In his article “On race relations, Republicans can’t be the party of both Lincoln and Reagan“, Professor Shastri argues that these two presidents held opposite positions on the cultural and economic dimensions regarding race relations. First of all, he discusses how they differ in the way they intervened in the autonomy of the South. This ties to the topic of federalism (Lecture 6, slide 5) since Lincoln used the national abolishment of slavery as a medium to unite the Southern states that wanted to rule themselves instead of being part of the Union. He valued equality more than democracy (Lecture 2, slide 8) because obeying the racist majority in this case meant taking away the rights of the Black Americans (Lecture 2, slide 7). On the other…show more content… I personally found it disrespectful how enthusiastically he alleged his support for “states’ rights” (which spread racism) in Neshoba County when the KKK had killed civil rights’ workers there 16 years earlier. Southern racists often supported states’ rights so they could be free to have slaves since there would be no national standard to obey. Long after it was enacted, Reagan attempted to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed literacy tests and prerequisites to vote. Providing the states the liberty whether to give blacks the right to vote or not would be like mocking all the progress and sacrifices we made in the Civil War. Indeed, Abraham Lincoln risked everything to preserve the very foundations of this country and used slavery as his main tool to accomplish this seemingly impossible…show more content… While I agree that Lincoln’s fiscal liberalism opened up a new world of opportunity for blacks that used to be slaves, I do not see Reagan’s opposition to welfare programs as harmful to blacks, Even though helping blacks financially through welfare sounds reasonable considering the painfully long history of slavery that they went through, I think that reducing welfare was an incentive for blacks to be less dependent on the government and to improve themselves because after all, they now had access to the free market and everyone is on their own (equal opportunity is a value that unifies America so it should work both