I am ashamed of my party. But it goes deeper than shame. I am afraid of what my party has become over the last two decades. And judging by the polls, I’m guessing there are millions of Democrats who feel the same unease I feel.
It’s almost impossible to process the current American meltdown both at home and abroad. But it’s clear that our party’s leadership is responsible – and not just the president, I mean the whole leadership from Harry Reid to Nancy Pelosi to all the power players who line up behind them.
Yes, some prominent Democrats have come forward to warn us about the true danger of the “Islamic State,” terrorism’s latest mutation. They express regrets about President Obama’s Iraq withdrawal. But let’s remember this sudden public reversal follows years of get-out-the-vote “happy talk” from most of our party leaders – while they mocked Republican warnings about the danger we faced.
Republicans have a right to be angry – we all have a right to be angry. It seems that very little our party told us has turned out to be true. It’s maddening. One Democratic candidate actually campaigned calling for a change in Democratic Party leadership. But don’t hold your breath for real change.
Even if the polls completely collapsed regarding our party, those who control the party would never step down, except to “raise up” people who believe the same things they do, and who will lead the same way. That’s the problem.
Only regular Democrat voters can force a real change in our party leadership with a voter strike over the next few elections. One election is not enough.
A Democrat no-vote
As 2016 approaches, it has never been more important for mainstream Democrats to draw a line by not voting Democrat. You don’t have to vote Republican; just let your “no-vote” send a message to our local, state and national leaders. If even a small percentage of each major Democrat voting block were to join the protest, it would force the party to take a hard look at itself, or at least start a healthy discussion.
Too many Democrats worry about the party’s direction, but still vote Democrat, hoping things will improve. They won’t.
Even the 2014 midterm elections won’t have any genuine chastising effect on Democratic leaders, especially if they can blame their troubles on one person – and that’s already in process.
But make no mistake; this is not just about President Obama any more than the 1990s were only about the Clintons. I sounded the alarm on this subject in a column before the 2000 election troubles, calling the split between our two major parties a “cold civil war.”
It has only gotten worse since then – much worse – and that should raise a disturbing question: How is this situation ever going to change?
For decades, mainstream Democrats have had to watch our party leadership decline into something unrecognizable to those of us who remember the Democratic Party of President Kennedy, or even of Jimmy Carter. Something ruinous on an epic scale controls our party. And only Democrats can do something about it – with a no-vote protest.
First, let me clarify: By “mainstream” or “regular” Democrats, I mean average middle-class Democrats who have remained in the party, but are also very uncomfortable with their party’s increasing revolt from mainstream America. Like most Americans, we are not revolutionaries.
Now is the time for these regular Democrats to face something that has become obvious to millions of other Americans: Our party leaders are at war with America. I mean they are at war with the same America John F. Kennedy loved, he and the rest of the Democrats of the “Greatest Generation” who helped win both World War II and the Cold War. Younger Democrats need to know they have a choice. We are at a fork in the road.
What went wrong?
Ironically, the root of our party leadership’s war on America was exposed right at the end of the Cold War against communism. In a famous Newsweek cover story called “Thought Police: Watch What You Say” (Dec. 24, 1990), the magazine soberly reported that after the radical movements of the 1960s, a “Marxist” hybrid called Political Correctness, or PC, had taken over many of America’s college campuses.
The cover story asked a chilling question: Was PC “the new McCarthyism”? Consider Newsweek’s 1990 description of campus political correctness and then ask yourself how this applies to our current Democratic leadership and its growing radical partisanship:
“… they now are gaining access to the conventional weapons of campus politics: social pressure, academic perks (including tenure) and – when they have the administration on their side – outright coercion … where the PC reigns, one defies it at one’s peril.”
During the 1980s, these PC devotees with their utopian sex-gender-race theories were mocked by most in the media as irrational. Radical feminists who insisted on spelling women as “womyn” to rid themselves of the word “men” (no kidding) joined a parade of others with their own pet theories to force on students. And “force” is the operative word.
