Whatever else one might say about Lincoln (and I could say a great deal), I think this is mistaken.  You can cheer on Lincoln until your voice gives out, I suppose, but you will have a devil of a time inventing the Garibaldi from Springfield as a font of American conservative thought.  Their enemies called them the Red Republicans for a reason.  Reihan, continuing to blog up a storm while Ross is away, helps explain the thinking that would draw meliorist/reform conservatives towards Lincoln as a model. 

A modern conservative appropriation of Lincoln seems mistaken to me since, obviously, I think Lincoln’s politics are the antithesis of the decentralist, distributist-cum-populist tradition that properly makes up what best approximates a native conservative tradition in America.  If judged according to Burkean hostility to Jacobinism and “armed doctrines” generally, Lincoln would have to be classified as an enemy of the permanent things. 

The “native” American tradition to which I refer is the Country tradition, which, like everything almost everything in early republican America, has its origins in Britain.  This tradition even had some latter-day representatives inside the Party of Lincoln, such as La Follette, and post-New Deal and post-WWII decentralists began to look to the GOP as an alternative, but it has never been their natural home and has never really been receptive to their message for very long.  If modern conservatives wish to belong to the Country tradition, Lincoln is necessarily out of the picture, and if they wish to embrace Lincoln they pretty much have to turn their back on virtually the entirety of that tradition.  Nationalism, centralism and government working on behalf of corporate and industrial interests (tendentiously dubbed by its early advocates as “the American system”) are all aspects of “Lincolnianism” that are directly opposed to the Country tradition.  In the American context, what would that tradition include?  I think it would include love of place and tradition, constitutional and federal republicanism, support for regional diversity, conserving local communities, keeping a broad distribution of property as a safeguard against abuse of power, and preventing the concentration of power and money in a few hands.  Lincoln represents the tendency to uproot, level or destroy pretty much everything that a great many traditional conservatives believe that we should be conserving.