Reject your political party: The Democratic Party
Artwork: True Blues - Democrat Presidents Playing Poker by Andy Thomas.
Reject Your Political Party Series
Both major American political parties have stated purposes and stated platforms. In this short series, I intend to assess whether or not those platforms are beneficial for the people of the United States. I also intend to show how the actions of party leaders violate the stated purposes of their respective parties.
Democratic Party Platform and Stated Positions
The Democratic Party presents itself as the party of the working man and of oppressed minorities. The party favors racial and gender equality as well as equal rights for those with alternative sexual orientations. They protect the rights of workers and seek fairness for the blue-collar guys against the large corporations for which they work. They are anti-war, and a strong advocate of a clean environment. (If you read my essay on the Republican Party, you’ll see where this is going already…) While these are admirable goals, none of these apply to the Democratic Party. The Democrats, like the Republicans, do not support the ideals they claim to represent, and, like the Republicans, trick their constituents into believing that they have the average American’s interests in mind.
Racial Equality
Racial equality is a noble goal, and something our society should work towards achieving. We are all human beings after all, endowed by our creator (whether you believe it’s God or nature) with the same inalienable rights. Very admirable, in theory. How does it play out in practice?
National leaders in the Democratic Party, whether they are politicians or activists, love to paint the Republican Party as the racist party. While it’s true that racism can easily be found in the current and historical Republican Party, the truth is that racism is not confined to just one political party or ideology. How could it be? When these Democratic leaders label someone a “racist” they are doing so not to encourage debate, but rather to shut it down and slander the target, whether that target holds racist views or not (usually they do not). Subscribers to the Democratic Party’s philosophy need to examine the party’s own history of not just racism, but institutionalized racism, that continues into today.
It is much easier to identify the Democratic Party’s racism in American history prior to 1960, so I won’t go into a lot of depth. You can research yourself. Here are some brief “highlights”: Andrew Jackson, the first Democratic president, was the man most responsible for the Trail of Tears (the forced relocation which drove from their homes and killed hundreds of thousands of Native Americans). For this reason, many Native American tribes won’t use the $20 bill since it features the face of Jackson. The great hero of the modern Left is (arguably) Franklin D. Roosevelt. His racial crimes include rounding up Japanese American citizens and putting them in concentration camps, putting a Klansman in the Supreme Court (Hugo Black), and persecuting the black press for treason solely based on their skin color. The Democrats were proponents of African slavery up to the Civil War, and the KKK was essentially the militant wing of the Democratic Party in the deep South during Reconstruction. The Democratic Party was also responsible for some of the first drug control laws, specifically aimed to punish Chinese immigrants.
American concentration camps specifically for racial minorities.
The change in perception came in the 1960s with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson. JFK and LBJ were not civil rights advocates, as many modern Democrats claim. JFK had Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wiretapped and investigated by the FBI to undermine his work towards racial equality. LBJ, on signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, remarked, “I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” He is also quoted as saying, “These Negroes, they’re getting uppity these days. That’s a problem for us, since they got something now they never had before. The political pull to back up their uppityness. Now, we’ve got to do something about this. We’ve got to give them a little something. Just enough to quiet them down, but not enough to make a difference. If we don’t move at all, their allies will line up against us. And there’ll be no way to stop them. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.” I would argue the Civil Rights Act was a power grab by the federal government.
I can hear the protests now: “All this was in the past! The modern Democratic Party has changed.” Fair enough, it has changed, and probably most people who identify themselves as Democrats are not racists, as used to be the case. That is not what I am arguing, however. Democratic racial policies are still inherently racist. Take affirmative action, for example. The entire idea behind it is that people with dark skin cannot succeed without the help of paternalistic white people. Yet anyone who points this out is often quickly labeled a “racist” by the staunchest Democratic supporters, again, to shut them up, not to foster debate.
Many, including me, have argued that the best way to achieve racial equality is not through affirmative action and quotas, but through equal access to education. After all, education leads to skills, which lead to better work opportunities and more wealth. So where does the Democratic Party stand on education? It is fiercely loyal not to minorities but to teachers’ unions that trap minorities in failing public school systems that don’t even teach a large percentage of students how to read. How is a young man or woman who happens to be a racial minority supposed to succeed in the world and escape a life of poverty and violence if they are not given the tools that a good education will give them? No wonder gang violence and drug abuse is rampant in the ghetto. The people who live there have no hope of escape.
