Liberalism and It’s Discontents
First I suggest you click this link and read this very interesting post on challenges to liberalism and liberal responses by Zack Beauchamp. It is an excellent essay, not super brief, but well worth reading end to end. Also stimulating enough that I began to type this comment before finishing it (I finished it after typing “by” and before typing Zack.
I was lead to it by a tweet in which Ross Douthat asks if Beauchamp sees anything useful people to the right of liberals might contribute. I think he obviously doesn’t, because such people (including Douthat) have nothing useful to contribute. In any case, that’s clearly what Beauchamp thinks.
I am going to attempt to summarize the post, but do ask you to read it.
1) liberalism is under attack, has been rejected by majorities in many of the largest democracies, and is challenged by significant minorities in the rest of them
2) It faces criticisms that should be taken seriously from both the right and the left
3) It’s defenders don’t make a strong case for the defense.
I will consider these points in order after the jump.
1. Of course Beauchamp starts with the USA and considers the crisis to have hit on November 8 2016. He says it may have began as early as September 11 2001. Yes indeed. He seems to have forgotten the Bush administration’s direct assault on all principles of liberty and limited government. Trump is more absurd, but he hasn’t done anything that Bush didn’t do and he hasn’t done many things that Bush did. It was argued that the rule of law was a luxury which we couldn’t afford. This was argued by then unitary executive himself and he acted on that basis. I am old enough to remember a time when a much smaller fraction of people lived under Democracy even using a definition such that many arguably fake democracies are now excluded. I suppose what Beuchamp is noting is that the end of history has ended, and Francis Fukayama is a fool unless he was Fukayaming.
The arguments he notes have long be familiar to me. I recall them from the 1970s.
On the other hand he is right about the rise of illiberal parties and elected presidents. I can only respond “that about Indonesia” by far the largest Democracy not yet afflicted. I note that Shinzo Abe has a far right ultra nationalist not so liberal political past. Basically decent liberals can look (in order of population represented) at Joko Widowo, Angela Merkel and Emanuel Macron (who is despised by all French people whom I have ever met). I may be insulting one of the widows who are constantly fighting over Bangladesh and definitely insist that whomever is actually in charge in Pakistan doesn’t play cricket. Still maybe Bangladesh and Pakistan beat Germany as last bastions of liberal Democracy. OK so I concede Beuchamp’s point 1.
2. On criticisms. Beauchamp notes leftist critics of “neoliberalism” he briefly notes that he doesn’t think rejecting neoliberalism implies rejecting liberalism. He doesn’t note any counter argument from the left. They just say no. They are critiquing the extreme pro market ideology called “neoliberalism” outside of the USA. They are critiquing Bill Clinton and his extreme centrism. I must admit that Bill Clinton’s extreme centrism is identical to extreme pro market rightism in Europe. But he wasn’t that way before 1994 (and isn’t that way now).
The neoliberal policies critiqued by the left include austerity. That has nothing to do with liberalism (or neoliberalism although it is called ordoliberalism). The unconvincing argument by Naomi Klein that “Here is what we need to understand: a hell of a lot of people are in pain. Under neoliberal policies of deregulation, privatisation, austerity and corporate trade, their living standards have declined precipitously,” reminds me of something odd I read in “The Great Transformation” by Karl Polanyi (I sure hope Klein would be flattered by the comparison). He said that when it expired in 1933 German Liberalism had sacrificed all its other principles in defense of the gold standard. I didn’t see any connection between liberalism and the gold standard, and I still don’t. Chancellor Heinrich Bruening has found his true heirs in Jens Weidmann and Wolfgang Schaeuble, but, aside from hoping things turn out less badly this time, I note that none of them is simply liberal. All also have a fanatical attachment to something which has something to do with the idea that no pain no gain so lots of pain lots of gain. It is insane. It has no particular connection to the idea of a government of laws, love of liberty, or anything coherently liberal.
The leftist critiques of liberalism are quoted criticizing liberal capitalism, neo-liberalism. They can claim to criticize classical liberalism, liberismo and various things. But all of this depends on defining the term to mean what it meant in the 19th century. The critique is fine as it goes, but it is (as they note) a criticism of a political fashion which started in the 70s, took over in the 80s, and is now dead and gone. They include Bill Clinton (who massively increased the EITC and introduced sCHIP) and Tony Blair (who implemented policies which were followed by a halving of child poverty in the UK (after 10 preceding years of stagnation). They don’t include Jeremy Corbin, Bernie Sanders or Elisabeth Warren (they would probably include Hillary Clinton based only on her marriage) They are beating a dead horse — and it isn’t and never was liberalism.
