.

People used the word conservative, and I don’t think they used the word squish, but people talked about him that way at the time. If you were a radical abolitionist, you might be suspicious of Abraham Lincoln and what he really stood for and the fact that he would also be like friends with slave holders. And Yeah. He also had views that we would consider objectionable, like maybe black people should move to some other country and be free there. There’s a lot there to object to, but he was also a constitutionalist.

He believed in the constitution. He believed the constitution limited what he could get away with in terms of attacking slavery in states that practiced it. So he wanted to do the maximum that was politically and legally possible with a hope that slavery would someday end.

So the story is in the book. I mean, this the the book is, you know, differ. We must. And you use sixteen encounters with sixteen different people that he disagreed with. That he was willing to sit down with.

So let’s talk about some of these sixteen. You talked about the Joshua speed years before the war. Another one of these face to face encounters was Frederick Douglas in August eighteen sixty three. So what were they differing about? How did that go?

Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglas in the midst of the civil war.

Yeah. This is one of my favorite encounters. Douglas, and I guess we should clarify because people get confused. They’re Stephen Douglas, the sender that Lincoln debated and the Lincoln

Not to be confused. Yeah.

Exactly. Really not not good views on slavery. And Frederick Douglas who escaped from slavery and became a writer in order and had an extra s on his name and was just an amazing figure because he was working both the inside and the outside. On the outside, he was very critical of Lincoln for the reasons we just said. Why are you so slow to abolish slavery?

Why are you not doing more? Why do you not under understand what obviously is necessary as the south goes to war. But on the inside, he supported Lincoln’s Republican Party. Which he knew was anti slavery, not as radical as he wanted it to be, but he was pragmatic too. Instead, this party has a chance to win, which they did win.

And this party is in power and so they can do things and I support them. And when Lincoln did finally issue the emancipation proclamation, Douglas took part in helping to recruit Bulwark men for the United States army. He then felt that Lincoln’s administration was failing to provide equal treatment, equal pay, and other things to those black So

the the black soldiers were not being paid the same as the white soldiers.

Barely more than half and they couldn’t be promoted as officers the way that white men could and they had other disadvantages. Douglas went to Lincoln at the White House to protest. To tell Lincoln off, and they ended up having a really remarkable discussion that Lincoln handled in a very effective way.

Okay. So he basically explained the politics. He said he would fix it, which he eventually did. How do we know about that conversation? It’s a private conversation.

It’s a private conversation. This is true with all of these. And in fact, I might have chosen other meetings had there been better records of just what was said. In this case, There’s a documentary record that includes several accounts by Frederick Douglas himself. He wrote a contemporaneous letter like a day or two afterward.

To the head of military recruiting, the guy who was at basically his boss as a recruiter. And so that seems like a fairly reliable source. That has a lot of really fascinating detail. And then he spoke about it. Other times, he talked about it in speeches a few months later, He wrote an article about this decades later in the eighteen eighties, I believe.

So they’re differing accounts that give different details, and you have to sift it a little bit. You have to be a little careful. There are other things as well documents that came out of that meeting that can be used to produce the context But that was a challenge with all of these sixteen meetings. How much do I believe? How long after the meeting did somebody write down an account of it?

How do I reconstruct Lincoln’s view of it? Sometimes Lincoln left an account of it. But, of course, Lincoln did not live to write a memoir.

Mhmm. So

some of these meetings, we don’t have Lincoln’s side at all. Then I try to do this with all my history. I try to choose occasions where I can document things that happen reasonably well so that we can have a fact based discussion rather than speculating?

So speaking of speculation, and this of course is a hypothetical that that we wondered about for a very, very long time. If Lincoln had lived, would reconstruction have played out differently and how would it because that was such a disaster country was one of the ugliest periods in American history. I know we try to gloss over it. There’s a big debate about how we teach it in schools, but the degree of political violence, the the backsliding on on racial equality. It was horrific.

So just give me your thoughts about if Lincoln had lived, which, of course, we don’t know the answer definitively.

Yeah. I guess I should spend just a few seconds explaining the thing that was wrong with Lincoln being killed aside from him being killed. He was replaced by a vice president. Who turned out to be politically very different than him. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, WEP Dubois has this great history of what he calls Black Reacon instruction that has a very long and sympathetic chapter about Andrew Johnson that ultimately encourages him because he deserved it.

But Johnson was an interesting guy. He was a poor white man He was in favor of the poor. He had a very populist mindset and was pro union at a time when it was very hard, and the state tried to leave the union. But, at the end of the civil war, when he became president, he was turned away from all of that and was played upon by Southern sympathizers essentially to put his prejudice first, his prejudice against black people first.

