We’re now reliving the Lincoln-Douglas debates

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 04, 2022

This Wall Street Journal editorial on the lessons to be drawn from the Kansas abortion referendum is balanced, reasonable, and mostly right. But my own thoughts on the issue take a different approach.

To illustrate, allow me to reproduce the penultimate paragraph of the Journal editorial, with just a few key alterations, which I highlight here in bold.

The Kansas result will inspire Democrats across the country to make the midterms a referendum on slavery. They may overreach with their own attempts to reinstate Dred Scott nationally. But Republicans will need a response on the issue that reassures voters like those in Kansas who have a more nuanced view of slavery than either side has been offering since Dred Scott took the issue out of the hands of voters in 1857.

Read the editorial that way, and I think you recognize that the Journal has adopted the approach to “popular sovereignty” once championed by Stephen Douglas, in his debates with Abraham Lincoln. Douglas won the election that year. He took a balanced, reasonable approach. He was a solid, honorable legislator. (“So are they all, all honorable men...”) But the face of Douglas is not carved into Mount Rushmore, and his memorial is not on the National Mall. America got that question right eventually—very painfully—and God willing America will get this question right eventually as well.