In today's fascist radicals of warmongers in both the Republican and Democratic Party, Lincoln would have beer smeared as a leftist, or even a Marxist.

President Lincoln's Republican Party Was the Original Party of Big Government | Literary Hub - 17 Sept 2020 |

Republicans want to imagine that there is a grand tradition between the Republican Party of the Reagan era and Abraham Lincoln's federal interventionist party of 1861.

The Republican Party has spent decades shouting, among other hollow slogans, that big government is bad and small government is good. They contend that small government is morally virtuous and good for liberty and freedom--epithets from Barry Goldwater's 1960 Conscience of a Conservative Movement Conservative's manifesto. And, one must ask: whose freedom? But, if Republicans understood that Lincoln's party is the origin of the modern, interventionist, administrative state, they would condemn it as socialist.

Big government began with President Lincoln's Republican Party, which in fundamental ways is the progenitor of the modern Democratic Party of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lincoln's party was not one of small, non-intrusive government, minimal taxation, traditional social mores, and white supremacy. It was the party of strong federal intervention and moral directive against the institution of slavery and Southern secession, the party of federally funded higher education, federally funded national transportation, and social welfare.

The radical Republicans of Lincoln's Party with their reform zeal and moral interventionist vision would be to the left of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

'Sapere aude'