The Party of Human Equality

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 as a revolutionary moral force against the greatest dehumanization in American history: chattel slavery. While the Democratic Party of that era defended slavery as a “positive good” and a cornerstone of states’ rights, the new Republican Party declared that treating human beings as property based on the group category of race was morally indefensible.

Abraham Lincoln, its greatest leader, insisted that America could not endure permanently half-slave and half-free. His election in 1860 and the Republican-led 13th Amendment ended the legal ownership of human beings on the basis of group identity. It was the most profound victory for human equality in our nation’s history.

Today, America faces a new form of group-based dehumanization—only the categories have changed. Tribalism, identity politics, and institutional DEI frameworks now divide citizens into fixed, hierarchical groups defined by race, gender, sexuality, or other immutable traits. People are routinely judged, rewarded, punished, stereotyped, or silenced not for their individual choices, character, or merit, but for the group to which bureaucrats or activists assign them.

This new tribalism teaches that certain groups are inherently oppressed and others inherently oppressive, that guilt or virtue is inherited through ancestry or appearance, and that equal treatment under the law must give way to “equity” outcomes enforced by group quotas.

This is the moral and intellectual successor to the very logic Lincoln and the early Republicans rose up to destroy: the belief that human worth can be determined by membership in a group rather than the content of one’s individual soul.

Ethical Individualism, developed by Russ McAlmond and advanced through Oregon’s Center for Human Equality, is the revolutionary 21st-century response—and the direct philosophical heir to Lincoln’s cause. It asserts a simple yet explosive principle: every single human being must be approached, understood, and judged as a unique individual, not as a representative of a group.

No presumptions of guilt or innocence, no assigned privileges or disabilities, no forced outcomes based on demographics. Ethical Individualism demands that we extend to every person the presumption of equal moral dignity and individual agency—the same presumption Republicans once demanded for enslaved Black Americans when the rest of society saw only a racial category.

In an age where government agencies, corporations, universities, and even K-12 schools sort citizens by identity markers and mete out treatment accordingly, Ethical Individualism is nothing less than counter-revolutionary. It rejects the entire apparatus of collective blame and collective credit.

It dismantles the soft bigotry of group expectations that says certain demographics “can’t” succeed without special preferences or “must” be restrained because of historical sins they never committed. It insists that the only way to heal division is to stop dividing—to see each neighbor, coworker, and citizen first and foremost as an unrepeatable individual with his or her own story, dreams, responsibilities, and worth.

This is why the Republican Party—the party that once stared down a slaveholding aristocracy and declared “No more judging humans by their group”—has a moral obligation to embrace and champion Ethical Individualism today. Anything less betrays the revolution Lincoln led.

Russ McAlmond, founder of the Center for Human Equality and a candidate for U.S. Senate in Oregon, is carrying forward Lincoln’s torch into our time.

By endorsing Ethical Individualism as its guiding human-relational philosophy, the Republican Party can once again become the unequivocal party of human freedom and genuine equality: treating every American as an individual, not as a data point in someone else’s tribal ledger.

The choice is clear. America can continue down the path of ever-finer group balkanization, where human beings are reduced to avatars of their demographic categories, or the Party of Lincoln can lead the nation back to the radical, revolutionary idea that made us great in the first place: every single person matters as an individual, and no one’s dignity may be sacrificed on the altar of group identity.

Ethical Individualism is that idea reborn for the 21st century—and the Republican Party must claim it.