If one looks at American history, it is clear to anyone who is knowledgeable and objective that the two greatest Republican Presidents are Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.
Lincoln usually ranks as our greatest President, and TR is often ranked as high as 4th on the list, depending on the specific poll of experts and scholars.
Both Presidents, of course, have faults and shortcomings, as all Presidents and all people do, but to deny their greatness is promoting ignorance and falsehoods.
Both have been analyzed and interpreted by massive numbers of scholars and writers of non fiction, and they have been depicted in all kinds of ways.
But recently, it has become fashionable for right wing propagandists to push a view not generally promoted in the past–that Lincoln and TR are in many ways “Marxists”.
It is pointed out that there is some correspondence and contact between Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx, the author of “The Communist Manifesto” and “Das Kapital”, and the argument is made that Lincoln was a “Marxist” who promoted his ideals, a way to criticize Lincoln’s promotion of racial advancements and labor progress.
Theodore Roosevelt is said to have “Marxist” tendencies in his promotion of the “New Nationalism” platform in his third party movement, the Progressive Party, in the Presidential Election of 1912, including government intervention in the economy for workers and farmers, and the regulation of capitalism through government lawsuits against monopolies, plus the acceptance of the basic concept of “social justice”!
IF what Lincoln and TR advocated is “Marxist”, then we need to be “Marxist”, as just because Karl Marx advocated for workers and the overthrow of capitalism, does not mean that everything he believed in and promoted is automatically evil and vile.
It is evil and vile to be against racial equality, labor rights, social justice, and regulation of capitalism in the public interest.
These views of Lincoln and TR are what make them great Americans, as well as great Presidents of the United States!
Conservative and right wing attacks on Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Barack Obama, among other Presidents, is par for the course, because they are Democrats, but attacking the best Republican Presidents is a new tack that must be fought with vigor!