Tuesday, August 17, 2021

A Century and Half of Apartheid Policies: From Its 1828 Foundation, the Democrat Party Has Never Shed Its Racist Past


Once again, Democrats, liberals, and other
drama queens are going berserk as they proclaim how "racist" a particular Republican is, or all Republicans are. That is rich, quips American Thinker's Deborah Bucknam (thanks to Instapundit), given that

the Democrat party is the oldest and most enduring racist political party in history, and its racism continues to this day.  Here are the facts:

The Democrat Party was founded in 1828. Its first national party platform, ratified during the 1840 Presidential election, stated: 

“ that all efforts by abolitionists or others, made to induce congress to interfere with questions of slavery… are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences, and that all such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people… and ought not to be countenanced by any friend to our political institutions.”

The message was clear:  the Democrat Party did not consider Black Americans to be “people”  deserving of “happiness.”

That same language was in every national Democrat party platform for the next 16 years. 

Democrat party leaders acted on their racist principles, committing high treason against their country and their fellow Americans between 1861-1865 in order to preserve the system of Black human bondage. 

In 1868, the  Democrat Party platform urged amnesty for the traitors who, during the Civil War, killed hundreds of thousands of Americans for the purpose of preserving slavery. The platform also called for “the abolition of the Freedmen's Bureau; and all political instrumentalities designed to secure negro supremacy”:

In 1904, seventy-six years after its founding,  the Democrat party’s platform complained about the Republican platform:

“The race question has brought countless woes to this country. The calm wisdom of the American people should see to it that it brings no more. To revive the dead and hateful race and sectional animosities in any part of our common country means confusion, distraction of business, and the reopening of wounds now happily healed.  We therefore deprecate and condemn the Bourbon-like selfish, and narrow spirit of the recent Republican Convention at Chicago which sought to kindle anew the embers of racial and sectional strife, and we appeal from it to the sober common sense and patriotic spirit of the American people.”

The Republican party’s “hateful” rhetoric in their party platform that the Democrats condemned?  Here it is:

“We demand equal justice for all men, without regard to race or color; we declare once more, and without reservation, for the enforcement in letter and spirit of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution which were designed for the protection and advancement of the negro, and we condemn all devices that have for their real aim his disfranchisement for reasons of color alone, as unfair, un-American and repugnant to the Supreme law of the land.”

Throughout most of the 20th century, Democrats condoned  or excused policies of apartheid and disenfranchisement of Black Americans.  Senate Democrats successfully filibustered a Republican led anti-lynching bill in 1934, and a Republican-led effort to ban the poll tax in 1940.  At the time, the poll tax was so effective  in the American South that  only 3% of Black Americans were registered to vote there. Elected Democrats fought tooth and nail against anti-racist legislation, filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and engaging in so-called “massive resistance” against school integration into the early 1970s. A century and half of racist policies vigorously supported  by Democrat party leaders -- no other political party in history comes close. 

[Vermont Democrat Party chair Bruce] Olsson’s commentary included the perennial claim that Republican President  Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” -- an effort to bring two-party rule to the South in the 1960s -- was racist.  I lived in Tidewater Virginia in the late 1960s.  Coming from New England, I was shocked  at the abject poverty of Black American families and the rigid segregation of virtually all  institutions there, despite the heavy federal military presence.  The South was truly, as one historian put it, a third-world country in a first-world nation.  Since the successful Republican Southern strategy,  the South is no longer a third-world country, but a first-world economic powerhouse.  And today, the South is more integrated than the northern cities run by Democrat machines. Some “racist” strategy.   

The Democrat party has never shed its racist past.  Today the party fights vigorously against school choice and voter ID laws, both overwhelmingly supported by minority communities.  Its leaders support abandoning crime-ridden Black communities by its “defund the police” movement.  It zealously supports expensive and unreliable “renewable” energy which hurts the poor and minorities, and its environmental land use policies are the equivalent of yesterday’s restrictive covenants that redlined minorities.  The Democrats’ latest racist push is critical race theory, which denigrates the courage, sacrifice and enormous achievements of Black Americans, while pushing for resegregation through so-called “affinity groups.”  As they say, a tiger doesn’t change its stripes. 

It’s time for a racial reckoning.  Democrats insist on apologies and accountability from the rest of us.  Democrats must take their own advice and own up to their own endemic racism. Then perhaps real racial healing can take place.

Did you know that in the 1850s, members of the Democrat party were referred to regularly as fire eaters or as locofocos? It kind of sounds like my calling them drama queens, with BDS and TDS being replaced by LDS (Lincoln Derangement Syndrome), does it not?

Related: • What Caused Secession and Ergo the Civil War? Was It Slavery and/or States' Rights? Or Wasn't It Rather Something Else — the Election of a Ghastly Republican to the White House?
• During the Winter of 1860-1861, Did the South's Democrats Obtain Their Aim — the Secession of 7 Slave States — Thanks to Elections Filled with Stealth, Lies, Voter Fraud, Intimidation, Violence, and Murder? (Wait 'til You Hear About… Georgia's Dark Secret)
• Wondering Why Slavery Persisted for Almost 75 Years After the Founding of the USA? According to Lincoln, the Democrat Party's "Principled" Opposition to "Hate Speech"
The Greatest Myth in U.S. History: Yes, the Civil War Era Did Feature Champions of States' Rights, But No, They Were Not in the South (Au Contraire)
• Harry Jaffa on the Civil War Era: For Democrats of the 21st Century as of the 19th, "the emancipation from morality was/is itself seen as moral progress"
• Why Does Nobody Ever Fret About
Scandinavia's — Dreadful — 19th-C Slavery Conditions?
• The Confederate Flag: Another Brick in the Leftwing Activists' (Self-Serving) Demonization of America and Rewriting of History
How to Prevent America from Becoming a Totalitarian State
• Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party
• Why They Don't Tell You the Whole Truth: The 1619 Project Summarized in One Single Sentence

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