Some may dispute my earlier characterization of Abraham Lincoln as a third-party candidate in the 1860 election by claiming that the Republican Party was already a major party by that time, and had as early as 1858 achieved majority support in most Northern states.

Perhaps to better understand my claim about Lincoln and the Republican Party, it is instructive to look back four years to the election of 1856, where the Republicans still had not controlled majorities in every northern state. This election was also outside the confines of the conventional two-party system.

In 1856, the Democratic Party was the major party and was still largely unified. James Buchanan ran on the Democratic ticket and won. But he ran against two “third parties,” the Republicans and the Know Nothings. The Republicans had been formed two years earlier, and this was the first presidential election involving their party. Their candidate, John C. Fremont, won 33.1 percent of the popular vote and carried 11 states. The nativist, anti-immigration Know Nothing Party was formed at about the same time as the Republican Party (circa 1854) and largely died out after the defeat of its candidate, Millard Fillmore, in the 1856 election. The Know Nothing Party got about 21.6 percent of the popular vote and is universally recognized as a third party – even though its candidate was a former President of the United States.

If the Know Nothings constituted a third party, then the Republican Party in 1856 was most certainly a third party as well. It was just as new, and its candidate was not even a former President (unlike Fillmore), and, moreover, he was the first candidate to openly proclaim anti-slavery views. For a politician to run for the presidency under an anti-slavery platform was surely radical at the time. Admittedly, abolitionist sentiment was growing, and Fremont was able to persuade many people of the correctness of this sentiment – an accomplishment on which Lincoln later capitalized.

The Republicans’ effectiveness in gaining large majorities in the North does not disqualify them from being a third party. Rather, it is testimony to how successful some third parties can be at convincing people to support them within a short period of time. The Republican Party rose at an astounding pace from insignificance to political dominance during the Civil War era.

Here is what Wikipedia has to say about third parties as pertains to the 1860 election. (This page also contains a comprehensive list detailing the performance of third-party candidates in American elections since 1832.)

”By 1860 the two-party system had fallen apart. The election featured four candidates, including the breakaway Southern Democratic Party, which nominated Vice President John C. Breckenridge as its candidate, and the Constitutional Union Party, which nominated John Bell. Republican Abraham Lincoln did not appear on the ballot in any of the 11 states that seceded after the election to form the Confederacy. Breckenridge, the southern pro-slavery candidate, carried most of the slave states, but had little support in the North outside of Pennsylvania. Bell and the Constitutional Union party, neutral on the slavery issue, drew most of their support from the southern former Whigs that had voted for Fillmore four years before. Stephen Douglas, the northern Democratic candidate, had the broadest support geographically but lost most of the Democratic votes in the South to Breckenridge.”

“Lincoln won the election with 39.8% of the overall popular vote but 180 electoral votes due to his votes being concentrated in the northern free states. Douglas finished second in the popular vote with 29.5%, but, with his votes scattered all over the country, carried only Missouri and New Jersey and won 12 electoral votes. Breckenridge, the quasi-”third party” candidate of southern Democrats, got 18.2% but won 72 electoral votes due to most of his votes being concentrated in the South. Bell, a true “third party” candidate, finished last in the popular vote with 12.6% but carried Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee to win 39 electoral votes, due to the Democratic vote in those states being split between Douglas and Breckenridge.”

“After this election, the two-party system coalesced around the Democratic and Republican parties.”

In a way, every candidate in the 1860 election was a “third-party” candidate, simply because both of the previously dominant two parties (the Whigs and the Democrats) had splintered, and the two-party system simply broke down. Every one of the candidates was severely handicapped by some disadvantage in the election, but Lincoln was in the best position to overcome his handicaps because of the activism of the Republican party during and since the election of 1856 and the effectiveness of this activism in convincing millions of people in the Northern states to adopt anti-slavery views.

So while the facts of the 1860 election are generally well-established, I can understand that there may exist differences of interpretation regarding who was or was not a third-party candidate then. However, there does exist considerable support for my position.

An article on PBS’s Online NewsHour states the following: “American voters have not elected a third party president since Abraham Lincoln when the then-minority Republican Party beat the Whigs and the Democrats in 1860 on the anti-slavery platform.“

Moreover, Thom Holmes of the Constitution Party of Oklahoma has a similar account: “Many people aren’t aware that the Republican party began as a new party in 1856 and only 4 years later, Abraham Lincoln was elected president in a 4 way race. Back in 1860 the two major parties of the day were the Whigs and the Democrats. Lincoln received less than 40% of the popular vote and his name did not even appear on the ballot in 9 states, including Texas.” (I think Holmes attributes the first major election in which the Republicans participated as the time of the Republican Party’s true beginning – a difference of interpretation rather than an inaccuracy.)

