Lincoln's extraordinary prescience
A reader's letter in today's Daily Telegraph quotes an extraordinary passage from a speech by Abraham Lincoln which, I am embarassed to say, I had never previously heard.
Abraham Lincoln foresaw the totalitarian nature of Marxism
Unlike the Gettysburg Address, this wonderful piece of oratory was not required reading when I was at school in the United States – perhaps because its political message is so much more contentious.
What is striking is not only its eloquence – it would be difficult to produce a more effective demolition of what we would now call the leftist fallacy – but its prescience. Lincoln was speaking before the Marxist revolutions and the rise of the socialist economic doctrines which have become European political orthodoxy.
It is clear that what he describes is a much older paternalistic tendency which simply found a new guise in the left wing policies of the twentieth century. The misguided desire to protect people from themselves by taking their independence from them finds different forms in different times but, interestingly, its critics always notice that it is fundamentally totalitarian.
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