And he was a deeply racist figure. Right? I mean, he

was Totally. He’s fantastically racist. Fantastic. Honestly, a lot of people, even the so called good people in this era are often racist by our but he was a particularly bad one. And he wanted the south to remain as close to the past as it had been without technically slavery, but he was not willing, for example, to allow Blackmen the vote.

It seems clear to me that Lincoln as a president would have approached things differently. He also, as we noted, said things that just by definition are racist to us, but Yeah. Was in favor of a was in favor of all the equality that you could get away with politically at any given time. Was talking about getting Bulwark men to vote in the very last speech of his life and had committed to people like Frederick Douglas that having staked out a position he was not gonna back up. It might still have been a disappointing and violent period that might have turned out about as it did because Lincoln would not have been president forever.

Yeah.

But he definitely would have taken a different approach and a more supportive approach to equality in those almost four years that he should have had left as president.

And, certainly, back to the fact that he was a very, very skilled politician. And, I know you gave an interview to, Boston, NPR affiliate and talked about the central understandings that Lincoln had about politics was that you needed a majority. You needed to actually win elections. And you brought this around with the interviewer to talk about what’s happening with the House of Representatives that Yeah. House Republicans seem to have have lost the narrative.

Right?

Yeah. I mean, it’s incredible.

To understand that you need a majority to get anything done. And that means you need to make some compromises you might not like.

Yeah. I feel that they blew it three times here really, Charlie Sykes the first is the way they ran in twenty twenty two. They expected a much bigger majority. But didn’t run the right kind of candidates and the right kind of campaign to get that. So they had a very small and vulnerable majority.

McCarthy ended up getting a majority for the speakership, but not. It turns out in a stable or lasting way.

Yeah.

And then sets two And then the third is Matt Gates. I mean, congratulations to him. He achieved his objective, but he doesn’t have a majority either, which is why nobody knows what’s gonna happen here.

Mac Gates may not care about having a majority. So in in the same interview that I know was very interested in your comments, you know, one of the dilemmas these days covering American politics is. And then I’ll ask you as a prominent member of the media. How do we cover Donald Trump? It is a unique problem.

I mean, you said you’re you’re happy to say the former president is alleged to have committed a crime, but I’m not gonna try ten that I don’t already know that he tried to overturn the election that he lost. I know how difficult it is to deal with someone who lies as aggressively and consistently as Donald Trump does. But do you think and I’m asking you to put your media critic hat on now?

Sure. Sure.

Has the media figured out how to cover Donald Trump? Have they learned anything from two thousand sixteen? Because I’m not convinced they have.

Well, I mean, you you may be right about that. I mean, trump drives a lot of clicks and a lot of attention, and it’s very tempting to go into that. I think that first, you need to cover Trump. And there are some people who will say, don’t cover him, don’t pay attention to him. We got some criticism when I interviewed Donald Trump in twenty twenty two, and he I asked him some hard questions and he hung up on me.

But I think it was right to cover Trump. I think it was right to talk to Trump because, I mean, think about this for a minute. Like, we were just talking about Israel and Hamas I’m gonna cover Hamas. I’ve been to Gaza. I’ve talked to Hamas guys.

Why would I not talk to them? They are doing things that we need to pay attention to with lives that stake. That doesn’t mean I’m carrying their propaganda, but I wanna understand what’s going on over there in every way that I possibly can. And in the same way, of course, I’m also gonna talk to an American political figure, even if he attempted to overturn his twenty twenty defeat, defeat, which he obviously did. And I’m gonna cover him.

Right.

But I wanna cover him and anybody. This goes for Joe Biden. It goes for anybody. I wanna cover them in context.

Yeah.

I wanna pay attention to what they’re saying and failing to say. I wanna pay attention to what’s true and false. And when I present all of that on the air, I wanna make sure that comes with enough information, enough context that anybody listening can understand who’s lying and who’s telling the truth, and they can make their own judgment about who makes sense.

Okay. So I should remember this, but what did you say to him that made him hang up on you?

It was a series of questions having to do with the twenty twenty election.

Yeah.

I don’t know that it was any one question particularly, but he made a number of false statements, and I kept correcting him and then asking further questions. And he didn’t like that. And we were scheduled for fifteen minutes, and he hung up after a little less than ten.

Okay. I I just wanted to play a little bit of that.