I’d add that I think the deregulation which has caused harm is fairly specific. It was financial deregulation. This was a huge mistake (which current Republicans are repeating). It does not discredit the less important but beneficial Carter deregulations of airlines, trucking and beer. It certainly doesn’t imply a defense of regulation of building heights etc.
I think the left critique of liberalism is based on accepting a fraudulent defense of laissez faire as the only liberal approach (these anti-liberals are arguing with Von Hayek and Friedman not any actual liberal who opposed Pinochet). The idea of the rule of law,freedom under the law, a government of laws not of men. and rights under the law do not imply any particular maximum tax bracket or any right to pay less than a legal minimum wage. The Locke/Hayek/Nozick argument does not follow from core liberal principles (even if Locke was the first liberal). It requires going way beyond the rule of law to argue that only their proposed laws respect liberty and that equally anonymous, precise, and neutrally imposed laws do not.
The conservative critique of liberalism ignores entirely the concept of voluntary associations. They assert that liberals believe in isolated individuals. They can’t point to any actual liberal who does this, because none exists or has ever existed. I think Beuchamp is just wrong when he writes “conservatives are right that liberals have been too inattentive to the importance of community”. I note that the author of “Bowling Alone” was a left liberal enthusiast for the definitely liberal Italian Commnunist Party in Emilia Romagna (I am not joking — I know lots of Italian communists and they all the ones I know well are liberals and many of them guilty of over affection for neoliberalism (I added the “I know well” because I have heard anti liberal speeches well maybe one anti liberal speech)). What happened here is that conservatives (as usual) claim as their exclusive property values that are pretty much universal.
I note the tweets I wrote before reading Beauchamp
Douthat tweeted
The question I’m left with at the end of this interesting
@zackbeauchamp
crisis-of-liberalism survey is whether he thinks there’s anything that liberalism can learn or drawn on from the *right* in order to survive and flourish anew:
I replied
obviously the reason you are left with that question is that neither he nor you can think of anything useful that anyone can learn from conservatives. The reason is that all alleged conservative insights have been disproven by massive evidence
In fact I challenge you. I suspect the answer will be to claim for conservatism universal values and widespread beliefs or to pretend that the only alternative to conservatism is something like Marxism. I say conservatism has the same epistemic standing as astrology.
I can’t claim to be proven right, but I can claim to be able to predict my sincere response to conservative critiques of liberalism. The claim that liberals ignore the importance of community and of voluntary associations (like say churches) is a plain falsehood. Basically either a lie or a proof of complete ignorance of anything outside of the conservabubble.
I guess this isn’t the place to ask for an indication of any useful contribution of 21st century conservatism, but I ask here too.
The right wing criticism of liberalism is based on a false claim about what liberalism is. It also is based on the assertion that the key threats to US democracy are the law requiring corporations to pay for contraception (if they buy insurance for their employees) and law suits by gay couples who are not baked a wedding cake.
I do have to admit that most conservatives have noticed that Marxists are thin on the ground these days (I think never Trumper Tom Nichols is a conservative who hasn’t noticed this but basically none of those quoted by Beauchamp claim that liberals believe in the perfectability of human nature nor that liberals are taking a step onto the slippery slope to serfism).
The left criticism is a valid criticism of Locke, and maybe John Stuart Mill. However, it is not relevant to the current debate. It requires the idea that property rights are human rights — not a positive right to food clothing and shelter but a negative right to keep anything one has obtained without breaking the law (which law must not include much current law or else) and do what one pleases with one’s property (so long as air doesn’t blow from your property to someone else’s or — it’s just silly — it’s not liberalism and it isn’t coherent).
3. First damn this comment is long. Beauchamp isn’t just interesting. He writes well saying a lot without going on and on and on. But anyway, he’s not satisfied with defences of liberalism.
Here he mixes apples and oranges. He argues that many people are rejecting liberalism although they shouldn’t. Then he objects to Pinker who argues that people shouldn’t concluding with the argument that one has to respond to people who are foolishly rejecting something they shouldn’t reject.
