Who Are the True Heirs of Lincoln and Douglas?

Rogers M. Smith

When I learned the 2023 Maryland Law School Schmooze would be devoted to considerations raised by the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, two questions occurred to me. First, what, if any, positions in our current polarized politics can plausibly claim to be the heirs of the rival positions that Lincoln and Douglas took in those debates? Second, does the text of the Constitution today align more with the positions of Lincoln or Douglas? These questions are linked because the rival political views in modern America include sharply opposed understandings of how the U.S. Constitution should be read, differences that some hold to parallel the profound differences between the perspectives of Lincoln and Douglas.

Indeed, my motivation for discussing these questions stems chiefly from my interest in a charge leveled most prominently by a number of “West Coast Straussians,” mostly students and admirers of the late Harry Jaffa. They contend that modern liberals and progressives have turned their backs on what they understand to be the natural rights principles of both Lincoln and the Constitution and have instead embraced morally relativistic and often tyrannical positions that today’s progressives defend as democratic, in just the way that Stephen Douglas defended his principle of “popular sovereignty.” This critique, tracing back toCrisis of the House Divided, Jaffa’s widely admired study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, is all the more salient because the Trump years brought the Claremont Institute, founded by Jaffa’s students in 1979 and for many years seen as esoterically academic and politically marginal, into heightened prominence. Because Institute-affiliated scholars have warned about America’s constitutional and political decline since the 1960s, Thomas Klinginstein, the chair of the Institute’s Board, asserted in 2022 that the modern conservative movement’s “intellectual justification” for turning to Trump “comes from Claremont.” That justification rests on a belief that Trump has so often articulated, that today’s political progressives are assaulting America’s founding values and best traditions. Trump, in turn, awarded the Institute a National Humanities Medal in 2019. The lawyer John Eastman, a chief architect of plans by Trump allies to overturn the 2020 election, has been affiliated with the Claremont Institute for several decades (though not all its leaders agree with his election claims), and he continues to direct the Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence.

It is perfectly reasonable to observe that both Lincoln and Douglas were men of their time, whose views were more distinct than similar to most people’s views today, and who faced very different challenges than ours, so that we cannot honestly say what stance they might take on current issues. The political reality, however, is that it is often effective for political actors and movements to link their preferred positions to those that are prestigious in their nation’s past, while tagging their opponents with disgraced viewpoints. After all, there are bound to be some connections between past and present. So, my response to the West Coast Straussian conservative critique is first, to concede that there are indeed ways in which progressives past and present have echoed Stephen Douglas’s espousal of popular sovereignty. Even so, progressives’ overriding sense of political purpose, unlike that of Trump and many Claremont conservatives, is far closer to Lincoln’s. Second, our Constitution is a hybrid of—primarily—founding era, Reconstruction, and Progressive outlooks, leaving it legitimately open to many different synthetic readings. Readings that give centrality to a moderate progressive interpretation of the postwar amendments, especially the Fourteenth Amendment, are among those that are not only constitutionally legitimate, but also very well supported in the text; and they are normatively best.