How come when he went to speak in different locations? Nobody came to watch. But all of a sudden, he got eighty million votes. If

you’re forgiving it, maybe because the election was about you. If I can just move on to ask, are you telling Republicans in twenty twenty two that they must press your case on the past election in order to get your endorsement. Is that an absolute They’re

gonna do whatever they wanna do. Whatever they have to do, they’re gonna do. But the ones that are smart, the ones that know, you take a look at, again, you take a look at how Carrie Lake is doing running for governor. She’s very big on this issue. She’s leading by a lot.

People have no idea how big this issue is, and they don’t want it to happen again. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen, and they don’t want it to happen again. I wanna The only way it’s not gonna happen again is you have to solve the problem of the presidential rigged election of twenty twenty.

And,

mister president, if I’m why would I one more question. I wanna ask about a court hearing yesterday on January sixth. Judge amit meta. He’s gone. Okay.

So interestingly, Steve, my one and only time that I interviewed, Donald Trump, he didn’t hang up on me, weirdly enough. Back in twenty sixteen, But one of the points that I tried to make with him, and I was trying to get my head around, you know, this was when he was making fun of Ted Cruz’s wife and how she was ugly. And The thought that came to my mind was that and I asked him about this. I said, you’re running for the office that Abraham Lincoln once held because in that moment, I had the contrast, and this is how that exchange went. Is this your standard that if a supporter of another candidate, not the candidate himself does something despicable that it’s okay for you personally a candidate for president of the United States to behave in that same way.

I mean, I expect that from a twelve year old bully on the playground not somebody who wants the office held by Abraham Lincoln. So we both had our Trump encounters, our Trump Lincoln encounters here. So Steve, Having studied all of this and immersed yourself so deeply in the nineteenth century American history while you’re covering what we’re going through right now. How optimistic slash hopeful are you? What will it take to get out of this moment?

For Abraham Lincoln, it took a horrific civil war. What’s it gonna take for us? What do you think?

I think that it requires persistent application of the principles of democracy. Lots of people walk around saying they’re worried about democracy. We don’t need everybody to be an ally in that cause. Yeah. We do need a majority to be an ally in that cause, and that may call for difficult compromises or reaching across to make allies I mean, I think about someone like Liz Chaney who ultimately lost her job over this.

Yeah. But worked with the committee that was investigating January sixth and produced a voluminous public record of it on a bipartisan basis, even though she was dealing with people who, if the issue were different, they’d be profoundly on different pages. And I think there were even people who kind of despised Cheney for things that she had said on various issues over the years. You need to build a majority. That means reaching out to lots of different kinds of people.

If you think about this from a democratic perspective, In twenty twenty four, Democrats are gonna lose the Senate unless they do reasonably well in a number of states that are more conservative and even support senators who progressives can’t stand. And if you think about it from a Republican perspective, Republicans are likely to lose the presidential election unless they can persuade suburban voters who used to be Republicans that they’re not way too extreme. Right. And so each party really has a coalition building problem and whoever’s the better coalition builder is likely to win.

But when we talk about democracy, we’re not just talking about majorities, are we? We’re also talking about the rule of law. We are a liberal constitutional democracy. And one of the key things that I took from from your book about, Abraham Lincoln was he was a very good politician, understood the need for majority, but he was also, as you point out, a constitutionalist, and we’re going to be stress testing the rule of law and whether or not the constitution does have the guardrails that the founders thought they were putting in place to deal with someone like Donald Trump.

Yeah. And honestly, I mean, ultimately, Charlie, I think you know this really well. The guardrails are great. We have lots of them, but ultimately the guardrails are people. Mhmm.

We need people in institutions to support the institutions. We need public that broadly understands that we have constitutional institutions. We may have to swallow things that we hate. I mean, Lincoln even said the fugitive slave act of eighteen fifty. Horrible law.

He said, okay. I hate it, but it’s the law it’s constitutional. I’m not gonna argue about it. It is the law. Lincoln said another thing though that I think is kind of inspirational when he was elected and before he was inaugurated, and southern states were beginning to claim that they had left the union.

He said there’s no way that I can accept this because my job My constitutional responsibility is to, quote, run the machine as it is. That is our first obligation as citizens. We have inherited this machine. It’s worked up to now, and our first job is to run that machine as it is.

The book is differ. We must how Lincoln succeeded in a divided America as Steve Inske, of course, is co host of NPR’s Morning Edition, and it’s up first podcast. Thank you so much for joining us on the Bull Secret Podcast today, Steve.

It’s an honor, Charlie. Thank you so much.

And thank you listening to today’s Bullworth podcast, I’m Charlie Sykes. We’ll be back tomorrow, and we’ll do this all over again. Bower podcast is produced by Katie Cooper, and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.