I’m going to quote at length (finally)
The first of these unsatisfying arguments, which I associate most closely with Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, is that the narrative of a world in crisis is simply wrong. On every conceivable metric, the world is getting better — extreme poverty is declining, life expectancy is going up, deaths from war and violence are on the decline. If things are generally doing well, where’s the need for radical change?
I happen to find the data behind this view persuasive, and indeed have argued that it’s a compelling case for cautious optimism about humanity’s future. It’s not, however, a particularly good defense of liberalism at the moment.
Most of the current global improvement is happening in the developing world; the biggest recent jumps in global life expectancy largely come from these countries, including authoritarian states like China. By contrast, conditions in richer liberal democracies are getting worse on a bevy of different metrics. The data on global improvement is hardly making the case for liberalism in its historical bastions.
Note the key weasel word “including”. Progress in authoritarian China has been amazing. but there has also been huge economic growth in democratic (until recently liberal democratic) India. The pattern is world wide. It doesn’t show liberalism is needed for material progress, but it also doesn’t show it hampers progress.
I am also quite sure that the word “democracies” is misleading. Beauchamp is thinking of the USA now suffering from an immense opiate epidemic. I don’t think there are similar patterns in many other liberal Democracies.
Here is a graph from the article I cited when defending neoliberal Tony Blair
all ideologies should have such crises.
I don’t see decline in advanced countries here
or
here
I’m afraid that the problem is our US problem not a general problem with rich liberal democracies.
In any case, reality is not the battleground on which Beauchamp is trying to fight
But most fundamentally, liberalism’s defenders need to meet people where they are. And Pinker’s metrics notwithstanding, a lot of people really feel like the political status quo is failing them. The illiberals are explaining why that is; liberals are trying to talk them out of it. This won’t work, no matter how many statistics on infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa liberals marshal.
The second unsatisfying liberal argument is that liberalism may not be perfect, but it has a long history of repairing itself. This is one of the central arguments in Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities, the New Yorker correspondent’s book-length defense of his liberalism.
the reply is that a defense of liberalism is not effective liberal policy (no duh)
“But saying that liberalism can repair itself isn’t the same thing as explaining how it can do so right now.”
Quite so, and the topic was [should liberalism be abandoned as it can’t solve our problems?] not [How can we solve our problems ?] Also, as Beauchamp knows, possible solutions to various problems are extensively discussed by earnest liberal nerds at, for example, Vox.com.
Finally Beauchamp objects to the liberals who argue that politically correct college students are a major threat (maybe the major threat) to liberalism. I agree with him that this is nonsense. I think this is a case of reflexive bothsiding hippy punching by people who just can’t stand to find that, at the moment, they happen to have no enemies on the left. Lenin isn’t always lurking.
But the old New Republic hippy punching is as irrelevant as it is irritating.
Liberalism will not be destroyed by safe spaces, trigger warnings, gay wedding cakes, bathroom bills or even by people who panic about those aspects of 21st century life. It has real dangerous enemies, but Beauchamp hasn’t interviewed them. I don’t blame him. They might send him to a prison camp in Siberia, Xinjiang or Kashmir if he tried. But in any case, they are not writing in Jacobin or First Things.
Better than a century and a half back, Abraham Lincoln became widely known for speeches and debates open to the public for free. Hilary Clinton gave bankers private addresses for two hundred thousand bucks a pop.
One advanced liberal causes. Guess which?
Maybe contemporary liberalism got a little fat and sloppy and complacent and rather too close to bankers than ordinary citizens. Too bad there’s no cure for this.
Back about 1965 or so, Dayton Ohio was a thriving little town with about 300 thousand residents, in a metropolitan area of about half a million people. It was the home of National Cash Register, and a few other things. It had art museums and a couple of universities and other “big city” accomplishments. It appeared to be thriving.
Today … NCR has moved away. The Ford and Kelvinator plants are closed. The museums and universities remain, but the city’s main contribution to contemporary culture is a recent mass murder in a downtown bar. And the city population is down to 140 thousand.