One need only scan today’s news to see political correctness at work, from revised American history curriculum battles with local school boards to attempts to redefine gender right before parents’ eyes. One public school district has warned its middle school teachers against using “gendered expressions” like “boys and girls” when talking to their boy and girl students.
How did this happen to us?
Ironically, two years after Newsweek’s dire warning, political correctness found a home in the White House with the first baby-boomer president, William Jefferson Clinton, and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Now the previously isolated PC campus codes would begin to gather influence at a national level. The laughing stopped. Remember, “where the PC reigns, one defies it at one’s peril.”
Now PC executive branch appointees would naturally rise to the highest levels of the bureaucracy from the State Department to the CIA and beyond, including of course, the judicial system. Officers in the military willing to accept PC would be advanced in their careers to help promote the various agendas of the Clinton administration. The rest were effectively silenced.
America also had a very different kind of first lady, a “student” of socialist community organizer Saul Alinsky, author of “Rules for Radicals,” a book written with the expressed purpose to bring about “change.” How? By taking power away from the “haves.” Of course, the definition of a “have” can change on a governmental whim. But this isn’t only about socialists “spreading the wealth around.” This is about owning the wealth.
Alinsky wrote in his first book, “Reveille for Radicals,” that radicals “hope for a future where the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people instead of the comparative handful.”
To independents and Republicans reading this, trust me – that’s not a regular Democrat talking. That’s Marxism, straight up.
‘No rules’ for radicals
Not only did Hillary Clinton write her college thesis about Alinsky (conveniently released to the public only in 2000), but also her close youthful relationship with Alinsky has now been revealed by the discovery of her letters to Alinsky, written when Clinton was a Yale law student.
A fan of “Reveille for Radicals,” the young Hillary Rodham told Alinsky she couldn’t wait to also use “Rules for Radicals” in her campus work.
Our leadership problem doesn’t end with Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, who actually taught Alinsky organizing techniques. The sad truth is that our party apparatus has been taken over by political correctness – PC “radicals” who share Alinsky’s basic Marxist worldview, his desire for class warfare and radical “change.” Our party leaders support, or at least tolerate, the use of Alinsky’s aggressive “no rules” techniques against mainstream America – basic bullying strategies.
“In war the end justifies almost any means,” said Alinsky. “The practical revolutionary will understand [that] in action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent both with one’s individual conscience and the good of mankind.”
In other words, “almost” anything goes when it comes to achieving “change” for “the good of mankind.” Of course, the radicals get to define what’s good for mankind.
Reclaiming our party
We mainstream Democrats should also focus on “change.” We must do what we can to change the character and cast of our party’s leadership into something identifiably “mainstream” when it comes to national and international policy. Our nation’s safety is at stake – not just because of terrorist enemies, but also because PC ideology combined with Alinsky agitprop techniques are undermining the fabric of our whole society, from cultural propaganda to street action.
It may be that President Obama’s disastrous leadership will be the wake-up call we needed to realize the wrong people are running our party. At this point we must know something is terribly wrong. It’s hard to ignore President Jimmy Carter’s recent decision to step forward and publicly reject President Obama’s handling of Iraq.
Any historically mainstream Democrat (Carter was a businessman, a governor and a U.S. Naval Academy graduate) would have taken the Iraq “hand-off” from George W. Bush and carried it over the goal line – not run it in the wrong direction.
These kinds of Democrats would never stand by and watch the Middle East meltdown we are now experiencing “on our watch.” They would not abandon Iraq only to let the “Islamic State” barbarians fill the void.
Can any of us imagine that Roosevelt, Truman or Kennedy would act as President Obama has?
For one thing, they would certainly have rejected a Democratic leader who publicly declared a war “lost” (as Sen. Reid did in 2007) while our troops were still fighting and dying on the battlefield. Imagine how our young warriors felt as they put their lives on the line and watched their friends die for a supposedly lost cause. Imagine what our enemies thought of Reid’s statement.