The cities where Democratic leadership is the strongest have the highest rates of violent crimes and poverty. (I’m looking at you, Baltimore, D.C., and Detroit.) In fact, President Barack Obama, who is half-black himself, was instrumental in shutting down a voucher program that would allow poor black families to get their kids out of the failing, violent DC area schools that he would never let his daughters attend. A cynical man might say he values towing the party line more than he gives a damn about his constituents.
Either Democratic policies caused Detroit to fall to this, or they were powerless to stop it.
Gender Equality
My reasons for opposing the Democratic Party’s positions on gender equality and gay rights are similar to my reasons for opposing their take on racial equality. Namely, the idea that women and homosexuals cannot achieve and care for themselves unless they have a paternalistic government to take care of them. It’s insulting at best, and at worst actually undermines any hopes of equality. The Democratic Party, as recently as 2012, has been active in a campaign meant to smear any opposition to their gender equality programs. They call their opponents perpetrators in a “war on women.” What about women who are not Democrats? Is a Republican or independent woman waging a war on herself? Ridiculous.
On taking office, the Obama administration passed a law requiring employers and schools to provide free birth control and sterilization services to employees and students. What’s wrong with that you ask? Well, a 20 year study by the CDC showed that 99% of women of child-bearing age were able to get proper birth control without involving their school or employer in their bedrooms. Imagine that. Women are smart and capable human beings. Forcing the government into women’s bedrooms paints them as incapable and dependent on government. (Ironically, it is the opposition that is often portrayed as “intrusive into the bedroom.”) What about women who do not want birth control? Either they do not believe in it for religious reasons, they are abstinent, they are post-menopausal, or they have another of several reasons why a woman may not want birth control. The new law forces these women to pay for other women’s contraceptives against their will. Do the rights of these women to keep their money not count for anything?
Further, the Democratic position on women is insulting because it portrays gender issues as issues only involving the bedroom and reproductive rights. Is it only men who care about jobs? Do women not care about war? The economy? Taxes? Education? By grouping all women together, you lose sight of the individual American women (about 150 million of them) each with their own hopes, dreams, fears, values, thoughts, beliefs, etc. Isn’t that just objectifying women in a non-sexual way?
Worker’s Rights
The Democratic Party presents itself as the party of the working man. They claim to protect the rights of workers and seek fairness for the blue-collar guys against the large corporations for which they work. This point is unique in my series of essays, because I actually would argue that prior to FDR’s presidency, the members of the Democratic Party more or less did represent the interests of the working class. For example, Andrew Jackson’s revocation of the central bank’s charter was a great victory for sound money policy, liberal politics and the working man. The New Deal changed all of that, however, and the fascism instituted by President Roosevelt continues in the rhetoric of the Democratic Party line to this date. (The anti-New Deal radio crusade of Democrat Al Smith is worth the read.) FDR actually ran his first campaign on a platform of ending Herbert Hoover’s disastrous financial policies. (Hoover was NOT a free-market advocate like many modern historians claim… the Republicans have always been in favor of mercantilism and cartels. See my post on the Republicans for more…) Once he took office, however, his administration made a conscious effort to duplicate the fascist policies of Mussolini’s Italy as well as pack the Supreme Court to protect the unconstitutional New Deal. He helped organize several industries into state-mandated cartels, including banking, farming, and manufacturing. Today’s Democrats are largely Roosevelt Democrats, not Jefferson/Madison liberals.
FDR’s NRA was one of the cornerstones of the early New Deal. It was little more than a cartelization of industry and an agricultural subsidy. It was later declared unconstitutional.
Today’s Democrats support the monetary policy of the Treasury Department and the fiat currency issued by the Federal Reserve, just like the Republicans. (Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, is the president who signed the Federal Reserve Act.) Barack Obama voted for Bush’s banking bailouts that robbed the middle class of much of their spending power and savings in order to give rich bankers golden parachutes. Once in office, his administration continued the bailouts. Democrats, just like the Republicans, are elected by multi-national corporations that expect special privileges if they fund successful campaigns. This is nothing but crony capitalism, and it benefits the super rich while destroying the middle class. Both major parties are guilty, the Democrats are not exempt.
Anti-War?