Wkipedia’s close, so I could give similar accounts of Cleveland and Cincinnati Ohio. And Akron and Toledo and Youngstown. I could do as much for Buffalo and Pittsburg and Peoria and …
But I forbear. You get the idea. The middle west of the United States got “hollowed out” in the last half of the 20th century and early part of the 21st Century AND POLITICIANS FROM BOTH MAJOR POLITIICAL PARTIES NEVER NOTICED UNTIL DONALD TRUMP WAS ELECTED PRESIDENT.
And since then, neither party has proposed cures for this large scale population and economic decline, or even shown much interest.
Let me suggest this may indicate some failure on the part of both parties. Let me go further and suggest voters may have noticed, or at least felt, this failure and that it has influenced their voting.
Home of the Shakers also. Did a consulting job at Miami Industries in Piqua Ohio just north of Dayton off 75.
But of course, a mere hundred million people in the American heartland is but a bagatelle, There are so many truly grave issues facing our Republic
Somewhere in the country there is a little boy — a dozen little boys at a dozen places — who thinks Maybe I should really be a little girl, And that little boy wants to wear a dress to school and go into the girls’ restroom and take a piss sitting down rather than stand in front of a urinal in a boys restroom. And a mean, sadistic, Nazi-like school administrator has cruelly refused to allow this behavior.
Obviously this is, and should be, AND MUST BE among the most important moral issues on our ethical plates. Politicians must rise in the Senate to address the horrors imposed on this child. We much have leaders of the Church preaching sermons on the topic (Christ hated transsexuals! It’s somewhere in the gospels, isn’t it?). We must have newspaper editorials, and dedicated websites, and TV pundits addressing the topic on Sunday morning.
To hell with the people living the Midwest. Too many of them voted for Trump anyhow, and they’re pretty much all racists or hopped up on illegal drugs, and they own too many guns and … They just don’t stir the liberal heart like the thought of that poor little boy soiling his pants because mean adults won’t let him sit on a john!
Okay, I come from this Midwest. I’m an old fart who doesn’t fit into the modern world. But I got to think that the issues liberals choose to address — that they ENJOY addressing — may not be the ones that most affect the future of the country.
Perhaps you’d like to tell me I don’t understand matters. Liberals know the plight of the Midwest is dire, but they just don’t have cures for it. Looking out for would-be transsexuals however is something that be done.
Okay, but I gotta tell you, I consider this a failure of liberalism as well.
Now, once upon a time in the distant uncharted past, like maybe 25 years ago, a batch of entrepreneurs and Masters of Industry got together with President Bill Clinton and informed him that, for the sake of all that was holy and economical, American businessmen had to move as much high tech manufacturing as possible to foreign lands. It cost too darned much, using expensive American labor, to make products that would sell in world markets, so something had to go .. factories should go to China, go to Thailand, go to Japan, go to Malaysia … and profits had to the Bahamas and Ireland.
Bill decided he was in a corner in one of his triangles and said he was all right with that. But other people raised an awkward issue: What about the people losing their jobs? What would they do?
And the businessmen said, No skin off our nose. buddy! But The Economists of America arose as a body and in a mighty voice thundered “It’s no big deal, Bill!” Because technological change and trade never really cause unemployment. In just a shake of a lamb’s tail, one-time steelworkers would be making better lives for themselves as C programmers and web-page designers and out of work seamstresses would be backstopping doctors as urgent care nurses in urban centers everywhere and … Okay, so people might have to relocate some, but the experience of the Okies showed Americans can do that. And maybe those steelworkers and one-time farmers would need some classes in programming, but a little bit of government retraining funds would soon solve the problem. NO BIG DEAL, BILL!
And time passed, as it does, and Bill Clinton is no longer President, and we still seem to have some unemployed seamstresses and out of work dudes who would like to get back to steelworking. But that “little bit of government retraining” just never happened. WHO COULD EVER HAVE GUESSED?
And, oddly enough, we actually have more educated people than jobs for educated people in this wonderful land, and we have college graduates serving up coffee to make a living, and people with PhD’s making minimum wages as “adjunct professors” teaching university courses, and half the governors in our country are looking for ways to cut the budgets of their state universities in half. And every conservative pundit in sight is inveigling about the evils committed by the liberals who captured universities.
And liberal economics profs are still insisting that automation and AI and other technology poses no real problem for unemployment, we just need to get people better educated and that’ll do the tick automatically, just as Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes and Paul Samuelson promised. No problem, Bill!
I humbly suggest liberals may have to rethink this issue someday.
