Oh for sure, I do agree a lot of progress has been made and it would be asinine to suggest we don't owe a lot to those who came before us. I merely meant to remind people how Abraham Lincoln felt about his own time, and perhaps draw some parallels to what we are seeing today.

In those days, just as much as we are today, Americans were proud of their experiment in democracy that was unique in world history, and proud especially of the ideals in which our republic was founded. But it was also true and widely recognized that we were not living up to those ideals entirely, indeed the rise of the Know-Nothings/American Party in many ways seemed to be a major rejection of the ideals of the American Revolution. Slavery went from being an important but minor part of the Southern colonial economy to being the defining characteristic, and increasingly exerting a tremendous political influence as well. To some, including Lincoln at the time (although this letter is obviously somewhat tongue in cheek vis a vis moving to Russia) the trajectory was not encouraging.

And to me part of the real genius of Abraham Lincoln, was that in looking at the issues of his day, he did not try to frame them (like perhaps Seward did with his Higher Law) as somehow superseding what the founding fathers spoke of already. Rather Lincoln instead looked at the words and language that the founding fathers used themselves in forming our republic, and tried to understand how they were applicable in his day. To him, "All men are created equal" was a clear and inescapable implication that slavery was wrong, and a large part of his speeches and writings draw on the language of the Declaration in particular because they seek to draw a moral argument there, rather than generating them newly from some personal arguments as many others did.

I think that this looking back is just as applicable then as it is now. Truly, we don't have slavery, you are right, but I think that there are other issues today which were not heavily on the minds of our founding fathers in the rough and tumble daily life of a frontier society, and yet which their words and language can still serve as a good guide for us in understanding today. So I will say it as plainly as I know how: if the ideals held behind the words "All men are created equal" ever stirred any true feeling in your heart, then you cannot honestly feel that the Republican leadership, base, or president are trying to live up to the ideals of the American republic, any more than the Southern politicians could honestly hear those same words and feel that they were living up to them.