A Love Ethic
Hi Georgia Feminists,
This was supposed to be a newsletter with a great debunk from Missy. It’s still that (keep reading), but last night’s news was enough that we wanted to pause for a minute and create a space for grief, love, and thought.
The Georgia Feminist was founded as a community of care and support. When we started selling t-shirts and blogging in college, we were trying to fill a void. (Fun news: UGA still doesn’t have a women’s center.) We’re a full-blown non-profit now, and that means we’ve been thinking very intentionally about what we do with our actions and our money. The one thing we keep coming back to — today more so than ever — is that no activism, no advocacy, is possible without a strong community where we support each other.
In her book All About Love, bell hooks describes this as a love ethic. What’s a love ethic? In hooks’ own words:
Awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination. Culturally, all spheres of American life — politics, religion, the workplace, domestic households, intimate relations — should and could have as their foundation a love ethic. The underlying values of a culture and its ethics shape and inform the way we speak and act. A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change.
And why are we thinking about this today? Again, let’s turn to hooks:
Sadly, many of our nation’s citizens are proud to live in one of the most democratic countries in the world even as they are afraid to stand up for individuals who live under repressive and fascist governments. They are afraid to act on what they believe because it would mean challenging the conservative status quo. Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture. No wonder then that we are a nation of people, the majority of whom, across race, class, and gender, claim to be religious, claim to believe in the divine power of love, and yet collectively remain unable to embrace a love ethic and allow it to guide behavior, especially if doing so would mean supporting radical change.
We’re reflecting on a love ethic today, and invite you to join us in doing so. This summer, we’re going to make sure that our programming and activities align with these ideas.
There are a lot of resources available on how to support those who need abortions right now. This very short list of resources and contextual articles is by no means exhaustive, but it’s what we’re reading right now:
Abortion funds in every state (@helmsinki)
Keep your abortion private and secure (Digital Defense Fund)
What could a post-Roe future look like? (The Atlantic)
Democrats predict leaked abortion opinion will elect Stacey Abrams and Sen. Warnock (AJC)
Feel free to reply to this email if you need to vent (we do check our email), if you have questions that you need help finding answers to, or if you just want someone to check in and say hi.
Hugs and love,
The GaFem Team
And now, a return to our regularly scheduled programming:
Myth One: Today’s Republicans are the Party of Lincoln
Hi everyone! Let’s tackle the myth that the Republican Party which put Abraham Lincoln on a presidential ticket is somehow the same as today’s Republican Party. It’s something I’ve seen on the internet a lot, often by today’s Republicans to combat accusations of racism, or to tie today’s Democrats to those in the nineteenth century (trust me, you do not want to be associated with Southern Democrats from 1880).
The first way to bust this myth is the most obvious, and therefore rather dull. It is laughable to draw a straight line from 1860 to 2022 and assume that there has been no change in political party makeup. The only thing the parties of the past and present have in common are their party names (plus, ten years before 1860, the Republicans didn’t even exist!).
It might be more helpful to examine political parties in history and ask which is more liberal, and which more conservative. But even then, it’s not so simple. When Republican Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, after Democrat president Lyndon B. Johnson’s progressive Great Society programs, there were still many liberals (and feminists!) in the Republican party. The idea that Republicans only take conservative stances and the Democrats take liberal ones, is not something we saw in the 1960s, and it’s certainly not something we saw in the 1860s.
“Okay, but Missy, if you had to pick a party today that was most similar to the Republicans in the 1860s…” Fine, fine. But don’t take my historian card away. The Republicans of the 1860s and 1870s definitely have more in common with today’s Democrats. Here’s why:
Back in the day, “radical” Republicans shepherded in a huge expansion of the federal government’s power. Policy-wise, this flies in the face of modern conservatives’ belief in “small government,” which they hold at least in theory. During the Civil War, the Republican Congress instituted high tariffs, a new income tax, higher taxes on businesses, federal investment in nationwide railroad development, and the Homestead Act of 1862.
