The Dead Heart of the Living Tree: Lincoln, Pragmatism, and Liberal Democracy

The Dead Heart of the Living Tree: Lincoln, Pragmatism, and Liberal Democracy

To grasp the meaning of Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s latest historical drama, we must  begin with the trailer that appeared on the night of October 3rd, 2012, just after the first of three Presidential debates between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama:

We open on an image of the Capitol Hill, and the music swells. Martin Luther King, Jr, American warriors then-and-now, helicopters, Iwo Jima, European beachheads; Nelson Mandela smiles and waves, suffragettes march past and so does Gandhi, and finally, there shines the skyline of New York City, two beams of light standing in for the fallen Twin Towers. Throughout we see text that reads: For Every Dream (MLK)/For Every Belief (Mandela)/For Every Freedom(Iwo Jima)/There Are Those Who Unite Us All (Lincoln). Over these images, Spielberg’s Lincoln speaks disjointedly: “Think we choose to be born, or are we fitted to the times we are born into? … We begin with equality, that’s the origin, isn’t it? That’s justice. … See, we’ve shown that a people can endure awful sacrifice and yet cohere.”

The trailer begins with images that would appear not to correspond to the content of that which is being advertised -- a movie about Abe Lincoln. Part of this can be explained as a nod to the “historic” nature of the debate during which it aired, situating the film within the larger continuity of American history (plus Gandhi and Mandela). Another explanation has to do with the somewhat audacious project of rendering easy equivalence between momentous though otherwise incongruous historical moments that typifies the approach of a historian like Spielberg. It signifies the recasting of novel occurrences as something familiar, or the reintegration of such moments of rupture into a coherent narrative of established truths. Each historical event is treated as simply another layer of fact to be imposed onto a firmly established, unshakeable conception of the nation, “grafting itself then upon the ancient body of truth, which thus grows much as a tree grows by the activity of a new layer of cambium.” (1)

The ad posits the interchangeability of bloody military triumph on the one hand, and popular civil rights movements on the other. Only for an American chauvinist with a serious commitment to triumphal militaristic narratives could these moments appear to be equivalent, all standing as examples of Great Moments in American History - that is, in the progressive history of “freedom”.  This trailer therefore calls attention to two major tendencies in Spielberg’s Lincoln: first, the uncritically triumphal approach to historical narrativization -- one that insists on reincorporating anything new, challenging or different into the body of old received truths; and second, a penchant for seizing the history of oppressed people, reducing them to marginal characters, and proceeding to do the telling as if no one had been silenced. (2)


The latter tendency is characterized by near-total erasure of any aspect of emancipatory struggle not confinable to the closed-door deliberations of craggy-faced statesmen. The token appears now and again only to fill some space, render a service, or to literally thank the Great Man for blessing the nation with his benevolent judgements. (After the Thirteenth Amendment, the centerpiece of the film, passes, Thaddeus Stevens takes the official document home to present to his longtime clandestine partner, a woman of mixed heritage, as a “gift for you.”) Thus the film cleaves closely to the narrow parameters it has set forth for itself -- first among which is to heap praise on such men and their deeds. This imperative has all to do with the former tendency: the tendency toward an ideological narrativity that privileges one mode of truth and is determined to graft all others onto it. Lincoln enjoys an epiphany about slavery, for instance, upon recalling a Euclidian postulate of equivalence: “Two things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.” But we know that full equality for blacks was rejected by figures like Lincoln precisely on the basis that they were not to be considered to be the equals of whites (hence “resettlement” had been proposed as a means of emancipating slaves without further corrupting white society). As a lawyer and man of reason, Lincoln of the film must adhere strictly to the logic of enlightened positivism, as set forth in documents like the Declaration of Independence (in which the truth that “all men are created equal” is treated as “self-evident”). Equivalence is set forth as a natural (divine) law, and although equality may not immediately follow, we are meant to take solace in the slow, “progressive” tendency that will eventually make it a reality. (Clear parallels should be drawn to liberal praise for Obama’s “evolving” position on same-sex-marriage. For perhaps he, too, was waiting for a Euclidian epiphany to guide him to the ethical, rational, and most enlightened position -- and as luck would have it,  it also happens to be the most expedient position). The truth that black persons could no longer be held in bondage now corresponded to what Lincoln’s eminently rational mind actually knew all along, stripping the new truth of its newness, and history of its specificity. Lincoln was always-already the Great Emancipator just as emancipation was always-already the great destiny of the United States.

