Lincoln, in this quote, is saying that Douglas’s argument is incredibly shallow and without substance. A type of argument that would qualify as one “as thin as homeopathic soup” is one that argues expectations over results, or theory over reality. Such was the argument held by American Socialists like Frances Fox Piven in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Socialists expected that an omnipotent federal government would be capable of reducing poverty and increasing the well-being of society. What they failed to see, however, was that such all-powerful governments had always failed to achieve equality in the past; indeed, in Socialist Russia and Communist China, what began as crusades for equity and equality turned into governments in which the disparity between the rich and the poor was far, far greater. As Thomas Sowell points out, any effort to ascribe to a group of people any social status, inferiority, equality, or even superiority, must necessarily take away freedoms from that group of people. For the same reason that Piven’s argument is irrelevant, Douglas’s argument for popular sovereignty is too. Douglas expected that popular sovereignty would reflect the will of the people, but in reality, the process faced problems such as border ruffians and squatting voters. Even more importantly, the desire of the slaves to be free could not be reflected in this popular sovereignty system because slaves could not yet vote.
For further inquiry, Robert chose: