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Amid the chaos of America in 2020, a number of opportunistic political operatives have been inspired to “rebrand” in an effort to convey some sort of timely political realignment.

Not so much the major players of the Democratic Party. Most of them have either remained staunchly opposed to anything from the Bernie Sanders agenda, or they have doubled down on the party’s rightward drift to appeal to those elusive “moderate Republicans in the suburbs.”

No, it’s a number of enterprising Republicans who have acquired a new coat of paint — namely the “Never Trump” faction of conservatives who bemoan the incivility and chaos that Donald has wrought upon our country and their party. Of the Never Trumpers, among them high-profile conservatives like Max Boot, Bill Kristol, and Jennifer Rubin, none are quite so seemingly counterintuitive as the Lincoln Project, the political action committee formed in 2019 to “hold accountable those who would violate their oaths to the Constitution and would put others before Americans.” In practice, this means a massive press and social media campaign to support Joe Biden, the sort of Democrat that many wealthy Republicans would love to see in office.

As is so often the case with Republicans selling their moral bona fides, the Lincoln Project invokes our sixteenth president, who oversaw a devastating war to preserve the Union and abolish slavery. Of course, Republicans love to claim they belong to “the party of Lincoln,” even as the party itself bears absolutely no resemblance to Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans. And though this point may be obvious, it does raise a bewildering question: What the fuck is a republican, as distinct from a Republican?

Richard Bensel’s classic 1991 history, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877, explains the trajectory of the former into the latter — from the Party of the Union to the Party of Finance — with a thorough account of Civil War party politics and the subsequent failures of Reconstruction. It’s true that it was the Southern Democrats who led the charge to secession. At the time, these were whites who favored Jacksonian democracy, meaning they endorsed the “democracy” of extending suffrage to all white men, alongside laissez-faire economics and limiting the role of the federal government to do things like, say, abolish slavery.

By contrast, Abraham Lincoln was the first president elected on the Republican ticket, a brand new party favored by Northerners who opposed slavery for any number of reasons, often in combination: some recognized it as a moral abomination, some saw it as the feature of a corrupt oligarchy in Washington, DC, and some were concerned about its devastating drag on economic development. All, however, advocated limiting the expansion of the institution westward. These Republicans also favored economic protectionism, investment in infrastructure, and building the sort of active, planned state necessary for developing a diversified and increasingly industrial economy.

The kind of state Republicans were trying to construct is, unsurprisingly, called a “republic,” and it was met with fierce resistance from Southern leaders. Secession was an attempt to thwart this larger project, but as Bensel shows, Republicans continued working to build a republic during the war — not only by crushing the slaveholding class and strengthening federal power over the states, but by coordinating a war finance plan, improving national infrastructure, and using federal aid to spur diversified economic development.

Spoiler alert: the Union won, slavery was abolished, and the ambitiously named period of Reconstruction should have set the stage for that great American republic the party of Lincoln had dreamed of. But this was not to be.

In the defeated South, the white planter elite fought the Northern occupation tooth and nail, mounting a deadly resistance to Republican efforts to extend civil and political rights to former slaves. Meanwhile, the rapid ascendency of finance capital had no use for the broader industrial and economic ambitions of Reconstruction. Bensel notes that the decimated and still underdeveloped South required massive investment to reintegrate itself into the United States, but instead of sending capital down to the region, Northern Republican Party politicians began to side with high finance by the 1870s. In direct opposition to their supposedly republican ambitions, they voted against planning, infrastructure, investment, taxes, and tariffs. Republicans also made disastrous concessions to Southern elites — and so the grand ambitions of Reconstruction were smothered by Northern economic conservatism, while racist violence, disenfranchisement, and segregation were codified in the South.

Republics were passé, and laissez-faire capitalism was the future.

That’s how the Republican Party became distinctly anti-republican. It’s why Joe Biden doesn’t horrify the GOP, why he even has a few “big names” in the Republican punditry and campaign industries boosting him, and why we have two political parties that you can barely distinguish from each other on economic policy. In fact, the abandonment of republicanism is the first — but not the last — barricade to anything approaching a workers’ party in the United States.

If socialists want to transform the United States in our lifetime, then they should first take up that small-r republican struggle for themselves. Because Reconstruction is not complete, and no one else is even up to the task. It’s clear that the Union is not whole, and that this fractured country based on regional economic competition and exploitation favors capital above all else. Capitalism is given unlimited growth over and across state borders, while left movements are largely penned in and restricted to one of fifty little semi-independent nations.

The more anarchist strains of left thought argue for the superiority of allegedly organic social formations like community, localism, regionalism, and municipalism — all of which were justifications for the succession of the American Confederacy as well. Not only are these ideals thoroughly and inherently conservative — a variation on “states’ rights” made palatable with a convenient left affect — they keep popular movements small.

It’s a grave error both politically and strategically to assume that “small is beautiful.” The tendency of smaller social units to be more socially and economically conservative, obstacles to mass politics in general and social-democratic reforms in particular, is not a coincidence — it’s a natural feature of smallness.

Nearly every major democratizing program and institution in our country’s history has had to fight to be big. The New Deal, the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act were all major advances for American democracy — and they were all fought viciously by states’ rights advocates intent on controlling their bailiwicks through the formal dissection and segregation of the country.

Despite the obstruction of universalist New Deal benefits, often by a still-segregated South, the improvements in American life extended across racial lines. With these gains outsourced to states, however, their vulnerability to erosion has proven all too obvious. Redlining, public housing policy, education budgets, and voting laws — all determined at a local level — have consistently proven effective means by which to segregate and disenfranchise. Meanwhile, state attacks on Planned Parenthood and restrictions aside, no woman will ever truly have the right to abortion without a guarantee of free health care at the point of access. The laws aren’t useless, but without a big, fat republic to back it up, they have no fortification from reactionaries and retrenchment.

At the same time, state and community initiatives have always found champions among the liberal ultrawealthy. It was the Ford Foundation that advocated for and invested heavily in “developmental separatism” and “self-determination” for black people in New York City, granting them the “freedom” to experiment with local initiatives and programs among their own rather than “assimilate” — that is, desegregate, a project that would require both redistribution and a standardization of resources and funding. More recently, “school choice” was the preferred euphemism for disastrous charter school programs, another round of “autonomy” sold as the alternative to equality. At the international level, Bill and Melinda Gates invested in microlending to the Third World — as opposed to large-scale industrial development — insisting that it was better to have peasants take out small business loans rather than, say, investing collectively in developing an industrial economy and welfare state. Go ahead and search for “microfinance, repayment, suicide” to figure out how so many of those “entrepreneurs” fared.

Moreover, the deliberately byzantine nature of state variation absolutely paralyzes any popular movements. Labor law varies so wildly at a state level that organizing a national action or campaign immediately becomes a house of cards. Ever wonder why it’s so difficult to hold police accountable for violence or murder? Well, you’re looking at one of America’s finest “community institutions.”