Participants: Lincoln Steed (Host), Greg Hamilton
Series Code: LI
Program Code: LI000362A
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00:26 Welcome to the Liberty Insider.
00:28 This is a program bringing news, views, 00:30 discussion, arguments 00:32 from a religious liberty perspective, 00:35 analyzing what's happening in the U.S. 00:36 and around the world. 00:38 My name is Lincoln Steed, editor of Liberty magazine, 00:41 and my guest on this program is Greg Hamilton, 00:44 president of the Northwest Religious Liberty Association. 00:47 Good to be with you. 00:49 You and I have discussed where we're going to take this, 00:52 but I'll start with an example you may not know 00:55 that I'm really setting it up for. 00:56 I remember after 9/11, reading in an article 01:00 that quoted Le Monde magazine in France, 01:03 where someone was analyzing what had happened, 01:05 and they said that this terror event 01:09 had created a situation... 01:11 Which terror event? 01:12 9/11. Oh, 9/11. 01:14 Had created... 01:15 I'm summarizing now, I'm about to say... 01:17 I thought you're talking about the events in Paris recently. 01:19 No, this was the 9/11 event, 01:21 had created events where they said, 01:23 we're in a process where liberal democracy 01:26 is in the process of being replaced 01:29 by its global opposite, a terror of security. 01:34 And it was a reminder to me how, you know, 01:38 the world can seem so cut-and-dry, democracy, 01:42 despotism, and yet events and the dynamic of history 01:46 can almost swap them. 01:48 Yes. 01:49 And we've seen that in the United States 01:51 on political parties. 01:52 Most people don't realize 01:54 the general alignment of the parties, 01:56 and they're almost the polar opposite 01:58 of what they were certainly as recently as the Civil War. 02:02 Well, after Constitutional founding 02:03 you've essentially had the Federalists. 02:05 Well, there were no parties originally. 02:06 Well, originally, that's correct... 02:08 They were factions. 02:10 But they were emerging at the time 02:11 and they were led by Alexander Hamilton 02:13 and the federalists and John Adams, 02:15 of course, the federalist, and George Washington, 02:17 who was a federalist, 02:19 and then there was Thomas Jefferson 02:20 and James Madison 02:21 who were known as the "Republicans" 02:23 which is today's modern day Democratic Party, okay, 02:27 which is fascinating because with the failure 02:30 of the Federalist Party 02:31 emerged what was known as the Whig Party, 02:34 Whig Party was more about logic... 02:35 Now, the Whig, it goes from England. 02:37 From England. 02:38 They were more of a law set ferrotype party 02:41 that liked their government but... 02:43 They were the Whigs and the Tories. 02:44 They liked a little bit of limited government 02:48 so they were a grand mix, 02:51 and so they took in 02:53 the most amount of people as possible, 02:55 in other words they were gadfly, 02:56 they were popular with everybody. 02:58 They would say yes to everybody and yet, you know, 03:00 basically be completely speak out of one side 03:04 of the mouth and then do another. 03:06 And so that was its problem. 03:08 So the Whig Party met its death 03:10 with the rise of Abraham Lincoln, 03:13 before the Civil War. 03:14 What's interesting about that is... 03:16 His rise precipitated the Civil War. 03:18 Well, but the Whig party was very much involved, 03:23 aligned not basically philosophically 03:26 with the south and with James Polk 03:29 who was the president at the time, 03:31 who was a protege of Andrew Jackson, 03:32 but James Polk put forward 03:34 this doctrine of Manifest Destiny, 03:36 this idea that we need to fight a war with Mexico 03:39 in order to gain more territory 03:40 in order to advance the more slave territory... 03:44 Why didn't he just build the wall with Mexico? 03:47 Yeah. 03:48 Yes, yes very fascinating, very fascinating question 03:52 but Ulysses S Grant who was a colonel at a time 03:57 called it a wicked war and Abraham Lincoln, 03:59 who only served two years as a representative 04:02 in Congress from Illinois, from Springfield, 04:06 he went there and he denounced James Polk 04:10 as an evil wicked president and that made news, 04:15 national news in newspapers all across the country 04:17 and that's what got him a name 04:19 to eventually run for president, 04:20 but in the meantime because of that, 04:21 back home in Illinois, he lost for reelection 04:24 so he only served two years 04:27 before he would become President. 04:29 Now, what would emerge from the Whig Party 04:34 was the death of the Whig Party from that 04:36 because the Whig Party went ahead and jumped all, 04:39 with all force jumped into the Mexican-American War 04:42 along with the South 04:43 and that turned a lot of people off, 04:45 and Lincoln was able to, for his clarion call to say, 04:48 "Hey this is wrong, this is evil 04:50 what we did to Mexico, okay. 04:53 We didn't gain anything from it, 04:54 we pulled back to the... 05:00 What it's called the Rio Grande so to speak 05:02 where we basically made our border. 