Fellow citizens: In the face of our current electoral crisis, revisit Abraham Lincoln’s famous “House Divided” speech. Breathe in the beautiful prose poetry of the first page, but also read the substance and argument of the next six pages. On June 16, 1858, from the Old State House in Springfield, Illinois, the then-former one-term congressman announced his candidacy for the United States Senate against the incumbent Democrat, Stephen A. Douglas, with whom he differed fundamentally on the future of slavery in America.

Let’s ask ourselves if we believe in the essential truth of Lincoln’s Bible-inspired claim: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

With urgency, we should be asking about the future of our own house divided. In this election, we are deciding whether the Union can endure half–MAGA neofascist and half–Democratic pluralistic under rule of law. Both Lincoln in 1858 and Justice Samuel Alito now recognize that in some struggles, only one side can prevail.

How shall we refashion Lincoln’s language for our own moment (we are hardly the first to do this)? “Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it,” Lincoln continued, “and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.” The language needs little change: Either the opponents of MAGA-fascism will arrest its further spread throughout our institutions and our political life, and put it on a course of steady if slow extinction, or its advocates will push it forward throughout the laws and soul of the nation. Are the coming months and years to be the end of the American experiment or its renewal?

In most of the rest of Lincoln’s speech he made an overt case for how his new Republican Party........

© New Republic