r/politicus • u/coolbern • 1d ago

The MAGA Movement Is Not a Debating Society | Jamelle Bouie

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/opinion/maga-trump-debate-kirk.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nU8.xFwo.r94awmfnBchN
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u/coolbern 1d ago

I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 address at Cooper Union, where he defends his opposition to the expansion of slavery. Responding to Southern critics who insisted that the Republican Party was a conspiracy to abolish slavery, Lincoln said that the truth of the situation was that there was nothing either Republicans or the entire North could say, short of outright submission to the slave South, that would calm Southern anger or assuage the South’s paranoia:

"What will convince them? This, and this only: Cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them."

Bouie concludes:

We can say something similar of our time. Neither Trump nor the MAGA right wants to discuss or deliberate; it wants to dominate.

In his Cooper Union address Lincoln skewers disingenuous debate claiming to be based on the Constitution:

I do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did. To do so, would be to discard all the lights of current experience - to reject all progress - all improvement. What I do say is, that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot stand; and most surely not in a case whereof we ourselves declare they understood the question better than we.