As Steve Inskeep examined Abraham Lincoln’s political skill to navigate a divided America for his new book, “Differ We Must,” he confirmed how politics is essential to sustaining democracy.
“One thing about democracy is that nothing is ever over, ever. No debate is ever settled,” said Inskeep. “That means you're never completely, completely defeated. So long as we keep our democracy, you get what you can get. And then you go on and you fight the next election and you see what happens after that.”
Ahead of his Jan. 25 visit to Boise, Inskeep visited with Idaho Morning Edition counterpart George Prentice to talk about today’s GOP versus Lincoln’s Republic Party, the endless possibilities in a democracy and, yes, what time he gets up, in anticipation of waking up the rest of the nation.
Read the full transcript below:
GEORGE PRENTICE: It's Morning Edition. Good morning. I'm George Prentice. As we approach the anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, we are reminded again of how Idaho is forever tied to Lincoln. In March of 1863, he signed the act that created the Idaho Territory. Lincoln appointed more than a dozen officers who established a foundation for Idaho's government, and from statues in front of the Idaho State House to Julia Davis Park, to our state archives, where more than 200 artifacts and documents reveal the significant connections of our 16th president to Idaho. Now, we are so very much looking forward to Steve Inskeep's visit to Idaho, Boise in particular, and through the good graces of the cabin, he will be at the Morrison Center to talk about his latest book, “Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded in a Divided America.” Hi, Steve.
STEVE INSKEEP: Hi. Thanks for the introduction.
PRENTICE: I think it's fair to say that Lincoln is… Is he the most written about person in history?
INSKEEP: People say that Jesus Christ is more written about, although that tends to be the same book over and over and over again. I'll note there are thousands and thousands of books about Lincoln.
PRENTICE: Is it thousands?
INSKEEP: Yes. In fact, I got a chance to talk with the head of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Archive, who gave me the number 18,000 about Lincoln.
PRENTICE: Oh my gosh. Well, this particular book… and what leaps out at us in its title is this political prowess of Lincoln and how he navigated this “divided America”… and that particular divide and that ”politican” definition of Lincoln… which we don't use too often. Is that what drew you to this?
INSKEEP: It is what grew on me as I did this project. Um, I mean, I've read a lot of those 18,000 Lincoln books, to be honest with you. I grew up in Indiana, where Lincoln spent a lot of his youth. I've been interested in Lincoln all my life, which makes me like a lot of Americans and made me hesitate for a while even to begin this project. But I got an idea that it might be possible to tell Lincoln's life story through his face-to-face meetings with diverse people, different kinds of people. I thought that would be a way to illuminate Lincoln's life and also illuminate the incredibly diverse country that he led, uh, and that we live in today. And I just gradually, as I did, the research began to realize that the story wasn't just the difference, it was a difference of opinion. It was a disagreement. That was what was at the heart of this. Lincoln had to deal with a wide range of people, some of whom he made his allies, even though they didn't agree on everything, some of whom he tried to deal with even though they were adversaries, some of whom he never was able to deal with at all. But he tried to use them in some way, and in every case, he was trying to get what he could out of imperfect people in an imperfect situation, for the good of the country.
PRENTICE: In today's political divide, even the word “politician” is looked down upon. Was that the case in Lincoln's day?
INSKEEP: Oh, sure. I mean, maybe a little differently than today. But people have always been skeptical of political leaders, uh, and a little bit scornful of political leaders. And, you know, maybe that's healthy, that's democracy. Uh, you know, you don't want to have a total cult of personality where you're not willing in any way to criticize or accept any of the criticism of a particular leader. But I do think that in Lincoln's time, there was a slightly richer understanding that being a politician is part of democracy. Practicing politics is democracy. We think of it as a kind of bad word that people should just do what is good for the country, and I sure wish people would just do what is good for the country. But we all have different perspectives on that and different interests. And what really happens in politics is that people have a clash of interests and mediate their interests and try to figure out a way to move forward collectively, and that action is politics. If we believe in freedom, if we believe in self-government, if we believe in democracy, we have to do that hard work.