This function -- stripping a new truth of its newness, the better to incorporate it into the old truth -- is a feature of Pragmatism, and as such corresponds to the philosophical and political project  of American Progressivism. As we shall see, this prized essence (present in the act of political compromise as of Lincoln’s “evolving” position on slavery) is clearly given by the framework of Pragmatism (writ large and small). William James described this process in his lecture on What Pragmatism Means:

The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter ... The most violent revolutions in an individual’s beliefs leave most of his old order standing. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography remain untouched. New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity. (3)

A pragmatist incorporates new information into his worldview by means of grafting the new onto the body of the old, by molding and remolding the two to make them work together. No matter how momentous the new realization is, the constitutive ways in which he views the world are never truly threatened, and in fact preserved at any cost. In this manner, change is never and could never be actually revolutionary, for revolutionary change would require precisely the total rethinking of time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and crucially, one’s own biography, a rethinking to which Pragmatism in this form appears averse. Change (made to correspond to reform as a slow and steady evolution) never implies a negation of the existing order of power. Change is rather positive and progressive -- to the extent that new truths are admitted, they are posited as consistent with the old. Hence the abolition of slavery is not taken by the progressive to be the constitution of a radical new order of equality, but merely the re-establishment of an old order of equivalence.

This is the trap in which progressive political thought finds itself: it may glimpse the radical implications of its experience, but being unwilling to perform a radical reconceptualization of everything -- least of all its own biography, its own self -- it will find those implications entirely too extreme to accept (both as such and in terms of the action they might call for). Today as ever, it chooses to graft sometimes new, generally correct information about politics (people deserve universal healthcare, drone warfare is ugly and bad, the world is being run by a corporate mega-elite, and so on) onto a broken framework of truths, namely the framework of progress, such that all of those ills can be treated, slowly but surely, with more of the same: progressive thinking and legislative activity. (The cure for the scourge of slavery is then taken not to be a vast social struggle, but as progressive legislation -- a bill in congress. Not the war but the Thirteenth Amendment, says Lincoln, “is that cure.” Of course, a vast and bloody war was indeed being fought, but only, it would seem to a pragmatist, in order to reestablish the federal government and assert the superiority of the progressive Northern Way, to provide space in which the liberal democratic process could be resumed).

In refusing to revolutionize the totality of ideas that constitutes its worldview and accept its own profound implication in the perpetuation of the injustice it claims to confront,  liberal thought therefore gets precisely nowhere. Hegel might have called this the conscious adherence to the Unchangeable. For Hegel, new information confronts the individual consciousness in a way that potentially negates, preserves, and goes beyond the existing truth (all truth being in a manner partial). But consciousness does not necessarily get beyond its prior horizon of possibility, a horizon known as the Unchangeable. In a given cultural context, it has a number of manifest characteristics (the supremacy of the white, hetero, US-born male, the cultural and military hegemony of the United States, or the authority inhered in bosses and the police are contemporary manifestations of that which cannot be easily got-beyond) but its latent character resides in all inherited relations of power (for Hegel, the asymmetrical but mutual dependence of Lord and Bondsman typifies such power relations). If we take the “old truths” to signify the Unchangeable, Pragmatism logically ensures their permanent endurance:

The point I now urge you to observe particularly is the part played by the older truths. ...Their influence is absolutely controlling. Loyalty to them is the first principle – in most cases it is the only principle; for by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them. (4)

Give to the poor and feed the hungry, but by no means abolish capital or redistribute the land, for to do so is to risk overturning their ontological status as poor and hungry, relations of bondage fixed by the unchangeable old truths.  To declare the slave free without striving to overturn her subordinate status in the wider social order, this is the crime of liberalism. To truly free another is also be to abolish one’s own privilege -- including one’s right to set the other free. Contemporary radicals, white and black, certainly mounted such efforts, especially in the period of Reconstruction -- but in the film, such proposals are treated as irresponsible, perverse, and generally dangerous to the progressive project.

The unchangeable truth nearer to the surface of Lincoln is clearly the Constitution. Perhaps the greatest and most revered collection of old truths, it is clung to with particular ardor by lawyers like Lincoln and Obama, cast as Lincoln’s modern counterpart, because it is a codification of truths that grant them immense power. (As if to illustrate how much of the left subordinates itself to this unchangeable, one often hears that ‘Protest is protected speech!’ After all, ‘it’s in the Constitution!’). Insofar as the Constitution is “a living document,” it lives to adhere any and all new truths to the decaying core of the old. On an even larger level, the core of old truths around which all compromise must be grafted include the veneration of power itself, the exceptionalism of U.S. Empire (and attendant racial superiority), and the sacred operation of capital. Taken together, these things are the dead heart of the living tree.  The vehicle of mediation through which these old truths are preserved and reasserted in the face of novel, potentially threatening developments is called liberal democracy.

