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  "path": "/articles/whats-happened-to-the-party-of-lincoln",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-06T12:00:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.mcsweeneys.net",
  "textContent": "My God. What has happened to the Republican Party? The Party of Lincoln, for goodness’ sake!\n\nNothing about them resembles the Party of Lincoln. Like, for instance, they have a signature hat, but it’s not a stovepipe one.\n\nThey don’t wear blankets over their shoulders and laps indoors to protect against the chill as they strategize about the Civil War in 1864. They just turn up the thermostat while fantasizing about a Civil War in 2026.\n\nThey don’t see plays anymore. And if they do, they get photographed doing hand stuff during them. Lincoln never did hand stuff. He was too busy bearing the heavy mantle of statehood to do hand stuff. And if he did do hand stuff at any plays, he wouldn’t get photographed. Photographs took longer than hand stuff back then.\n\nThey don’t project from their diaphragm with a high, powerful voice that carries their poetic oratory over the heads of the crowd assembled at Gettysburg. They bark unhealthily from the throat like someone who doesn’t understand how a speakerphone works.\n\nThey don’t likely have undiagnosed Marfan syndrome, and in fact, they’re not tall at all. Physically or spiritually.\n\nTheir wives aren’t redecorating the White House to make it more elegant. Instead, they’re doing MMA on the lawn. Lincoln wasn’t into MMA; he was too skinny to be an effective grappler.\n\nThey aren’t on the penny. They actually got rid of the penny altogether, leaving us with nothing to give people for their thoughts.\n\nThey don’t tell folksy, long-winded stories to make a wise point to their assembled Cabinet members. They give weird evasive answers to reporters that take a hard left turn into a new genre of personal insult that isn’t folksy at all.\n\nThey aren’t mourning their sons by cradling their bodies in the tombs they were interred in after perishing from scarlet fever. They seem to be really weird about their sons in every possible direction, and in fact, it doesn’t seem like they’ve ever hugged them once.\n\nOh, also decorum or whatever. They don’t have it.\n\nNow, there is a lot of debate surrounding their sexuality, I’ll give you that. That is one thing they have in common with the party of Lincoln. Or rather, with some of the higher-ups in the party of Lincoln.\n\nBut they don’t have a memorial statue of a big version of themselves sitting in an equally big chair. However, that is mostly because they simply do not die.\n\nNow that I think about it, there is one other way they aren’t like Lincoln. But I’ll keep that to myself.",
  "title": "What’s Happened to the Party of Lincoln?"
}