PRENTICE: As we approach February, we see the Idaho political calendar… and I'm certain it's the case across the nation… filled with so-called Lincoln Day events - fundraisers for the Republican Party. And while the GOP will be quick to remind anyone who will listen that they are the party of Lincoln, their adversaries might want to challenge that, at least in spirit. Where do you think Lincoln's Republican Party lands on the spectrum when it's compared to today's Republican Party?
INSKEEP: Well, the issues are very different, of course. One thing to think about when you think about the Republican Party in the 1850s and 60s, when it was new, when Lincoln joined it, he was not the very first person to join it. It was an anti-slavery party, and it was widely seen as the Progressive Party. In a way, they were the people who were arguing for social change, although they were not the most radical people arguing for social change, but they were the people who wanted to stop the spread of slavery, who had in mind the eventual end of slavery, even though it was so firmly entrenched in the Constitution, and by law and by custom, it was hard to imagine exactly how it would end. But they wanted at least to stop the extension of slavery. That was the Republican Party of that day. It was also a very practical institution. It was a way that people in the North, where slavery had been outlawed, had been banned, abolished, could join together and increase their political power and pursue other things that were important to them. You talked about Lincoln's links to Idaho. Lincoln, in a way, is linked to the entire American West because he, as president, signed the Pacific Railroad Act and the Homestead Act and other important legislation that led to the opening up and development of the West, as people in the East would have described it. And that was important. And it was part of what the Republican Party was doing. They believed in national development, they believed in business. They had a particular economic argument for a free labor, free market system that they largely pursued. They also had opinions about tariffs and some other things. And they were an anti-slavery party. So it was a mixture of issues. That is true of the Republican Party today, that it's got a mixture of issues and interests. It's true of the Democratic Party today, a mixture of issues and interests. But people have flipped. Around over time. There's a lot of old-line Democrats, or people whose ancestors were old line Democrats who've become Republicans. There are a lot of Republicans or people who are ancestrally would be Republicans who become Democrats. But it's a big mix. And I wouldn't say the parties are exactly the same. I wouldn't say that they flipped either. I would just say that there are constantly evolving coalitions.
PRENTICE: Let's talk a little bit about media then. And now we see today's political climate so shackled to media….social media in particular. But in Lincoln's time, the media landscape was changing pretty rapidly as well.
INSKEEP: Yeah. This is one of the things that I love about this story. In trying to tell Lincoln's life story through his meetings with people who disagreed with him, you get a sense of how he used the media and how other people around him used the media and how it was changing. And when I say this, it'll feel familiar. It'll feel like now, this was a disorienting time where communications were becoming ever more rapid. The telegraph was sending news instantaneously from city to city. It had never happened before, and that news would get into a daily newspaper, which had been very rare and was becoming very common, and that daily newspaper would be thrown onto a train and delivered to some remote town. The same day that it was published. People were getting, by their standards, instantaneous news and having to deal with the consequences of blaring headlines telling them of catastrophic developments in Kansas having to do with armed conflicts over slavery. This is before the Civil War. People were taking up arms before the Civil War over slavery. And this, I think, made it harder for people to deal with their differences. People were in a much more visceral way, confronted with the differing laws and customs and traditions in different parts of the country, and found it much less tolerable to face people who disagreed with them.
PRENTICE: And he wasn't shy about sharing his thoughts. He would write letters, to be published, right?
INSKEEP: It's a very clever user of the media. In his earlier days, he would write anonymous newspaper articles. Most newspaper articles were without a byline. They were anonymous. And it's thought that hundreds of them in an Illinois newspaper were his. And it's known that a number of them were his. And you're exactly right about the letters as president, there were a few occasions where somebody would make a complaint or write an open letter to him denouncing this or that, or demanding answers about this or that, and he would respond with an open letter of his own. And it was a way for him to lay out his reasoning in a short, concise way. And some of those were extremely effective in appealing to people's reasons rather than their emotions.