Mike:
There is not enough money in being an adjunct Prof. I could do it. The would pay me $10,000 a course; but, why should I do it for such when I can make more in industry? Even at 70.
Probably I should explain why liberals ought to be seen applauding a few Shriners’ marches and buying Girl Scout cookies and listening to a few Buddhist monks and Moslem imans and maybe ought attend a few school board meetings and … And why there ought to be a Goo Goo equivalent of the Federalist Society that labors away at cutting our legal code and mountains of federal regulations into half without losing anything important, and then does that again, and again and again … And why instead of burbling about the wonders of STEM education for our children, politicians ought to spending some sizable chunk of federal money to employ scientists and technologists and engineers. and mathematicians. Of course, I could also say a few words about balancing the federal budget and revamping the tax code. And maybe it would be interesting to have some conferences allowing federal and state level politicians and their staffers to meet and socialize and learn about each others’ concerns.
But maybe I’ve done enough for a while. I’m a conservative kind of guy, after all, so I should learn to shut up some. And what I really wanted to say here is that maybe liberals haven’t totally failed — I’d go along with that — but they haven’t made a massive success of governing the country. Let’s settle for that.
@Mike Shupp; Mike, it isn’t necessary to screw over LGTPQ (or whatever) concerns to fix the country’s problems. Why not feel free to offer some suggestions instead. The current batch of candidates seem to be trying to come up with some solutions. Right wingers and conservatives, not so much.
JackD — I’m not suggesting that we “screw over” individual cases of sexual disphoria or confusion. Surely there are local groups of people affected by sexual discrimination who can protest on their behalf. I am suggestion however that maybe at a national level, liberals who actually wish to govern the country should pursue other issues. But I think liberals find that difficult — transsexual rights Is a fairness issue, it tugs the strings of a liberal heart like a banjo player out of Deliverance. And “being fair” is a simple thing to ask for; having hearings on complicated matters is not.
But the impression that gives, to folks with hearts differently strung, is that liberals really ENJOY transsexual rights cases, that there must be millions of sexual pervision things always going on which is why Fox News talks so much about it, that the godless liberals intend to impose their unnatural prejudices and their Hellish sexual practices upon all the nation’s innocent God-fearing children, and so on. Conservatives have hearts that beat like banjos as well.
As for “offering suggestions” …. the main issue I’m dealing with here is why liberalism’s “defenders don’t make a strong case for the defense”, point (3) in the original post.
But do I have other advice to give liberals? Suggestions and solutions? Well yes, some ideas occur to me… (a) Slap a buck per gallon carbon tax on gasoline and split the revenue between alternate energy research and reducing the federal deficit. (b) Cut down the delays on licensing nuclear power plants so they can be constructed in three years rather than thirty. (c) Bump the NASA budget from 20 billion per year to 100 billion, and build a permanently occupied lunar base. (d) Bump the NOAA budget up to 100 billion per year as well, with emphasis on cleaning up the oceans and increasing fish populations by a factor of 10. (e) Maybe find 20 or 30 billion per year to spend on nanotechnology. (f) Pour a lot of that money into places like Cleveland Ohio and Buffalo NY and North Carolina’s Research Triangle, with the idea of starting Silicon Valley-like enterprise zones. (g) Patch a lot of crummy roads and bridges. Dig up just about every damned sewer line in the United States, and fix breaks and corrosion problems — a task we should have started on back about 1985. (h) Get some really bright people and have them think about reducing military procurement costs. (i) Chop the US legal code and regulations in half, as already mentioned. And into a quarter, and into an eighth. Put all the legal stuff on the internet along with simple-enough-for-eighth-grader explanations of every single phrase. (j) Maybe put a couple dozen bankers into jail for fraud. Maybe put some cops into jail for bas behavior, Maybe put some politicians into jail for corruption. (k) Start thinking about what role the US is going to play in the world in 30 or 40 when China and/or India and/or some African coalition visibly outweigh us in terms of GNP and technology. Get DoD and State in on the thinking, as well as some allies, and start drafting laws and treaties to send to Congress to lay the foundations for the coming world. (l)Persuade the NIH to identify the functions of as many human genes as possible, and to develop techniques that enable boosting of intelligence in embryos, as well as longevity, disease resistance, immunity to Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. Make gene editing of human embryos legal and cheap, and make sure it’s as available to the poor as to the 1%, (m) Make proficiency in a foreign language mandatory for high school graduation. (n) Develop a paradigm for a bot-free high-speed unhackable alternative to the current internet which escapes the drawbacks of most social media. Aliases might be forbidden as an example, advertisement-based web searches made illegal, there might be mandatory charges on multiple message transmissions, etc. Make this the preferred channel for military and government internet access, and encourage its spread throughout society
Is this enough for a start? Note that none of these suggestions would seem to appeal to the current crop of Democratic Presidential contenders. Or any of the Republicans for that matter.