The reason I bring up these two sources is that they come from representatives of organizations with extremely divergent views – PBS and the Constitution Party – and yet seem to agree on this evaluation of the Lincoln’s status as a third-party candidate.

Sincerely,

Gennady Stolyarov II

Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator: http://rationalargumentator.com

Writer, Associated Content: http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/46796/g_stolyarov_ii.html

Author, Implied Consent, A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life: http://rationalargumentator.com/impliedconsent.html

Author, A Rational Cosmology: http://rationalargumentator.com/rc.html

Author, The Best Self-Help is Free: http://rationalargumentator.com/selfhelpfree.html                           

Author, The Progress of Liberty Blog: http://progressofliberty.today.com/   

Some argue that the primary reason for the Soviet Union’s demise was that the Reagan administration’s policies brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy. But this view overstates the role of American policy and understates the role that the spread of information from and about the West played in the USSR’s demise.

Indeed, the Soviet Union had been bankrupt in the conventional sense since its very founding. As a matter of fact, Lenin’s initial policy of “War Communism” from 1917 to 1922 completely demolished the capital stock of the Soviet Union and reduced the people to a hand-and-mouth existence. Thereafter, whatever increases in prosperity the Soviet Union experienced were intermittent (say, during the “New Economic Policy” of the 1920s or Khrushchev’s relaxation of repression during the 1950s and 1960s) and in large part made possible by investments from the West – which were subsequently nationalized by the Soviet government.

It is possible for a country to exist on the verge of starvation for generations without the people realizing what the root of the problem is and correcting that problem. Without having an idea of what freedom was or what life in a free society was like, most of the Soviet people did not even believe that an alternative to their way of life was possible – and state propaganda convinced them that life in the West was even worse.

So it was indeed information that brought down the USSR – by giving the people an improved understanding to the alternative to Soviet life.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator: http://rationalargumentator.com

Writer, Associated Content: http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/46796/g_stolyarov_ii.html

Author, Implied Consent, A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life: http://rationalargumentator.com/impliedconsent.html

Author, A Rational Cosmology: http://rationalargumentator.com/rc.html

Author, The Best Self-Help is Free: http://rationalargumentator.com/selfhelpfree.html                           

Author, The Progress of Liberty Blog: http://progressofliberty.today.com/   

I do not mean to minimize the tragedy experienced by over 3000 innocent victims who perished during the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as the continued impact that horrendous calamity has made on the lives of the victims’ families. They deserve our sympathy, and this day will justifiably remain a day of mourning for many of them.

But the same holds for all the great massacres, genocides, and slaughterfests of history. Just as tragic as the events of September 11, 2001, were the Nazi Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, the killing fields of the World Wars, the genocides of Mao Tse-Tung, Pol Pot, Slobodan Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein, and other events going at least as far back as Saul’s indiscriminate slaughter of the Amalekites over 3000 years ago. These tragedies need to be remembered, and their lessons need to be learned so that they might not be repeated. September 11^th is now one more of these historic tragedies – important indeed, but no more so than any of the others on that long, bloody list.

The occurrence of this tragedy does not mean that the way we lead our lives on an everyday basis needs to change. If we let September 11^th irrevocably alter the way Americans lead their lives – putting them in perpetual fear of the next attack, rendering them willing to trample over their sacred and inalienable liberties for the sake of an imagined “security” – then the terrorists will have won without blowing up another bomb. They will have gotten us to subjugate ourselves to external controls and renounce America’s heritage of freedom, individualism, and the presumption of innocence.

While remembering September 11^th, we have an imperative to enable American cultural attitudes to recover from this event. The obsession with security needs to stop, and liberty needs once again to become our primary aim, for without liberty, no security is possible.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator: http://rationalargumentator.com

Writer, Associated Content: http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/46796/g_stolyarov_ii.html

Author, Implied Consent, A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life: http://rationalargumentator.com/impliedconsent.html

Author, A Rational Cosmology: http://rationalargumentator.com/rc.html

Author, The Best Self-Help is Free: http://rationalargumentator.com/selfhelpfree.html                     

Author, The Progress of Liberty Blog: http://progressofliberty.today.com/

The Catholic Church, especially in the past 40 years, has become increasingly tolerant, civilized, and respectable – even to the point of issuing a pardon for Galileo’s “transgressions” in 1992 – about 359 years too late, but better than never at all.

Yet, while Catholics should be proud of many, though not all, of the directions their Church has taken recently, they should be ashamed of its activities during the majority of its history. Until the 1960s, the Church has functioned as an active foe of rational ideas and attempted to suppress the free exploration of ideas. Some of the most talented writers of all time have been put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Index of Prohibited Books, which was only discontinued in 1966.