05:04 Yes, we increased our territory but not by much 05:07 and how many thousands were killed," all right. 05:10 So it was, it was the Vietnam of that era so to speak. 05:13 Thank you for bringing this up 05:14 because a little historical reality 05:16 wouldn't hurt right now when, 05:18 when there seems to be a national turning 05:20 against immigrants/Mexicans. 05:22 Mexico too. 05:24 And the U.S., just like it has with slavery 05:27 has a little bit of sins, 05:30 some sins to atone for indeed with Mexico. 05:32 Yes, absolutely. 05:34 So what happened with Lincoln is, you know, 05:37 Lincoln embraced the anti-slavery movement 05:40 which at first he was kind of upset... 05:42 Yeah, he was slow to the party. 05:44 Because he felt that the anti-slavery movement 05:47 was so obnoxious 05:48 and they were only a destabilizing factor 05:51 and they were the religious right... 05:52 In fact, in reality, he always until almost to the very end, 05:57 saw it more from a constitutional states 06:01 or a federalist point of view 06:02 rather than the issue of slavery itself. 06:05 Yes, yes, absolutely right. 06:06 That's exactly right. 06:08 So the anti-slavery movement was viewed 06:12 as an obnoxious radical movement 06:14 that represented the Christian right 06:16 of Lincoln's day and Lincoln decided, 06:20 you know, they're right, 06:22 we've got to co-opt their movement 06:24 because it is a just cause 06:25 and he saw it as a motivator for the soldiers of the North 06:30 with his Emancipation Proclamation Act, 06:33 to give them motivation to win this war 06:36 that we have to win this war. 06:37 So... 06:39 But remember the emancipation 06:40 was only for slaves in the south. 06:43 Yes, I understand that. 06:44 So it was to create dissent within the south, 06:47 wasn't initially to free northern. 06:49 But when the final bill passage came 06:52 after his death in 1965... 06:53 It evolved into that 'cause it started something 06:54 that he stopped. 06:56 Right correct, that's correct. 06:57 But my point is that 07:00 when you look at the moral revolution 07:02 that took place as a result of the Civil War, 07:05 you have a party that emerged that was anti-slavery, 07:10 was for reforming the South and especially 07:15 when it came to states' rights, this whole idea 07:17 that states are ultimately sovereign 07:18 over the federal government, which was forever, 07:21 basically that argument was forever decided 07:23 supposedly at the Civil War 07:26 with the North winning and so on. 07:28 So you have the party of Lincoln 07:30 and its values of civil rights. 07:33 Then you get to 1960, 07:36 which is a watershed moment in political history 07:39 that people don't often remember. 07:41 You had Richard Nixon 07:42 running against John F. Kennedy. 07:45 What's fascinating about Richard Nixon is that 07:48 he was a Republican 07:49 who was an absolute mastermind at propaganda. 07:53 He was a genius, but he would get paranoid 07:58 and obviously go too far 08:00 with Watergate and everything else. 08:01 He was always a little paranoid 08:02 because he was the hitman for McCarthy. 08:04 But he hated the Kennedys, utterly hated the Kennedys... 08:07 As did Johnson. 08:08 But here's what happened. 08:10 Here's John F. Kennedy, 08:12 a northeastern Irish Catholic from Massachusetts 08:17 being the Democratic Party standard bearer. 08:19 Where did most of the Democratic Party reside? 08:22 It resided in the Old Dominion South, 08:25 the Confederate south, the Confederacy, 08:28 all right, which were made up largely 08:30 of Southern Baptists and Southern Methodists, 08:32 all right, who for a Catholic to be their standard bearer 08:36 was anathema to them, okay. 08:38 It was absolute utter abomination 08:42 to their party to have a Catholic standard bearer 08:44 for their party, 08:46 but a double whammy with that, 08:47 he embraced the Civil Rights Movement 08:51 and Martin Luther King, all right. 08:53 So those two whammies against him 08:55 those two big black eyes, 08:57 so what did Richard Nixon do? 08:59 He did essentially what Ronald Reagan did later. 09:02 He basically said to the South, 09:04 "Hey, I would like to do a little dance 09:06 with the Christian right down there." 09:08 So he did a little dance and guess what? 09:10 In 1960 Kennedy barely won the election with Hawaii 09:14 being the last state to be counted 09:16 to take Kennedy over the top, all right. 09:18 That's how close it was, 09:19 it was that close in terms of the Electoral College. 09:21 But more specifically what happened was, 09:24 here you have Kennedy who just barely won, 09:29 you have Nixon doing this little dance with the South. 