The Homestead Act alone is a huge piece of government financing: adult citizens and heads of household could receive 160 acres of government land for free, provided that they work the land and make positive changes in five years’ time. This act was responsible for the settlement of four million Americans in 30 western states, including formerly enslaved Black citizens. This huge piece of federal programming is definitely not something we would see from today’s Republicans, who prefer most financial transactions to take place in the private sector. (A note: before it became federal land, this land was taken from Indigenous Americans either through coercive treaties, violence, or outright theft.)
At a time of anti-Irish, Chinese, Italian, Jewish, and Slavic sentiment, the 1864 Republicans were pro-immigrant.
The Republican platform for the 1864 election moved their immigration stance from number 14 to number 8. It reads: “Resolved, That foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to this nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.”
Southern Democrats called Lincoln a tyrant and accused the Northerners (most of whom would vote for Lincoln) of federal overreach. Echoing today’s Republican fears of a “big government,” southern Democrats pointed to Lincoln’s refusal to let slavery expand to new territories and states as an example of an infringement on their rights as Americans. They thought Republicans were refusing the South’s constitutional right to property (aka slaves), oppressing enslavers so much that they chose to secede. The Confederacy seceded to preserve its way of life.
Democrats also pointed to the evils of feminism, as many women’s rights advocates were also abolitionists. Southerners believed that these “manlike” women were a sign that Republicans wanted to turn the world upside down.
Through Reconstruction-era (1865-1877) legislation, the Republicans in Congress enabled perhaps the largest expansion of democracy in U.S. history.
Today, many conservatives are “constructionists,” who believe the Constitution should be interpreted only as it was intended in 1776 – they do not view it as an organic and elastic document. Read this way, the Constitution grants hardly any protections to marginalized groups.
Meanwhile, the Republicans of Lincoln’s party (after his assassination, sure, but still his party), added three whole amendments to the Constitution in order to expand civil and voting rights to African Americans. And then they sent in the U.S. military when the white southern Democrats, hoping to maintain something as close to slavery as possible, refused to comply. We wouldn’t see this kind of federal protection and enforcement of civil rights again until the 1950s and 1960s, under Democratic presidents.
White Democrats in the South flipped to Republican in the middle of the 1900s. Those Republicans formed the backbone of the conservative party we have today.
When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he said “We have lost the South for a generation.” The “we” in this statement was the Democratic Party, and LBJ was right.
After Reconstruction ended and Black Americans were prevented from voting and treated like second-class citizens under Jim Crow laws, the South voted Democrat so consistently that it was called “the Solid South.” This happened because white southerners, under the banner of “states’ rights,” did their best to stop integration. They also resented the large sums of money going to what LBJ called the “War on Poverty,” seeing this as wasteful and its recipients unworthy.
As a result, we saw white southern Democrats slowly yet surely becoming conservative Republicans by the 1980s, 1990s, and aughts. Not always explicitly in response to desegregation, but that’s what got the ball rolling. The “Southern Manifesto” of 1956, written by Southern Democrats and segregationists Strom Thurmond and Richard Russell (Georgia’s own!) in opposition to Brown v. Board of Education shows us that the Democratic Party was about to change dramatically.
Want more on the party shift? Check out this thread from historian Kevin Kruse.
I hope the myth that today’s Republicans are the “Party of Lincoln” has been sufficiently busted!
Tl;dr: The Republican Party of the 1860s was big on federal expansion, taxes, and programs. It was pro-immigrant and wanted to expand rights and freedoms to Black Americans, so much so that one faction of the party was literally called Radical. It’s especially difficult to call the Republicans of today the Party of Lincoln because there was such a giant party shift that happened in the middle of the 1900s.
If you have a history-related question for Missy, please email thegeorgiafeminist@gmail.com.
Missy DeVelvis is a historian of the U.S. South with a particular interest in the Civil War Era and women and gender studies. You can learn more about her work here.
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