Among the writers proscribed on the Index are John Locke, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Galileo, Jonathan Swift, John Stuart Mill, Victor Hugo, and Giordano Bruno (whom the Church also burned at the stake, by the way). You can see a vast list of prohibited writers by following the link above.

Interestingly enough, Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler are not on the list, even though both were alive while the list was still being published.

Sincerely,
Gennady Stolyarov II

Editor-in-Chief, The Rational Argumentator: http://rationalargumentator.com

Writer, Associated Content: http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/46796/g_stolyarov_ii.html

Author, Implied Consent, A Play on the Sanctity of Human Life: http://rationalargumentator.com/impliedconsent.html

Author, A Rational Cosmology: http://rationalargumentator.com/rc.html

Author, The Best Self-Help is Free: http://rationalargumentator.com/selfhelpfree.html                           

Author, The Progress of Liberty Blog: http://progressofliberty.today.com/   

The Rational Argumentator

A Journal for Western Man

Principal Index *** Contributors *** Yahoo! Group

The Genesis of Right and Left

Kyrel Zantonavitch

Issue CLXVII - July 17, 2008

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The permanent fight between existence and non-existence, life and death, pleasure and pain, flourishing and suffering, prosperity and poverty, civilization and barbarism, happiness and misery, good and evil, truth and falsity, etc. takes many forms. But for the past 2600 years — ever since rationality was discovered and invented — the world has principally been engaged in an unending battle of reasonism versus skepticism and dogmatism.

This ferocious war can be further broken down into two parts. The first is “confidentism” and “certaintyism” vs. skeptic-based relativism and subjectivism — both of which ultimately lead to nihilism. The second part is thinking and logic vs. dogma-based feeling and faith — both of which ultimately lead to nihilism.

The sophisticated thought-system and advanced culture of reasonism began with the first truly rational man. It began with the creators of philosophy and science, namely Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Rational thought and Western liberal culture had an early climax with Aristotle, Epicurus, and Zeno the Stoic.

The primitive belief-system and retrograde culture of skepticism and dogmatism began with the first truly irrational man. It began with the largely senseless and contradictory thinkers Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Gorgias, and Zeno the Paradoxist. Irrational, illiberal intellectualism had an early climax with Plato, Arcesilaus, and Carneades.

The fundamental culture, life-style, and philosophy of reasonism eventually led to the thriving, dynamic, awe-inspiring nations of Athens, the Roman Republic, Western Europe, and America. The fundamental culture, life-style, and pseudo-philosophy of skepticism eventually led to the leftist, communist, belligerent, military dictatorships of Sparta, the late Roman Empire, the Soviet Union, and red China. The fundamental culture, life-style, and pseudo-philosophy of dogmatism eventually led to the rightist, fascist, belligerent, theistic dictatorships of the Dark Ages, the absolutists, the Nazis, and the jihadis.

Reasonist arguments, speculations, and claims were almost always presented calmly, dispassionately, systematically, and rigorously. But skepticism and dogmatism engendered a kind of mental and psychological tyranny which made the skeptics and dogmatists rather hate abstract truth and science, as well as any neutral, objective, fair-minded presentation of evidence, facts, and proof. The presentation of their arguments, speculations, and claims generally involved a kind of hysterical passion and out-of-control fanaticism.

To this day both irrational belief-systems and illiberal cultures wantonly and maniacally attack the reason-based thought-systems of Western civilization and Western liberalism. A left-wing, progressive-style illiberalism ineluctably leads to a post-modernist, socialist slavery — including mental and psychological tyranny. A right-wing, conservative-style illiberalism ineluctably leads to a pre-modernist, theocratic slavery — including mental and psychological tyranny.

Leftism today is exemplified by Stalin and Mao. Rightism is exemplified by Hitler and Khomeini. “Upwingism,” in contrast, is exemplified by Locke and Smith, if not Voltaire and Jefferson.

A personal, social, political, philosophical, and cultural paradise would be derived from a fully-realized, completely civilized world of pure reasonism which oozes confidence in, and certainty about, thinking, logic, rationality, science — and sensible, solid, sound philosophy. It would be devoid of left and right, of collectivism and god. This utopia would be based upon the entirely reasonist and idealist world of pure liberalism.

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Kyrel Zantonavitch is the founder of The Liberal Institute  (http://www.liberalinstitute.com/) and a writer for Rebirth of Reason (http://www.rebirthofreason.com). He can be contacted at zantonavitch@yahoo.com.

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This TRA feature has been edited in accordance with TRA’s Statement of Policy.

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