Really? We'll examine what you call Marxist below. But any genuine Marxist is aware, strongly aware, that Karl Marx himself idolized Lincoln. During his sojourn in the United States, Marx was a contributor and correspondent (Harper's Weekly, iirc) who extolled Lincoln and his war of liberation. The paper trail is there, and it has been commented on in Marx's bios. The history is there.
....we were discussing former Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo a few weeks back. He was an ardent, outspoken New Dealer and totally supportive of foisting a marxist state on America......
Theo Bilbo was a populist. A populist is/was not a Marxist. Some Marxists could, at a stretch, be seen as populists "somehow", but here is the bite:
In the history of the United States, the liberty interest and the yeomanry have been represented, up until 1928 when the party was taken over by urban socialist "reformers" (Jewish, Irish, and Italian wardheelers -- Tammany Hall writ large and larded up, esp. among the Jewish community, with socialist intellectualism and vanguardism), by the Democratic Party, or as it was called in the earlier 19th century, the National Democracy, and before that the Democratic Republican Party in Jefferson's day.
These people were the Antifederalists, who forced the business-dominated, big-planter Tidewater combination called the Federalists, to accept the Bill of Rights. Alexander Hamilton, who founded the Bank of New York, spent much of Federalist 81 arguing against the idea of "bills of rights" (based on the English experience of the previous hundred years and more) on the grounds that, in the words of the Ninth Amendment, an enumeration of rights would be used to disparage other rights inuring to the people. His observation led directly to the writing of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
James Madison wrote most of the Bill of Rights, but as a Federalist his main concern was that if the People, led by the Antifederalists, were determined to have a Bill of Rights, then it should be articulated properly by the most competent talent available -- him. (And he vindicated his own judgment.)
The common dirt farmers, the "yeomanry" of Jefferson's discourse, were always the core constituency of the Democratic Party until they were overreached by the urbanists and their very different agenda (shift from emphasis on the liberty interest and the interests of the People, to policing up Mr. McGillicuddy -- regulation and "reform", rent control, police review boards, etc., etc.).
The core interest of the yeomanry has always been freedom from domination by the economic and political power of the business interests, the planter class, the patroons and Millocracy leaders of Northern society, and more recently the pretensions of the Eurosocialist New Class.
That's why the populists who supported the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt in the South were racists -- the interests of the People, in the South, was always conflated with racism, with protecting the interests of the People from the economic warfare and sociopolitical overreaching of the planter class and their slaves. (Black slaves were always seen by poor whites as catspaws and enabling tools of the rich -- hence the hate and discontent, in addition to the alienage issues created by having an obviously [to everyone] distinct and separate ethnos in their midst which was at once sponsored and exploited by the rich. Even Lincoln, a Southerner by birth who grew up in the Southern culture of southern Indiana and Illinois, wanted to remove them from the United States after emancipation. Later on, blacks were seen as devastatingly efficient economic competition, deployable at will by the rich to destroy wages and undermine the yeoman class, as well as political tools of the Northern Party via the Freedmen's Bureau armed with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, strengthened by the Force Acts.)
Marx espoused vanguardism. Lincoln lived it. That's why Marx admired Lincoln.
Your premise is simply wrong.
Read a little more history and you'll see I'm right. I'm not pulling this out of the air. Solid historians have written on these subjects for generations.
It seems most of you guys want to blame Lincoln for Marxism to coverup the fact that the south overwhelmingly supported Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Jimmy Carter (certainly much moreso than northern states), which were responsible for enacting far more statist, socialist, national policies than Lincoln could ever dream of.
There are so many things wrong with that statement I don't know exactly where to start. For one thing, Woodrow Wilson, except in foreign policy where he was out of step with almost everyone in America, is a poor choice to compare to FDR and Jimmy Carter. (You forget LBJ and Slick Willie? Bet you didn't.) Their measures would have been alien to him. There were a number of war measures passed during World War I in emulation of "modern" fighting nation-states like France and Great Britain, but to say that they arose from some deep wellspring of latent Jeffersonianism is frankly misplaced. Wilson's war measures recalled Lincoln's, not Jefferson's, administration; but he was in no way a socialist and didn't support urban socialists and their ideas the way later Democrats did.
