"Popular Sovereignty"

A Sullivan reader finds historical irony that the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln, is today embracing the ideas of his opponent, Stephen Douglass, when it denies marriage equality to same-sex couples. Money quote from Lincoln himself:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor or degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Interesting aside in the Wiki entry for the Know-Nothing Party. In 2006, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol penned an editorial in which he blasted those in the Republican Party that embraced anti-immigrant populism without recognizing the danger of "turning the GOP into an anti-immigration, Know-Nothing party." Funny how Kristol, who later embraced a "know-nothing" like Sarah Palin in 2008, forgot to go back and read his own writing.