Even acknowledging that Lincoln did much to set the stage for the welfare/warfare state of the Progressives, Sobran acknowledges commendable things about Abraham Lincoln, and seems to see him as a flawed but complex man. Many of his publicly expressed sentiments were commendable, even if his actions and methods did not always live up to them.
I think it is interesting that, in the wake of a time that Big Government progressivism was making side-by-side inroads into both parties (Teddy Roosevelt on the one hand, Woodrow Wilson on the other), it was the decidedly more pro-black party (the GOP) that the anti-New Deal modern conservatism movement found its home. At it's inception, National Republican were nearly as national as National Socialism would be.
But while Progressivism grew in the wake of the Whig tax-and-spend patronage system of Lincoln's, a Reconstruction vision of individual rights grew in the wake of the 14th Amendment, a vision of a land of opportunity based on guaranteed rights to property and due process that "respected no man's person."
The party that argues now for treating everyone the same, was arguing then to treat everyone the same. The party that argues now to treat some people differently, argued then to treat some people differently.
The Democratic part, in the space of a few short years, went from wanting to support privileging whites over blacks to wanting to privilege blacks over whites. That's like seeing 7 years from now Planned Parenthood leading the charge against abortion. Wouldn't that be a strange conversion?
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