The "Solid South" supported Wilson because "he kept us out of war". Talk about bait-and-switch. The war won, the country promptly voted for "normalcy" -- which, in the South, meant the Klan and white supremacy, not socialism or internationalism. The Grange movement and Kluxerism were not branches of socialism.
Therefore, Wilson cannot be lumped in with FDR and his support of alphabet-soup socialist state organs and wildly proliferating federalization of life in the United States.
The "Solid South" supported Jimmy Carter before, not after, they found out what a "progressive" he was -- after they found out, they supported Ronald Wilson Reagan.
They knew what LBJ was about -- that's why they voted for Barry Goldwater, showing their final repudiation of FDR's New Deal and the place it gave blacks in the Democratic "new axis" of labor, blacks, socialists, and Northern Catholic and Jewish "Old Ethnics" who still voted reflexively Democratic. In the Southerners' world, the planter class was simply replaced by the federal government as the sponsor of the Enemy Classes and the engine of the non-rich white man's political subjugation, helotization, and progressive enslavement. Southern whites didn't vote for Hubert Humphrey, either, but instead gave their votes to George Corley Wallace, who represented the tradition of the old populists like Theo Bilbo and Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman.
But any genuine Marxist is aware, strongly aware, that Karl Marx himself idolized Lincoln.
Marx praised Lincoln because the war freed the slaves and doomed the plantation system. "Idolized" is going too far.
Try as they might the Confederates didn't convince him that they were the true anti-capitalists. But in subsquent years many socialists and leftists (V.L. Parrington, Charles Beard, Edmund Wilson, E.L. Masters) did have a soft spot for the Old South, which for all it's faults wasn't industrialized.
If you look at what's taught in the schools today, there's a lot of hostility to the Republicans -- even Lincoln's Republicans -- for being the "party of big business." And there's a lot of deflation of the rhetoric of the party of Lincoln by those who want to explain Northern opposition to the expansion of slavery as a result of Negrophobia. In other words, leftist and neoconfederate arguments overlap.
If leftists haven't entirely rejected Lincoln, it's because they're following most of the rest of the country, which still has respect for Lincoln, not because he's their man and they're trying to force him on us.
The common dirt farmers, the "yeomanry" of Jefferson's discourse, were always the core constituency of the Democratic Party until they were overreached by the urbanists and their very different agenda (shift from emphasis on the liberty interest and the interests of the People, to policing up Mr. McGillicuddy -- regulation and "reform", rent control, police review boards, etc., etc.).
Unfortunately for the rest of the screed, American politics have had as much or more to do with ethnicity, race, religion, and sectionalism as with either class or ideology. So the idea that the virtuous poor piled on to the Democrat platform is very much an oversimplification. If you want to find out who's right and who's wrong you have to do so on a case by case basis.
The idea that the Democrats opposed the planter class just isn't true. Planters provided leadership for the Democratic party throughout the antebellum era and beyond. Strange as it might appear to dogmatists, a true backwoodsman like Davy Crockett actually was elected on the Whig ticket.
For one thing, Woodrow Wilson, except in foreign policy where he was out of step with almost everyone in America, is a poor choice to compare to FDR and Jimmy Carter. (You forget LBJ and Slick Willie? Bet you didn't.) Their measures would have been alien to him. There were a number of war measures passed during World War I in emulation of "modern" fighting nation-states like France and Great Britain, but to say that they arose from some deep wellspring of latent Jeffersonianism is frankly misplaced.
I don't think the point was that Wilson was a Jeffersonian in the sense of promoting smaller government, but that Wilson was a Southerner by birth and he got where he was with Southern votes. Saying Southerners were "Jeffersonians" and Wilson wasn't doesn't change that. In fact it underlines the point that Southerners weren't always against extentions of federal power -- especially when the extension was to their advantage and the government was under their control.
They knew what LBJ was about -- that's why they voted for Barry Goldwater, showing their final repudiation of FDR's New Deal and the place it gave blacks in the Democratic "new axis" of labor, blacks, socialists, and Northern Catholic and Jewish "Old Ethnics" who still voted reflexively Democratic.
You're mixing up your arguments here. Was it big government they hated or just people who weren't racially or ethnically like themselves? If you want to argue that they weren't voting on racial grounds you're not doing a good job. I could dispute with you, but you'd have to figure out just what your own position on this is first.
In your dreams perhaps. Karl Marx never set foot in the United States. But by all means let's see your paper trail.