There have been four assassinations of presidents in American history, and every one of them has aided the Democrats. This is not to say that the Democrat party engineered the assassinations for its own advantage, but nevertheless, it’s true: each time a president has been killed, the Democrats were the beneficiaries. If Donald Trump had been murdered on Saturday evening, it would not have been the killing of a sitting president, but once again, the left would have reaped the benefits.
When Abraham Lincoln became the first president to be murdered while in office, the Democrat party, which had supported slavery and split over secession, got a new lease on life. In 1864, Lincoln had run for reelection on a national unity ticket. The Republican party even renamed itself the National Union party, and chose as Lincoln’s running mate one of the few pro-union Democrats, Andrew Johnson of the border state of Tennessee.
When the Confederate sympathizer and staunch Democrat John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln on April 14, 1865, the party that was still in the midst of leading a massive and bloody insurrection against the federal authority in Washington was suddenly back in the White House. Lincoln had called for “malice toward none” and “charity for all,” but none of those who followed in his wake could figure out how to deliver that, and most weren’t even interested in trying. As Rating America’s Presidents explains, President Andrew Johnson opposed the enfranchisement and equality of rights of blacks. In this, Johnson departed from Lincoln’s course, as his martyred predecessor had favored civil rights for the freed slaves. In May 1865, Johnson granted amnesty to all ex-Confederates except those who owned property worth $20,000 ($300,000 today), that is, virtually the entire former ruling class, and soon they were back in power in what came to be known as “the Solid South,” a segregationist Democrat voting bloc that lasted a century.
The Democrats benefited again on July 2, 1881, when a deranged man named Charles Guiteau stepped up behind President James A. Garfield and fired his gun twice, hitting him in the back and arm (Garfield died on Sept. 19). Guiteau cried out, “I am a Stalwart and now Arthur is President!” Arthur was Chester A. Arthur, who had been awarded the Republicans’ vice presidential spot in order to balance the ticket. Garfield was a champion of civil service reform, while Arthur and Guiteau were Stalwarts, those who favored the “spoils system.” Under the “spoils system,” the president gave federal jobs to his supporters; proponents of civil service reform wanted such jobs to be given on the basis of merit.
Arthur surprised everyone by abandoning the Stalwarts and enacting Garfield’s program; he felt bound to do so since Garfield, not he, had been elected president. For this, Arthur has been justly praised, but civil service reform has not turned out to be the unalloyed benefit that many assumed it would be. In fact, it allowed for the formation of the unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy that now largely runs things in Washington. Chester Arthur unwittingly paved the way for the creation of the deep state that did so much to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump (and will again if he is reelected). Garfield would have had a hard time getting civil service reform passed; Arthur did so on a wave of sympathy for the martyred president. The road from there leads straight to the far-left dictatorial bureaucrats of our own day.
Leon Czolgosz, the man who shot President William McKinley on Sept. 6, 1901 (McKinley died eight days later), was a man of the left, an anarchist and associate of the renowned activist Emma Goldman. After hearing Goldman (who actually advocated the assassination of rulers she thought unjust) speak about the injustices of American society, Czolgosz determined that “I would have to do something heroic for the cause I loved.” He traveled to Buffalo, where McKinley was appearing at the Pan-American Exposition, to kill the president.
Emma Goldman suggested that the assassination was justified: “Some people have hastily said that Czolgosz’s act was foolish and will check the growth of progress. Those worthy people are wrong in forming hasty conclusions. What results the act of September 6 will have no one can say; one thing, however, is certain: he has wounded government in its most vital spot.” This the-end-justifies-the-means rhetoric would become a staple of leftist discourse, particularly in the twenty-first century, when the left in America grew more violent than it ever had before.
Republican Party bosses, notably McKinley’s chief backer, Ohio Senator and Republican National Committee Chairman Mark Hanna, thought Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was a reckless radical. Hanna once exclaimed to a roomful of party leaders: “Don’t any of you realize there’s only one life between this madman and the presidency?” When Leon Czolgosz showed by killing McKinley how important such concerns really were, one prominent Republican is said to have exclaimed, “Now look, that damned cowboy is president of the United States.”
The “damned cowboy” was a “progressive,” equating progress with the steady expansion of government control over ever more aspects of citizens’ lives. As charming and ebullient as he was, Theodore Roosevelt was also one of the founding figures of today’s gargantuan and out-of-control federal state. Democrat party leader and thrice-failed presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan charged Roosevelt and the “progressives” with stealing ideas from the Democrat program. Roosevelt responded cheerfully: “So I have. That is quite true. I have taken every one of them except those suited for the inmates of lunatic asylums.” And some of those as well.
On November 22, 1963, the Democrats were grim about their prospects for 1964. Although the fact has been forgotten now, John F. Kennedy’s presidency had been rocky. He had faced down the Soviets over their missiles in Cuba, but they wouldn’t have put them there in the first place if they hadn’t perceived JFK as a callow, weak party boy. His disastrous Bay of Pigs effort to overthrow the Communist regime of Fidel Castro only reinforced this view. Kennedy faced a tough challenge from Republican Barry Goldwater, whom many pundits thought could win.
The assassination of Kennedy changed all that. Lyndon B. Johnson rode the revulsion and horror that followed the assassination to a landslide victory, and enacted the far left’s dream agenda for domestic policy. (In matters of foreign policy, the hard left was not as enamored of LBJ.)
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Johnson’s War on Poverty was a huge exercise in applying the wrong solution to problems and only making them worse rather than solving them. Yet the Democrat party to this day is full of leaders who refuse to admit that it has been a defeat and a disaster, and keep pushing to repeat its mistakes on an even larger scale. The War on Poverty has cost over $22 trillion since 1964, over three times the cost of all the actual wars that the U.S. has ever fought. All that has resulted from it, however, is urban blight, nagging minority unemployment, and above all, more poverty. Poverty levels were falling sharply before Johnson declared war on poverty; in 1950, 32 percent of Americans were considered to be living below the poverty line. By 1965, when the War on Poverty was just getting started, the poverty level had been cut nearly in half and was down to 17 percent. But by 2014, after trillions had been spent in the War on Poverty, it was at 14 percent, nearly the same as it had been when the War on Poverty began.
The War on Poverty failed because it ignored a basic law of economics: if you pay for something, you’ll get more of it, not less. As the government expanded welfare programs that subsidized food, housing, and health care for the poor, it got more poor people, not fewer: the Johnson administration had created an economic incentive to remain poor. Johnson’s “Great Society” took away incentives to work and created a permanent unemployed underclass in which an ever-larger group of people were essentially wards of the state.
We’re still paying the price, but the advocates of statism and socialism love it. If Donald Trump had been killed Saturday night, those forces would have virtually assured of getting even more of what they want.
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