This is, by far, the easiest propaganda concerning the Democrats to debunk, especially in the age of Barack Obama and his administration’s murderous drone strikes and multiple front war on terror. Candidate Obama ran his 2008 presidential campaign on a platform of ending Bush’s war in Iraq. President Obama extended Bush’s Iraq exit date, tripled the troop surge in Afghanistan and started wars in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. He’s claimed he has the right to murder anyone his administration deems a terrorist, including Americans on American soil, using secret evidence that no one is allowed to see. “Just trust me.” In fairness, Mr. Obama never claimed to be anti-war… just against the unpopular Iraq War. Even in 2008, he supported the Afghanistan War and told the voters that he intended to intensify American presence in the graveyard of empires. Anyone who votes Democrat because they are anti-war is either not listening to the candidates, or is in a state of cognitive dissonance. (Of course, there are a few exceptions… Dennis Kucinich immediately comes to mind. These are few and far between, however, and are mostly labeled “fringe kooks.”)
Vietnamese children fleeing a napalm attack.
Warmongering Democrats did not start with Obama, however. In the Twentieth Century alone, we had Woodrow Wilson getting the US involved in World War 1, FDR in WW2, Truman’s annihilation of two Japanese cities (full of innocent civilians) with atomic bombs, and LBJ’s intensification of the Vietnam War, including the idea of “carpet bombing.” The “left” used to protest these wars, but now it seems most Democrats are perfectly happy with murdering people in other countries if our government doesn’t like their government, as long as it is a Democrat ordering the troops, sanctions, and drone strikes. The modern Democratic Party adherents are truly despicable hypocrites when it comes to warfare.
Environmentalism
Democrats like to argue that without government to enforce the environmental mandates they set, we would all be living in a world of toxic waste. The water would be undrinkable, the air unbreatheable, fauna and flora would constantly go extinct, etc. Aside from the fact that many of these fears are being realized even in the face of strict environmental controls, the larger elephant in the room is that the US federal government is the biggest polluter of any other organization in the world, and the biggest in human history. Even if you don’t count war, which you should (it’s horrible for the environment, with the shell casings, poison gases, and toxins left by military vehicles), think of the office supplies needed to run a bureaucracy. It is estimated that the feds spend $1.3 billion in printing, and $440 million of it is wasteful. Government agencies print more than small businesses because they don’t directly pay for it; the taxpayers do. The same goes for the government’s fleet of cars and other vehicles. The gas bill is given to the taxpayer, so the government worker doesn’t care about conserving gas. What about funding for green initiatives? One word for you: Solyndra. The truth is that there is a huge demand for green technology, but when the government gets involved and promises “free money” to green business, the less ethical business owners will certainly step up to claim it whether their product is truly green or not, and whether their business model can succeed or not.
What you get when you support corporatism, green or not.
In Conclusion
The Democratic Party presents itself as the party of the working man and of minorities. They pretend to favor equality for all people regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation. They proclaim that they protect the rights of workers, are anti-war, and advocate for a clean environment. These are all admirable ideals, of course, but the Democratic Party fails to promote even one of them. Like my brief essay on the Republican Party, this is not meant to be a thorough history or in-depth look into the principles of the Democratic Party, but rather an overview for Democratic voters so they can question their motives and values. Many on the left like to say, “Question authority.” I agree. (Although in 2013, Mr. Obama has told college students in no unspecific terms not to question his government.) “Question authority” applies to Democratic leadership as well as any other artificial authority. Everything I’ve written about is available on the web, in depth, for anyone curious to know more. If you read this and think I must be wrong, please do some research and prove me wrong. I’m happy to be corrected, if I’ve made a mistake.
Next: The Libertarians
Reject Your Political Party Series
A Disclaimer About My Politics
Thanks for reading this post, I hope I challenged you in some way. Agree with me? That’s cool. Disagree? Even better. I’m just a random guy on the internet, voicing his opinion (at the time of writing this blog post – check the date; opinions change as more facts and experience are gathered). But imagine if I had the political power and will to force you to agree with me! That would be terrible, and that’s the point of voluntarism and non-aggression. You should not be forced to agree with me. Please extend me the same courtesy.
“The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’ meaning ‘many’, and the word ‘ticks’ meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’.” -Larry Hardiman
Political Blog Posts
- The Democrats Don’t Deserve Your Vote
- The Republicans Don’t Deserve Your Vote
- The Libertarians Don’t Deserve Your Vote
- Democracy ≠ Freedom
- I Don’t “Feel the Bern.”
- Confessions of a Public Servant
- Leaders vs. Rulers
- Libertarianism is Better Than Progressivism
- Why I Do Not Vote (And Neither Should You)
- The Traffic Court Swindle
- Top Five Reasons I Don’t Argue Politics on Social Media
- Why Meaningful Debate is Impossible
- Dos and Do Nots for the Liberty Minded
- “There ought to be a law…”
- A Defense of Fugitive Slaves
- Conspiracy Theories are Dumb
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