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Lincoln is a supreme and masterful act of liberal mythmaking. As Chris Hayes adoringly puts it to his guest, the film’s screenwriter Tony Kushner, on a recent segment of his show:

It’s a movie about what is most elevated and corrupt, about the inescapable logic of compromise. It is, to my mind, the greatest sustained artistic meditation on these themes in the context of American politics that I have ever seen, one with some very obvious resonance to our own current bitter political culture. (5)

Asserting the inescapability of compromise is the bread and butter of liberal apologists, who are unwilling or unable to picture a radically different future as much as they may wish for the individual changes that would result from systemic upheaval. As Spielberg’s Lincoln adheres dogmatically to the old truths of liberal democracy, its supposed subtlety is undercut by pre-rendered judgements against principled radicalism. 

What is really puzzling and paradoxical about this mode of adoration for Lincoln is that he is praised as a great and noble man for the decisions he made, while at the same time those decisions are characterized as the only reasonable, pragmatically sound choices on the table. A true pragmatist, then, has in fact very little to decide, since principles are mostly off the table, or firmly embedded in the immutable core of old truths. A pragmatist acting benignly has consequently very little to truly be praised for. What is to be done is what is most practical in any given situation -- no more, no less. How then should we praise a man for doing only what is the most calculated? We might praise him for his technical proficiency in identifying the most politically expedient move, for the deftness which with he reconciles (subordinates) new ideas to what he already knows to be true, but why devote volumes to worshipping his character, and why confuse the two things?  This sort of praise for Lincoln marks a deviation from the normal adoration of him as a crusader for equality, shifting the focus of the admiration to his status as a master technocrat, adept at the strategic elements of arcane legal justifications, the wrangling of consensus, and the manufacturing of consent -- in short, of politics. It is in this regard, not in the genuinely commendable qualities that he did have, that Lincoln stands as a role model for Obama and company.

Spielberg’s film is nominally based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography Team of
Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, a 900-page tome dedicated to chronicling the “story of Lincoln’s political genius revealed through his extraordinary array of personal qualities.” That tells you more or less all you need to know about what the book will be – a fawning ode to a Great Man, a mode of hagiographic history performed in large part by amateur psychology-at-a-distance. Although its conclusion is foregone -- Lincoln is, on the balance, confirmed as a great and noble man, the book retains a certain degree of nuance that is mostly elided in the film version, which necessarily covers a much narrower range of events. What’s significant is Spielberg and Kushner’s decision to go with the passage of the 13th amendment as the central drama of their film, when in reality, as one gathers from Goodwin’s book, the circumstances surrounding the much higher stakes of the writing and issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation (an executive order, drawing on the President’s war powers, declaring forfeit the property of enemy combatants, in this case, the slave labor force propping up the the insurrection) have a lot more to say about the sort of cynical pragmatism that the film is determined to superficially question before ultimately casting as saintly behavior. The selection of the 13th amendment is telling: the war has virtually been won, slavery has nearly abolished itself, Lincoln has been re-elected, the Republicans have won congressional victories. With virtually nothing to lose, Lincoln feels the time is right for heroics, and pushes forward with a belated concession to morality. In other words, he feels that at this time, he can incorporate new truths into his worldview and into the apparatus of state power without threatening to radically alter either. The timing and language of the Proclamation, on the other hand, was an unabashedly strategic military ploy, and much more characteristic of Lincoln’s instrumentalization of the issue of slavery and emancipation. It would’ve been infinitely more instructive to analyze this period of time, but also infinitely less suited to the recuperative project of the film.

An aside: the reason why it’s so important to devote time to establishing the personalities and human qualities of men like Lincoln and Obama is precisely because their political philosophies are so calculating and robotic. The reason why it’s important that we know that Abe is spinner of folksy yarns with a tendency for melancholy, that Obama gives fist-bumps and poses with children, is out of a need to create a coherent understanding of men whose political visions lack ethical coherence.  The success of Steven Spielberg’s latest historical epic is the celebration and ennobling of valueless pragmatism, by which the pragmatist is elevated out of his technocratic existence into the realm of sainthood.   

