Today is the birthday of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), our 16th president, who successfully steered the country through the Civil War which his election had provoked. It is still a legal holiday of sorts in New York State, although nothing like the widespread observance it was when I was a lad, when we always had the day off from school. In those days, Lincoln's Birthday meant singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic and, for Republicans, the annual Lincoln Day Dinner. Republicans do still hold Lincoln Day Dinners, but the party that holds them is vastly different from what it was decades ago, let alone what it was when it was "the party of Lincoln."
Quickly replacing the Whigs as the opposition party to the post-Jacksonian Democratic party, the Republicans accomplished what no other U.S. third-party has ever done. After the Civil War it became the dominant national party, as the U.S. experienced an era of explosive economic growth and increasing industrial prosperity, now known as the "Gilded Age." The Republicans presided over the transcontinental railroad, the end of the "frontier," the expansion of "manifest destiny" and American Empire beyond the confines of the North American continent, but also an era of unprecedented immigration and the development of a class-conscious, apparently permanent proletariat. The first Republican era ended only when the Great Depression collapsed the social and economic structure bequeathed by decades of Republican rule.
The Republican failure led to the New Deal, a systematic effort by the newly empowered Democratic coalition to use the federal government to advance the interests of non-elite Americans, producing a period of unprecedented economic prosperity, widespread abundance, and greater equality than anything experienced since at least the Jacksonian era.
Under Eisenhower and Nixon, the Republicans appeared to have adapted somewhat successfully to the new social and economic order, but this was superseded by the Reaganite takeover of the Republican party that eventually went beyond even Reaganism. This was the historical process so well described by Geoffrey Kabaservice in his monumental Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party (Oxford U. Pr., 2012).
That is, of course, what parties tend to do in a two-party duopoly, in which coalitions must be formed before the election rahter than after as in parliamentary systems. Thus, bot the Republicans and the Democrats have transformed themselves beyond recognition over the course of their history.
The newly transformed Republican party described by Kabaservice already bore little, if any, resemblance to Lincoln's party of Abolitionists and strong Unionists. All that was left to happen, which admittedly no one was really expecting or predicting, was the Trump takeover of the party, which occurred - if not quite seamlessly then seemingly inexorably - between 2015 and 2024. And now we have a Republican party even more thoroughly president-centered than it was under Lincoln or TR or even Reagan.
"The party of Lincoln" is today as unlike Lincoln's Republican party as today's Democratic paty is unlike Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans.
As for Lincoln, One of the few enduring remnants of the once widespread cult of Lincoln is his image on the penny. President Trump picked this week to announce his plan to discontinue the penny. So much for "the party of Lincoln."