What has been happening in the US is just a repeat of what has happened for literally hundreds of years as conservative groups begin to lose their grips on power.
The attempts to reduce the eligible voting population, demonization of foreigners and minority groups, gerrymandering (in particular continental versions of “rotten boroughs”), anti-sacrilege acts (constant bellyaching about flags, anthems, and pledges, the “war against Christmas”), the urban vs rural divide. Joseph de Villèle and Klemens von Metternich engaged all of these in the 1800s, and I’m sure you can go much farther back before that.
There’s a long history of the rich and powerful holding on with every ounce of power their money can buy them, and usually they can hold on for a long time. Eventually someone else decides they’d like a little power and a say in what happens, and hey some of that money would be nice too.
Somehow we never manage to stop the money from creeping back though, and the rural population always supports it.
Someone drank too much.
I never considered myself a liberal until a conservative used it as a slur against my opinions. It is quite clear to all of us what it means to be a conservative. I have yet to meet a person that a conservative considered a liberal that shared most if not all ideas with a liberal doctrine common to all non-conservatives. The problem with topics like this is that liberals are nowhere near as knowingly defined as conservatives. What I consider to be liberal may not be the same as another liberal. The definition of liberal is a creature of the right and not a self-defined statement by liberals themselves. This is why you see so many conservatives talk about classical liberalism from the 19th century. It is easy to define what a liberal is if you are a conservative. It is a different story to define it when you are not a conservative.
I am finding the discussions based on liberal/conservative is no longer relative. It is an endless binary loop.
Neither word, liberal/conservative represents a consistent ideology related to the past. Blended with the party identities of Democratic Party/Republican the words have even less definition in the public space.
We are, on this planet in a major storm of power conflict based on selfishness and in some spaces just how much selfishness is necessary if necessary at all. Or, selflessness how much of it is needed if any at all.
Over the course of history, liberal/conservative has been redefined by the opposing arguments to either side. The technology progress within media (hand written copies to now the internet) has made it easier to ever define your debater and then debate on your definitions.
I think this has lead to many tuning out to their detriment rather than working to understand the reason for and need for such debate: securing one from the risks of living and life.
BTW, the “heartland” was not the first to experience the hollowing out in this nation.
With that, the changing climate is forcing the discussion beyond one’s national boundaries. We are going to learn just how much selfishness we don’t need and how much selflessness we do need. Forget liberal/conservative based debate.
@ Mike Shupp “Lincoln served as a lobbyist for the Illinois Central Railroad, assisting it in getting a charter” He later signed an act giving huge amounts of land to railroad companies. I admire Lincoln very much (as I admire Hillary Clinton). I do not admire people who apply totally different standards to Clintons and to others.
Robert:
Stephen Douglas his opponent made his fortune from selling the land around Lake Michigan to the Illinois Central which I am pretty sure would be the South Shore Train (electric) shuttling people back and forth to Chicago from Michigan. There is a very interesting article in Harpers on Lincoln the Whig and his “pursuit” of the Democrat Douglas to the presidency. It kind of fits with your post and the lengthy Vox article of yours which I also read. Lincoln’s Party.
sorry the link https://www.britannica.com/biography/Abraham-Lincoln/Prairie-lawyer
@Robert Waldman — Yes, Lincoln was a railroad lawyer — working as I recall for one George McClellan, who apparently was quite an able railroad president, but …. And Lincoln later signed the bills that set up the transcontinental railroads.. Maybe I read the wrong books about the Civil War but I don’t recall that even his political enemies alleged that the RR companies bribed Lincoln to do their bidding.
I think it’s a mistake to look for parallels between Lincoln and either of the Clintons. If it’s a consolation, I voted for Hilary in 2016 and don’t regret it.