Against Donald Trump 'The Atlantic' Editors Endorse Hillary Clinton for President - The Atlantic

For the third time in its 159 year old history The Atlantic has endorsed a candidate for President of the United States of America.
The predecessors? Abraham Lincoln in 1860.  Lyndon Johnson in 1964.  Hillary Clinton in 2016.
What unites them is grave moral crisis: 1860 - impending secession and war.  1964 - Barry Goldwater's repudiation of Linccoln via his `libertarian' rejection of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ending legal racial segregation.
Now it is the embrace and failure to repudiate a vulgarian bully who incites white nationalism and a politics based on fear and resentment.  But the real moral challenge belongs to the voters who must plumb their consciences, abandon their partisan tribal loyalties and ideological near and dears to cast the only vote that will help stop Trump: for Hillary Clinton.  - gwc
'Against Donald Trump -The Atlantic's Editors Endorse Hillary Clinton for President - The Atlantic

In october of 1860, James Russell Lowell, the founding editor of The Atlantic, warned in these pages about the perishability of the great American democratic experiment if citizens (at the time, white, male citizens) were to cease taking seriously their franchise:

In a society like ours, where every man may transmute his private thought into history and destiny by dropping it into the ballot-box, a peculiar responsibility rests upon the individual … For, though during its term of office the government be practically as independent of the popular will as that of Russia, yet every fourth year the people are called upon to pronounce upon the conduct of their affairs. Theoretically, at least, to give democracy any standing-ground for an argument with despotism or oligarchy, a majority of the men composing it should be statesmen and thinkers.

One of the animating causes of this magazine at its founding, in 1857, was the abolition of slavery, and Lowell argued that the Republican Party, and the man who was its standard-bearer in 1860, represented the only reasonable pathway out of the existential crisis then facing the country. In his endorsement of Abraham Lincoln for president, Lowell wrote, on behalf of the magazine, “It is in a moral aversion to slavery as a great wrong that the chief strength of the Republican party lies.” He went on to declare that Abraham Lincoln “had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician.”...

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