Abraham Lincoln, the man that freed the slaves, was a Republican.

That only makes sense if you realize that he was an attorney to Rail Road Business interests.

In 1860 the modern corporation, the limited liability corporation, did not exist.

It was invented in England in 1862 to help capital formation for big capital intensive projects, such as rail road building. It quickly spread to the rest of the western/modern world.

Lincoln couldn’t imagine the vast corporate holding of communication systems, media, and newspapers – situations that were all just getting started at the time.

In 1862 the United States, even with three million slaves in the south, and another five million subsistence farmers (all rough figures) in the south, had the broadest distribution of wealth in the history of the world. Mostly as a result of the millions of small farm holdings from Minisota and Iowa east to New Hampshire and Maine. Perhaps for the first time in history, creating a vast middle class that achieved critical mass, enough, to drive politics based upon moral issues (moral issues are a middle class phenomina, the poor/subsitance farmers can’t afford such, and the rich/slave holders, don’t need it).

We fought a civil war to free the slaves. Yet in the 25 years following the civil war the United States would achieve unprecedented concentrations of wealth and dispersion of squalor. This concentration of wealth created brittle economics, made all the more brittle by a lack of a central bank.

The culprit for the post civil war distopia was the invention of the modern, limited liability corporation. So Lincoln freed the slaves, ending one kind of dystopia, but during his presidency, a new phenomina was born that would create a new kind, and vastly more pervasive, economic dystopia.

Bush and the Republican ancestors were all born in the post civil war era. Their dystopia was only remedied in the New Deal. Bush’s and his Republican ancestors attempted a coup (see Wikipedia’s Business Plot/Plot against FDR) at the beginning of Roosevelt’s presidency.

In 2001, Bush had a mandate to fight the war on terror, and an opportunity to unite the entire world in the effort. A reasonable response to 9/11, would have been to call for the draft on 9/12, because no one knew on 9/12 how big the effort to solve the problems endemic of 9/11 would be. But a drafted army would force Bush to perform policies that were logically within the publics interest.

The Republican aristocracy that funded Bush’s campaign with unprecedented amounts of money (in the hundreds of millions of dollars, $60 million alone to kill off the McCain campaign in Michigan and South Carolina after his surprising showing in New Hampshire) did not do so for Bush to fight a war on Terror, the funded Bush, and put him in his place, so he could fight the war on Roosevelt’s the New Deal.

The war on terror, then, became the means for Bush, lacking a true mandate with his negative plurality, to achieve the political power he needed to assault Roosevelt’s new deal.

I say all of this, because your Lincoln quote reminded me, that all the dysfunction in our society was born during the Civil War era, at the very time we were fighting a war to end unfairness and the dystopia it gives birth to, we were creating a new form of unfairness and that dystopia is not only still with us now, its undermining the existence of our society (taking down the nation, as you said). And the corporation that Lincoln’s era and Lincoln’s party gave birth too, has created vast media empires that make it possible to fool more people for longer periods of time than Lincoln could ever have imagine.

But lets be clear, Lincoln was a lawyer to large business interests. What he would be today, is really hard to determine. But he might be a party to the party that is trying to fool all of the people all of the time.