The People v. the Democratic Party

My new Broadside from my PJ colleague Roger Kimball‘s Encounter Books is now available on Amazon for the low, low price of $5.99. (The Kindle edition — with links! — comes out at the end of the month.) How can you resist:

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A taste of what’s in store:

The first thing you need to know about the Democratic Party is that its first vice president, the traitor Aaron Burr, shot and killed one of the Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, and then plotted sedition against his own president. Everything else is, as they say, commentary….

My brief is against the Democratic Party, which from the inception of the Republic has been a public enemy – an organization antithetical to our nation’s traditions, civic virtues, and moral values.

Does that seem overstated? Consider the facts. Whether it has been defending slavery, selling out our secrets, or simply voting “present” so as not to take a stand on the crucial moral issues of both statecraft and soulcraft, the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition has always been in the forefront of everything inimical to the United States of America.

Its unofficial modern slogan – “by any means necessary” – is indicative of its fundamental amorality. Its will to power, especially since the mid-19th century, is insatiable. It sees greater government as the greater good. It views individual liberty as dangerous and personal choice – always excepting abortion, the only sacrament the atheist left acknowledges and honors – as contrary to the will of the demos. It is always in favor of centralized fascism, including but not limited to the power to ban, criminalize, and anathematize speech and ideas with which it does not agree and which threaten its hegemony.

And all of this in disguise – under the cloak of “compassion,” of “tolerance,” of “fairness.” The Tarnhelm beneath which modern “liberalism” (its very name mocks the political origins of the term) lurks, coiled and ready to strike whenever our side lets down its guard. “Come, I think hell’s a fable,” says Dr. Faustus to Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s play. “Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind,” replies the devil.

And so in the hell the left has made of America over the past half-century or so we currently dwell.

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My Broadside, which runs about 6,000 words or so, is the 30th in Roger’s ongoing series of provocative essays about current events; other authors include my friend and PJ/NRO colleague, Andy McCarthy, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, and European Parliamentarian extraordinaire, Daniel Hannan. So think of them as playing cards in an all-star conservative lineup and collect the whole set!

One more fillip to whet your appetite:

The Democratic Party has always appealed to the basest instincts of the American people, molting and changing shape as the political winds dictated but solely devoted to its raison d’être: the accumulation and retention of political power. As it evolved over the course of the late 19th century, its chief mechanism became, in essence, bribery – not simply of civil officials but of the public itself.

It’s unclear who said, “A Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only last until the citizens discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury.” But that may as well be the party’s animating ethos: “social justice” disguised as sympathy or, worse, compassion. Always wrapping itself in the false cloak of righteousness and celebrating the folk wisdom of the demos, the Democrats have consistently championed class envy, social division, and often – quite nakedly – racism, if they thought it would buy them votes.

Only the Democrats could reinvent themselves so effortlessly, molting from the party of the Ku Klux Klan to the party of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From the party of the aggressive atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who destroyed school prayer and helped set the country on its downward moral spiral in 1963, to the party of Bible-toting Baptist presidents (Bill Clinton) and the racist ravings of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. When your only principle is power, it’s easy to embrace flexibility and nuance.

This amoral relativism raised to a high art of hypocrisy – for such it is – at the party’s core has long posed the most potent threat to its continuing existence; therefore, it is the one aspect of its nature that must be most assiduously concealed and obscured.

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If you’ve had it up to your all-American keister with the Democrats’ phony moralism and their relentless scrubbing of their dismal record, I invite you to give the book a try. And if you’re not sold yet, the original title was going to be “A Criminal Organization Masquerading As a Political Party.”

‘Nuff said. Enjoy.

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