09:33 Nixon won almost the entire South. 09:36 He won nearly the entire South in that election. 09:38 Here Kennedy, a Democrat, lost nearly the entire South. 09:43 You don't think that the big part of the story 09:46 of the shifting parties 09:48 was reconstruction in the South? 09:50 Yes, but... 09:52 That's when the identity shifted 09:54 from one party to the other 09:56 and the Democrats got their grip on the South. 10:00 Yes, but that's just going too far back. 10:02 I want to bring it up to current time 10:05 so that we can understand... And back to Lincoln... 10:06 I want to understand this shift, 10:09 this fundamental shift. 10:10 There's no question that when Kennedy was elected, 10:12 that was an incredible watershed 10:15 and for the U.S. 10:16 as a whole to have a Roman Catholic president. 10:18 Right. 10:20 If I could choose any moment 10:22 when the taken-for-granted visceral Protestant identity 10:26 of the U.S. clearly changed, it was then, 10:30 even though he didn't do 10:32 what his church might have wanted 10:33 and it was stated recently, the Catholic bishops said, 10:36 "They made a mistake in not holding him 10:38 to the Church dictates 10:39 and they wouldn't make that mistake again." 10:41 He turned out to be no problem... 10:43 Though his speech in Houston, 10:44 while he was running for presidency. 10:46 We printed that in Liberty issues. 10:48 Saying that he was for the constitutional separation 10:51 of church and state, 10:52 he made that very clear throughout his speech 10:54 was very powerful that he wasn't beholden 10:57 to the Roman Catholic Church, that was powerful, 11:00 but what happened was what emerged from there 11:02 was the election of 1980. 11:04 Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter. 11:07 Jimmy Carter, son of the South, 11:09 Ronald Reagan from California... 11:11 And a deeply spiritual man as well. 11:12 Lee Atwater, his spin master, his Karl Rove so to speak, 11:16 his Steve Bannan so to speak, 11:20 came up with the slogan Reagan Democrats. 11:24 It was an attempt to win the industrial Midwest 11:28 and the auto industry 11:30 and all the entire South, guess what? 11:32 By the end of Reagan's second term in 1988, 11:36 the South had gone from being nearly 70% Democrat 11:40 to 70% Republican. 11:42 What did they bring into the party? 11:44 Did the Republican Party stay in terms of his Lincoln values? 11:48 No. It went against civil rights. 11:51 It was not the party of civil rights anymore. 11:53 It gradually moved away from that. 11:55 It started to adopting 11:56 the Christian right mantra in that 12:01 they were opposed to the constitutional separation 12:03 of church and state. 12:05 And so Reagan endorsed them. 12:08 He said to Jerry Falwell, to Moral Majority convention, 12:11 "I know you can't endorse me, but I endorse you." 12:14 Remember that famous statement? 12:15 Well, so what emerged from there 12:18 later in 2010 you have the Tea Party convention. 12:22 And I'll never forget Sarah Palin, 12:24 spending five minutes, 12:26 five minutes of her 20-minute speech, 12:28 which is a big chunk, 12:30 she made this appeal to the working class people, 12:35 labor union workers mainly. 12:36 Her appeal, she said, labor union members 12:39 okay in her speech, she appealed to them, okay. 12:43 What's interesting is that 30% of the Tea Party 12:48 which is a sub-party within the Republican Party 12:51 was a working class movement and that movement has now been, 12:57 and by the way that's mostly a... 13:00 The people that they gained 13:01 most were labor union Catholics, 13:03 Catholics within labor unions. 13:06 And the Catholic Church became a huge influence 13:08 within the Tea Party and in the Republican Party, 13:11 and it began to be 13:13 pro-working class and pro-labor. 13:15 Donald Trump seized upon that 13:17 with his populist movement to gain the working class, 13:22 the Joe Plumber so to speak, 13:24 and so what you see is a transformation 13:26 of the Republican Party 13:28 that is not the party of Lincoln anymore. 13:31 And, of course, according to must Republicans, 13:34 it's not their party anymore, it's been taken from them. 13:36 Exactly even with... I mean, by it's recent elect... 13:39 Well, the establishment Republicans, yes, 13:41 they're very upset about this as they should be. 13:44 You know, I'm not partisan, 13:46 but I'm a registered Republican, okay. 13:48 And I'll just tell you that 13:49 it has been very upsetting to me. 13:51 Yeah. 13:52 Well, we need to continue this 13:54 and give it a Religious Liberty spin, 13:56 so stay with us. 13:58 We'll take a short break 13:59 and continue this discussion of what are the parties, 14:02 where they're going, 14:03 and where is religion figure in all of this. |
Revised 2017-05-01