On his November 24th program, cable news liberal Chris Hayes hosted the above-mentioned interview segment with Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner, which was followed by a roundtable discussion comparing the presidencies of Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln, centered around the Affordable Care Act as Obama’s signature legislation and moment of Lincolnian compromise. The segment mostly falls flat, but not without some interesting, troubling points being briefly raised and quickly exorcised. (Some viewers might recall that Obama’s “compromise” was not compromise at all, but actually his position, as well as that of the health insurance lobbyists who wrote the bill). In any case, the purpose of the segment is to elevate the process of compromise over the stakes themselves -- while the really significant act of “compromise” doesn’t happen during legislative wrangling, but rather occurs when liberals coax themselves into voting for a conservative corporatist Democrat despite being deeply opposed to his policies in principle. They give their consent and receive very little in return.  The act of compromise is therefore internal, it is the process of reconciling new ideas to old truths. As such, Obama’s “compromise” on the ACA is not a one-off legislative deal, but just another component of an unprincipled, ethically incoherent policy platform -- a platform guided only by the commitment to one of the ultimate old truths: the need to consolidate state power (and thereby rescue corporate power) by any and all means. In this sense, in his strident, violent defense of the status quo and of power as it is currently constituted, Obama is quite like Lincoln, whose overriding objective was the preservation of the Union, the reinforcement of the dominion of the federal government, and the enhancement of discretionary war powers enjoyed by the executive branch.

The apt comparison, therefore, between the “signature” moves of Lincoln and Obama is not (as Hayes well knows) a facile discussion of the ACA, but a discussion of the (executive) power over life and death that Obama has claimed through his policy on drone war (or for that matter, the upcoming “Grand Bargain” in which liberal aspirations will be coddled but necessarily curbed). As Hayes smirkingly acknowledges in the Kushner segment, a comparison between the ACA and the 13th Amendment suffers from the fact that the stakes of the two pieces of legislation and the circumstances surrounding them are wildly incommensurate for several reasons. It’s drone war and the destruction of civil liberties that are the analogue in terms of magnitude, not healthcare reform. In the very decision to pursue an unfathomably bloody war, but also in the decision to claim the authority to emancipate the slaves as a function of his war powers, Lincoln makes an explicit claim to power over life and death for the sake of consolidating state power, which he retroactively legitimates through legal arguments and the wrangling of legislative consensus. This power over life and death is the same claim that Barack Obama has made in the pursuit of the large scale extrajudicial killings of men, women, and children via drone that have become normalized under his administration. That both Lincoln and Obama couch their decisions to seize the ultimate power over life and death in legal terms is crucial, as is the fact that  they find the law totally pliable in their hands so long as military supremacy is also assured.

Why the narrow, anemic focus on the Affordable care act in these segments of Up w/ Chris? Are the real parallels really not obvious and urgent? Could an intelligent person really conceive of a segment comparing Obama and Lincoln without it occurring to him to bring up executive war powers, the suspension of habeas corpus, and the virtual civil war that the security state conducts on its own citizens? Is a discussion of the ACA really the best Chris Hayes could do? Of course not, but it’s certainly the best he cares to do, because the segment is intended as a piece of Obama apologetics and an exercise in progressive palliation. Associating Obama with the myth of Lincoln lends immediate borrowed nobility and an air of historical gravitas, and frames the crimes and failures of the Obama administration as necessary detours in the march of progressive reform, rather than the cynical ends-in-themselves that they really are.

So why is a film like Lincoln and the narrative it creates so important to liberals and progressives, to people like Hayes and Kushner? Why the effusive praise for what is frankly a laughable, schlocky, sanctimonious film? We argue that the importance of Lincoln as an historical example is the utility it has as an assuager of fear and guilt about being on the wrong side of history, a palliative for the shame that accompanies acceding to morally repugnant compromise, of voting again for the Democrat Obama in spite of any knowledge and disapproval of truly heinous abuses committed under his reign. It’s a liberal/progressive feel-good movie with a thin pretense of concern about the morality of compromise and backroom politics. And from watching the Chris Hayes segment with Tony Kushner, it’s evident that the once-radical Kushner has deep reservations about Obama’s politics, but is rather shell-shocked from eight years of Bush, which in his mind may have been brought about by the refusal of the stubbornly principled on the left to vote for the Democratic challenger. No, since researching and writing about Lincoln, Kushner has come to view the Obama administration through a “Lincoln lens,” a highly instructive exercise which presumably grants one insight about the wisdom of compromise, which exculpates one from any responsibility for the atrocities of Obama, which assures one that casting a vote for him was the only sensible, pragmatic thing to do. It makes sense: when Obama did become President, and the abuses of Bush continued and intensified, the only recourse the bamboozled liberal had was to take comfort in the purity of his intentions (if not actions), and to the mythical nobility of pragmatic compromise. Internalizing the message of Lincoln is the only way that liberals and progressives who know better are still able to live with themselves after utterly caving to empire, twice.

