The Road to Oblivion

Thomas Frank

There have been an estimated sixteen thousand books written about Abraham Lincoln. Like the lives of the wealthy and the secrets of self-improvement, a fascination with the Great Emancipator seems to be an unchanging feature of American literary taste. Few of these volumes, however, have had the resilience of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. In 2005, when the book first appeared, it was the subject of “vast critical acclaim” and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for some twenty-seven weeks, according to the press release that accompanied my copy. Three years later, a junior senator from Illinois named Barack Obama anointed Team of Rivals one of his favorite books, once again pushing it into the glare of public adulation. When Steven Spielberg transformed it into his movie Lincoln in 2012, the book climbed the charts for a third time.

Despite having triggered these sequential booms in Lincolniana, Team of Rivals is profoundly uninspiring. [..]

One cavil you might raise is that this isn’t much of a revelation, since big wars are generally fought by national-unity governments. Nor was the “team of rivals” concept an innovation of the early 1860s, though Goodwin assures us it was. [..]

It was, in other words, an unremarkable arrangement, documented here in a largely unremarkable book, all of it together about as startling as a Hallmark card. How did such a commonplace slice of history come to define the political imagination of our time?

To begin with, the book perfectly captures the faiths of our white-collar priesthood. The appeal of Team of Rivals to this corporate demographic is built into its very architecture: after Goodwin relates some familiar Civil War anecdote, she invariably ties it to Lincoln’s style of personnel management—this supposedly being the true manifestation of his genius. And to every vexing human-relations question, Team of Rivals gives a pat answer. How, for example, does one ride herd on a group of difficult, contentious, even creative people? Goodwin’s Lincoln offers the following counsel: Listen more and blame less. Also: Be sure to relax now and then. Also: Don’t hold grudges.

[Then ..] during the 2008 election season [..] Team of Rivals was endorsed by Barack Obama. That’s when it occurred to pundit after pundit that the book was about something that should properly warm the heart of every American: bipartisanship [..]

[Steven Spielberg's] movie Lincoln focuses very narrowly on a short segment of [based on the previous book above] book in which the president rams the Thirteenth Amendment—the one abolishing slavery—through the House of Representatives. It’s 1865, and Lincoln has just won reelection. Still, he doesn’t want to wait for a new Congress to be seated: the amendment must be passed immediately. This means winning a two-thirds majority in a lame-duck legislative body that is still filled with his opponents, and the bulk of the movie is a close study of the lobbying and persuading and self-censoring to which Lincoln and his team must descend in order to, well, free the slaves. These are the lessons for our time that Spielberg has plucked from Goodwin’s Lincoln saga.

And upon beholding the film, the upholders of the Washington consensus saw the clouds part and the sun shine through. Yet another commonplace had been magnificently reaffirmed—and this time it was the emptiest D.C. cliché of all. “It’s compromise,” is how Goodwin summarized the film’s message for an interviewer. And the commentariat chimed in unison: Yes! We have learned from this movie, they sang, that politicians must Make Deals. That one must Give Something to Get Something.

The film was a study in the “nobility of politics,” declared David Brooks in the New York Times; it teaches that elected officials can do great things, but only if they “are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and be slippery and hypocritical.”

Michael Gerson of the Washington Post suggested that members of Congress be made to watch the thing in order to acquire “a greater appreciation for flexibility and compromise.” According to Al Hunt of Bloomberg News, the film shows our greatest president “doing what politicians are supposed to do, and today too often avoid: compromising, calculating, horse trading, dealing and preventing the perfect from becoming the enemy of a good objective.” [..]

The Civil War is a peculiar place to set such a message. After all, it was compromise that permitted the South’s slave empire to grow so large—the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and so on—and Abraham Lincoln first rose to prominence as a highly moralistic opponent of the last of these...

The movie actually goes well beyond celebrating compromise: it also justifies corruption. Lincoln and his men, as they are depicted here, do not merely buttonhole and persuade and cajole. They buy votes outright with promises of patronage jobs and (it is strongly suggested) cash bribes. The noblest law imaginable is put over by the most degraded means. As Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Radical Republicans in the House of Representatives, says after the amendment is finally approved: “The greatest measure of the nineteenth century was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.”

The movie is fairly hard on crusading reformers like Thaddeus Stevens. The great lesson we are meant to take from his career is that idealists must learn to lie and to keep their mouths shut at critical moments if they wish to be effective. Lobbyists, on the other hand, are a class of people the movie takes pains to rehabilitate. Spielberg gives us a raffish trio of such men, hired for the occasion by William Seward, and they get the legislative job done by throwing money around, buying off loose votes—the usual. They huddle with Lincoln himself to talk strategy, and in a climactic scene, Spielberg shows us how a worldly lobbyist can git-r-done while a public servant dithers about legalisms. Happy banjo-and-fiddle music starts up whenever the lobbyists are on-screen—drinking, playing cards, dangling lucrative job offers—because, after all, who doesn’t love a boodle-bundling gang of scamps?

Tony Kushner, the celebrated playwright who wrote the script for Lincoln, told NPR that the project had allowed him “to look at the Obama years through a Lincoln lens.” As in 1865, he said, there is enormous potential now for “rebuilding a real progressive democracy in this country.” There are “obstacles” to this project, however. And among the most notable ones, in Kushner’s view, are those damn liberals—or, more specifically, “an impatience on the part of very good, very progressive people with the kind of compromising that you were just mentioning, the kind of horse trading that is necessary.”

Allow me to do some historicizing of my own. Since about the middle of the Bush years, we have been living through a broad revival of reform sentiments. What ignited this revival, and what has kept it going since then, is a disgust with precisely the sort of workaday Washington horse trading that the makers of this ​movie have chosen to celebrate. Think of all the chapters in this saga of outrage: the soft-money campaign donations; the selling of earmarks; the Koch brothers and their galaxy of Washington pressure groups; the Citizens United decision; the power of money over the state.

I myself think it’s healthy that public fury over this stuff has simmered on into the present; there’s still plenty to be furious about. The lobbyists may be Democrats or Republicans, but they are pulling the wires for the same interests as always. Many of the people who engineered the deregulation of Wall Street (or their protégés) are still hanging around the halls of power. And the one great triumph of the Obama administration, health care reform, was flawed from the beginning, thanks to a heavy thumb on the scales placed by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

Maybe complaining about all this is yet another hangup of the contemporary Thaddeus Stevens set, who can’t see that tremendous victories await if they’d just lighten up about reform and money-in-politics. But maybe—just maybe—reform is itself the great progressive cause. Maybe fixing the system must come first, as a certain senator from Illinois once seemed to believe, and everything else will follow from that.

Instead we have a movie that glorifies Abraham Lincoln as a great compromiser, focusing on the one episode where a dash of corruption worked wonders and everyone lucked out and the best measure in American history was thereby enacted. While watching it, though, I couldn’t help but think of all the episodes of ordinary Washington venality that this movie effectively rationalizes—like the doings of the Grant administration, for example, in which several of the same characters who figure in ​Lincoln played a role in one of the most corrupt eras in American history. Or just imagine a movie about the lobbyists who pushed banking deregulation through in the centrism-worshipping Clinton years. All the magic elements were there: consensus; compromise; idealists in surrender; lovable lobbyists dangling pleasures of the flesh before bureaucrats. Ninety minutes glorifying the merry japes of those lovable corruptionists—that’s a task for a real auteur.