PRENTICE: Well, I can't let you go without asking you a bit about how you spend many of your mornings, how I spend many of my mornings, and that is waist deep in the 2024 political landscape and the factors that will sway this election. We certainly see the economy, our involvement in global conflicts. But do you see a factor or factors? Uh, I don't know, cultural debates, reproductive rights, the environment that might engage more voters this year?
INSKEEP: Oh, wow. See, when you got started on that question, I thought that we were going to talk about how early we have to get up in the morning. Um, which is the question that many people want from me.
PRENTICE: OK, full disclosure, what time is it?
INSKEEP: Yes, you go first. You go first.
PRENTICE: 1 a.m.. I'm at the station by 115.
INSKEEP: You win. You win.
PRENTICE: It's not a contest.
INSKEEP: I get up at 3:00 eastern time.
PRENTICE: Well, it's the same time then. It's just a different part of the country.
INSKEEP: Exactly, exactly. But you are awesome. That is much more impressive. I'm in it 4 a.m., and at 5 a.m. eastern time, Morning Edition starts and we go live for a few hours, and then we continually update so that people in the West get the latest news, along with whatever features… and so forth from earlier in the morning that we have. And you were asking about what issues might people in 2024…
PRENTICE: Do you have a sense of what is underreported or maybe under the radar?
INSKEEP: Wow, underreported or under the radar. This is a weird thing to say: Everything is over reported and blown out of proportion. And I don't mean to say that there's nothing serious happening in the world. There are terrible things happening in the world, but we have constant demands on our attention which pull us away from long term things that matter. I can think about, for example, the war in Ukraine. There was a period, and maybe you remember it when it seemed that nobody in America could think or talk about anything else but the war in Ukraine. And then other things happened and dragged it away. And it's just getting much, much less attention now. But it remains as important as it ever was. Amazingly, I think this has even happened with the war between. Between Israel and Hamas. It was the only thing that people could think about for a while. But it goes on and other things come up and our attention gets pulled elsewhere. But these are long wars and long term issues that demand our attention in one way or another, whatever we think about them. And that's true of domestic issues as well. You think about something like climate change, whatever your view is on climate change. I mean, the science is what the science is; and the world economy is shifting in different ways, shifting toward electric cars, just to give one example. And that raises economic as well as other questions for us about how we're going to respond and how this country is going to meet this new reality. There are issues like abortion that were huge in the 2022 campaign and are not resolved. As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court ruling on abortion, as I'm sure you know very well, did not end the debate. It opened a debate in 50 states. And there are very few states where this is in a final stage. There are many states where people are still working this out. And one thing about democracy is that nothing is ever over, ever. No debate is ever settled. And this can be discouraging. It can be despairing. You have to go fight the same thing over and over and over again. But it's also hopeful, because that means that you're never completely, completely defeated. So long as we keep our democracy, you get what you can get, and then you go on and you fight the next election and you see what happens after that.
PRENTICE: And what a privilege, right? What a privilege. It is that what we do? I mean, the fact that we happen to work and thrive in a democracy is cherry on the sundae.
INSKEEP: Yes.
PRENTICE: But just to have that early morning blank slate as the world invents itself. But it's never over. Like you said, it's never over.
INSKEEP: Yeah. And our work in the media is never over. And we never get everything that we would like to in any given day's show. But as you know very well, from experience, the saving grace is there's going to be another show tomorrow and we'll add a little bit more and get a different perspective on things and just keep going.
PRENTICE: Steve Inskeep is in conversation with Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof at the Morrison Center, Thursday, January 25th. And we are so privileged that he is with us right here on Morning Edition and those early morning hours to guide us through. And for that, we thank you for every day and for this particular day. Safe journey to white. Thank you.
INSKEEP: Wonderful. Thanks. Really appreciate this.
Find reporter George Prentice@georgepren
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