Democrats, renounce thy name
We live in an era when symbols control our politics; not ideas, not people, nothing fixed or permanent, only symbols. The problem with symbols is the meaning ascribed to them changes with the fashion of the day. The most abstract of symbols are the names we give ourselves.
A loud and raucous debate is upon us, all around the world, about the symbols associated with racism. The debate is particularly harsh in the United States, led by the Democratic Party, who claim a right to root out the vestiges of racism in America. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic Party colleagues are not serious people.
While dramatically and disrespectfully wearing Kente cloths and kneeling in the Emancipation Hall, calling for the removal of statues from the Capitol Building, and slamming Mt. Rushmore as a monument to racism, they would like you to believe they favor removing the symbols of a bygone era. We’ll know they are serious only when they renounce their name.
The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery over the adamant resistance of the Democratic Party, and he paid the ultimate price for that transgression.
After the Civil War, Southern Democratic Party partisans advanced the Jim Crow laws postponing the promises of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that outlawed slavery, declared all persons were equal before the law, and ensured all races had a right to vote regardless of any previous condition of servitude.
Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, former President of Princeton University, and our 28th President for two terms, stated plainly his belief that Blacks were inferior to whites. He re-segregated the federal cafeterias in Washington, DC after he took office. An equal opportunity white nationalist racist, Wilson abandoned the Japanese at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 following WWI. He refused to even listen to Japanese requests that a principle of racial equality be added into the proposed League of Nations’ treaty.
Democratic party paragon Franklin D. Roosevelt invited the 1936 American Olympic team to the White House, but excluded Jesse Owens, the only black medal winner. Adolf Hitler watched this Black man win Gold, but Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with him. Roosevelt separated the white and Black White House servants, appointed Hugo Black of the Ku Klux Klan to the Supreme Court, and rounded up and imprisoned Japanese Americans without charges or trial.
With lynching of black men pervasive across the South, last reported to be Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama on March 21, 1981, the Democratic Party welcomed the Ku Klux Klan into its ranks, including Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, once the KKK’s Exalted Cyclops. Senator Byrd served in the US Senate as a Democrat for 51 years until his death in 2010 when he was the Senate’s president pro tempore. Before running for Congress, Byrd wrote:
“I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side ... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”
He at least apologized for those thoughts before he died, perhaps mindful of the Judgment that was coming. His mindset prompted Democratic Party senators to filibuster against every Civil Rights Act in the 1950’s and 1960’s. They tried to filibuster the 1964 Civil Rights Act for 60 days, the longest filibuster in Senate history.
George Wallace was a life-long member of the Democratic Party and in 1963 when he was sworn in as Governor of Alabama, he declared his opinion on the races by declaring, "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever".
The racist past of President Joe Biden, Democrat, is well known, and that is all the more reason to wonder how can he be the leader of our country and how can so many Black race hustlers offer him their support? He gave the eulogy at Senator Byrd’s funeral, he opposed school busing, he opposed Republican legislation to outlaw the tax-exempt status of racially segregated schools, and he boasted during his 1987 run for President, "we were on the South's side in the Civil War." For those who need to be informed, the South fought to keep their right to buy, sell and hold Black slaves as chattel property. Biden bragged about that legacy, is as racist as they come, and he has never once apologized for those views.
While Speaker Pelosi virtue signals her intent to remove statues of racist politicians who lived over one hundred years ago, she is silent about the explicit racism of politicians from her political party in our lifetime. The past isn't dead, said William Faulkner; it's not even the past. The Democratic Party was and is undeniably the party of racists.
Personally, I oppose these efforts to erase our history because I believe symbols are less important than what is in our hearts. Symbols remind us of the past and as George Orwell presciently warned us in his novel 1984, a people with no past have no future. The Democrats seem to have found the memory hole that Orwell’s Winston Smith used to erase the history that they prefer remains unspoken.
If the Democrats want to do something fully within their control to erase a vestige of our racist past, then they should start with their own legacy and renounce the name of the Democratic Party. Don’t hold your breath.