Andrew Ferguson devoted an entire book to the American public’s “long love affair” with Abraham Lincoln. He sees in Steven Spielberg’s new movie about the 16th president more evidence of that love affair.
But Ferguson describes for Commentary readers an interesting phenomenon: Despite Spielberg and “left-wing playwright” Tony Kushner’s efforts to “enlist Lincoln into the cause of contemporary liberalism,” criticism of the new movie has emanated largely from the left. Why? Ferguson contends that Spielberg, Kushner, and their associates are “true to the story they tell — Lincoln’s finagling of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to ban slavery.”
Disdain for politics is a close cousin to a desire for authoritarianism. This explains why the sharpest criticism of Lincoln has come from Spielberg’s left, where impatience with democratic procedure and disputation lies closer to the surface.
A historian from Northwestern University called Kate Masur set the moviemakers straight in an op-ed for The New York Times. Their chief crime, she wrote, was perpetuating “the outdated assumption that white men are the primary movers of history and the main sources of social progress.” In her piece Professor Masur scarcely mentions Lincoln at all, in keeping with the fashions of the day: Academic history doesn’t want to appropriate Lincoln, just belittle him. In the racial and ethnic spoils system of the modern academy, the approved — indeed, obligatory — view is that “the slaves freed themselves.” There’s a grandeur to the absurdity of this idea, and it has the desired effects. It valorizes African Americans, sidelines Lincoln, and demotes the old white dudes in frock coats and mutton chops who argued, voted, and executed the laws. Most important, it trivializes the processes of self-government by which social progress is legitimately made.
