Eight score and nine years ago, an odd assortment of malcontents brought forth in a one-room schoolhouse situated in a Wisconsin settlement named Ripon, a new party, conceived in liberty, dedicated to the proposition of equality.
Eight years and nine months later, a charter member of this new party, Abraham Lincoln of neighboring Illinois, issued the Emancipation Proclamation. On the eve of this act, he told Congress that “in giving freedom to the slave we ensure freedom to the free, honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.”
The meaning of those words was unmistakable 160 years ago and remains so today. None are free unless all are free. To Lincoln’s mind, emancipation was essential to maintaining the freedom of white America and the United States as an emblem of liberty to the rest of the world.
How far the party of Lincoln has strayed from these origins. Today’s Republicans no longer believe the fate of their own freedom depends on the extent to which they respect and defe…
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