Even open discussion of Obama’s failings seems to make Kushner nervous – he is genuinely puzzled as to whether it’s possible to criticize Obama from the left without destroying the precious, fragile embryo of the progressive movement:

How do we, as progressives, keep public discussion alive about things that are being compromised and lost, while at same time not undermining the larger project, to rebuild a politically effective progressive community in the US. That seems to me to be in one sense what Obama has taken on as president. It’s gonna be a big issue in the second term, because I think he’s a builder, and I don’t think he’s gonna immediately become everybody’s dream left president this time around either. The question is how do we talk about this stuff without undermining the attempts to build a…[trails off]

There seems to be very little room for any sort of principled dissent in Kushner’s utterly convictionless assessment of contemporary, Obama era politics. In his mind, it’s simply too dangerous. So what of the radicals of Lincoln? (6) Thaddeus Stevens is given a prominent role, and one gets the sense that Kushner might quietly fancy himself a bit more of a Stevens than a Lincoln, although as Hayes puts it, the film puts a heavy thumb on Lincoln’s side of the scale when it comes to weighing the pragmatist vs. the purist. Perhaps the most telling moment of the film, and the truth about where Kushner really stands about how a dutiful progressive should behave comes with the scene depicting the climatic capitulation of Thaddeus Stevens on the floor of the House of Representatives. Stevens, well known for his radical assertion that black people should be equal to whites in every sense, not just in narrow legal terms, is under questioning by a hostile Democratic congressman. He is asked whether he believes in full equality for the nation’s blacks.  His admission to this charge could compromise support from moderate Republicans and jeopardize the eventual passage of the 13th Amendment. The tension mounts, the music swells to a triumphant crescendo, and Stevens lies: he believes only in equality before the law. Next to the actual passage of the amendment, this scene is situated as the great victorious moment of the film.


Recourse must be made to that unshakeable old truth, the law. Anything beyond legal equality, or any assertion at all that is not framed within a legal discourse, would demand too radical an accommodation on the part of the ossified core of old truths at the heart of political life under liberal democracy. The film makes this explicit, and progressive commentary reinforces it at every turn. Liberal thought is here defined as a knowing confrontation with the new at the horizon of the unchangeable, and an equally knowing refusal to go any further (in thought and in activity), and the choice to accommodate oneself and the new to that horizon. This refusal is not necessarily in bad faith -- so long as the Unchangeable appears to be just that, liberal thought in itself can hardly be expected to go beyond it. But the unchangeable not only produces individual refusal, it is itself produced by collective refusal to engage in prolonged critique of standing truths in a way that allows alternatives to emerge. Time and space, cause and effect, nature and history, and one’s own biography. Inherited and dead social truths about each of these concepts constitute precisely that which is maintained in liberal thought, and those truths likewise constitute precisely that which is overturned by radical imagination and radical struggle. For under radical conditions history is rewritten, the notion of truth itself becomes subject to change. Lincoln shows that “a people can endure awful sacrifice and yet cohere,” a pragmatic proverb if ever there was one, that we might brace ourselves for the austerity to come, prepared to make any sacrifice to keep the system in place no matter how it disfigures us. Lincoln does not ask whether we can rewrite the very history we are making. It only asks us to be fitted to the times into which we are born.



- the FWPBI (Sam Connet & Logan Joseph)


1. James, William. "What Is Pragmatism, Lecture II: What Pragmatism Means." Lecture. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Dec. 1904. Web. 29 Nov. 2012. <http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/james.htm>. Published in James, William. Writings, 1902-1910. Ed. Bruce Kuklick. New York, NY: Literary Classics of the United States, 1987. Print.

2. Covered in some detail here: Masur, Kate. "In Spielberg's 'Lincoln,' Passive Black Characters." New York Times. N.p., 12 Nov. 2012. Web. 29 Nov. 2012. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/opinion/in-spielbergs-lincoln-passive-black-characters.html>.

3. James. Ibid. Emphasis added.

4. James. Ibid.

5. Up W/ Chris Hayes. MSNBC. N.d. 24 Nov. 2012. Web. 29 Nov. 2012. <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46979738/vp/49946960#49947264>.

6) Aaron Bady's rather good article from Jacobin, which Sam and I saw as we were finishing this up, takes on this question and makes a lot of other really smart points about the film: http://jacobinmag.com/2012/11/lincoln-against-the-radicals-2/