Mainstream Democrats respect the military that guards our freedom (just as they respect our law enforcement who risk their lives every day). Why did our party leadership support Reid’s re-election after that disgrace? They should have rejected him as a point of honor – or is that still a word our leadership uses?
Think of the lying that went on to force the Affordable Care Act down America’s throat without any bipartisan support. And what about the “lying” that still goes on by delaying the effects of the law until after key elections? Our leadership looks the other way while regular Americans are getting the shaft.
Who are these people who tell us we’ll find out what’s in the bill after it’s passed? How can they think such bold lying about keeping our doctors and our plan can be laughed off and forgotten? But it doesn’t stop with lying to fool the American people. Remember, there are “no rules” – Senate rules, rules of decency or otherwise – on the path to PC power.
The defame game
To better understand what these so-called Democrats believe, consider how they behave. Think of how they falsely accused and indicted Republican Tom DeLay.
Led by “Democrats,” the 2005 sham indictment of then-House Majority Leader DeLay achieved its goal of forcing a powerful Republican out of the political arena and weakening the GOP right before the 2006 elections. DeLay’s recent final and overwhelming court vindication doesn’t change that fact.
“What the Democrats did to me is right out of the pages of Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals,’” DeLay told WND senior reporter Jerome Corsi. “People don’t understand, but it’s the politics of Karl Marx that drive the far left in control of the Democratic Party.”
He’s right. People don’t understand – including regular Democrats. But DeLay went further.
“The Republican Party leadership does not understand they are dealing with the far left when they are dealing with the Democrats today,” DeLay said. “The Democrats want to destroy you and your family. They want to bankrupt you and put you in a coffin so they can dance on your grave.”
The anger in DeLay’s words is understandable. After all, the man was robbed of a prominent political career, not to mention nine years of his life and who knows how much money in legal fees. And imagine the stress on his family who had to watch him get dragged through the mud for years. How do he and his family get their reputation back?
But that’s not the only painful thing for me about DeLay’s statement. His use of the word “Democrat” seems somehow out of place – and yet I know it’s not out of place when it comes to our current leaders and the various PC groups who support them in their bullying methods. I come from a Roosevelt/Truman/JFK Democrat family, and I know how my father would have reacted to the DeLay story.
Blind loyalty
The only reason mainstream Democrats haven’t fully absorbed this radical change in our own leaders over the last two decades is that they’ve kept us focused on the other party. We’ve been successfully “blinded” with a key Alinsky technique – demonization.
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” wrote Alinsky. “One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.”
So our party teaches us to fear fellow Americans who belong to the party of Abraham Lincoln, by portraying them in cartoonish fashion as uncaring, rich, bigoted, ignorant, racist, greedy, haters, or you fill in the blank. In other words, vote Democrat because we’re not the evil Republicans.
First and foremost, we should remember that not long ago there were far more similarities than differences between our two great parties.
For one thing, “Greatest Generation” Democrats believed in a strong military and a muscular foreign policy to stand up to evil in this world. They loathed and feared atheist communism just as much as Republicans did and were staunch in supporting America’s effort to resist the global communist movement after World War II.
On the domestic front, Democrats honored the traditional family, which the “sexual revolutionary” socialist left dismissed contemptuously as “bourgeois family values.” Democrats knew that historic “one man, one woman” marriage was central to the strength of this country, as were the children that resulted.
Think of famous Democrat Sen. Patrick Daniel Moynihan, who as a young social scientist and deputy secretary of labor in 1965 warned the country about the devastating effect fatherless families were having on the African-American community.
He was called a racist for that prophetic warning, which if heeded, could have prevented so much misery – not only among blacks, but also among whites and Hispanics who are now following the same self-destructive path.
The right to reason
Sadly, we can’t have an intelligent, fact-based national conversation about family issues – I mean a real dialogue supported by both parties – because it’s not “politically correct” to make even scientific claims about the value of father/mother families.
