The Gilder/Lehrman Institute, in collaboration with other Lincoln cultists at Gettysburg College, has awarded its $50,000 Lincoln book prize to self-professed communist historian Eric Foner (whose Columbia University students call him “Red Eric”). In his 1988 book, The Story of American Freedom, Foner lavishly praised the Communist Party USA as a “cultural  front that helped to redraw the boundaries of American freedom.” In a February 11, 1991 article in The Nation magazine entitled “Lincoln’s Lesson,” Foner opposed the break-up of the Soviet Union, calling the peaceful secession of the former Soviet “republics” a “crisis” that would destroy the “laudable goal” of Soviet socialism. He praised the notion of “overreaching loyalty to the Soviet Union,” and intoned that “no leader of a powerful nation” should allow “the dismemberment of the Soviet Union.” Lincoln would not have allowed it, he said, while condemning  the much-less-bloodthirsty Gorbachev.

All totalitarians are mortal enemies of divided sovereignty, federalism, or voluntary and consensual government, and champions of monopolistic, centralized  governmental power. That’s why they all idolize Abraham Lincoln, who orchestrated the mass murder of some 350,000 fellow citizens for the sake of what Foner calls “the permanent American union.” 

Lenin supposedly said that the capitalists will “sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”  Lerhman is participating in a long tradition of American capitalists giving away the “rope” to their sworn ideological enemies.  Congratulations, Comrade Lehrman, for finally coming out of the closet.

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