This dangerous bias exists partly because so many voters, including myself, come from broken families. The PC left is very good at taking advantage of that – in fact, it’s good at turning all our personal realities into political insecurities (the war on women), and then into votes.
But it goes beyond even that.
PC Marxists even deny Americans the right to defend “normalcy,” which we should all do for the sake of our common future, even if we don’t come from an ideal background. In fact, the very word “normal,” not to mention “ideal,” is a threat to the entire politically correct fantasy-based “egalitarian” structure.
This so-called progressive creed is a rebellion against reason, from standards of truth – specifically Western Judeo-Christian standards – and is fast becoming a direct threat to all Americans who hold those standards as true, people like former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and perhaps people like you.
As Newsweek put it:
“The rejection of hierarchy underlies another key PC tenet, ‘multiculturalism.’ This is an attack on the primacy of Western intellectual tradition, as handed down through centuries of ‘great books.’”
So not only are PC Democrat leaders in the process of passing laws that will criminalize traditional Americans – Democrat or Republican – but they are driving this country toward rejecting its entire intellectual and religious history from Aristotle and Aquinas to Shakespeare and C.S. Lewis and, of course, including the Bible.
But that’s not all. Even America’s founders are under attack – something that should inspire all of us to resist, no matter what race or religion, no matter man or women, adult or child. For this strikes at our common heart if we are to remain a country.
Newsweek goes on:
“In the PC view, this canon perpetuates the power of ‘dead white males’ over women and blacks from beyond the grave. It obliges black students to revere the thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, who was a literal slave owner.”
So students should disrespect the “thoughts” of Thomas Jefferson? Stop and think about it. Not only is our party the party of Jefferson, but if we convince suggestible students to reject him, that compromises the Declaration of Independence, which we owe to Jefferson – and without which, there is no America.
Trashing the very foundation of America’s political and spiritual creed leaves a void that PCism is happy to fill with its own creed.
The trouble is that political correctness is not anchored to anything philosophically solid – according to Newsweek, “It does violence to logic.” Yes, logic itself is a threat to the PC creed, which claims the right to re-imagine everything.
Men and women are the same because they say so (never mind the science). Co-habitation has no effect on young people (forget the stats). Terrorism is just “man-caused disaster” (because labels are reality). Wars “end” (when our politicians wish them to). And truth is relative (just because …).
The principle is simple:
Everything is ideological (or “political”). So decisions are not filtered through a notion of what’s right, but rather what’s “ideologically correct.” If reality clashes with ideology, then adjust reality. If women are not physically equipped for combat, then force the military to lower the physical requirements for women.
Apply that kind of thinking to America’s problems and you get “politics,” not solutions. No wonder there’s such chaos in the country right now – and in the world. No wonder our chaos party PC leaders can’t manage the nation’s affairs.
For them, facing reality is a matter of choice. But when it comes to political leadership – not to mention living life, as regular Democrats know – reality isn’t a choice.
Conclusion
So mainstream Democrats have to decide if this is what we want to support when we vote Democrat. Are we really for PC, or just hesitant to stand against it? Do we really want to be forced to accept a creed that’s entirely – entirely – different than the beliefs of our parents and grandparents and great grandparents?
To help answer that question, read the inaugural address of one of our most famous modern Democrats, John F. Kennedy, and ask yourself this:
Do you want to support a party leadership whose vision for the party (and for America) is profoundly different from President Kennedy’s, not to mention most other famous Democrats?
It’s not that PC progressives have nothing useful to say; they just let their anger at unfairness, their personal frustration, and radical leaders carry it too far – way too far. The results for our party have been tragic. It seems the only way we can maintain power in a center-right country is to lie about Republicans and bully people who disagree.
I am not urging Democrats to leave the party – I haven’t left. But we do need a real change within the party to help regain something we’ve lost. After all, America functions best with a choice between two parties that love this country like a good friend, Constitution, Declaration, history and founders – flaws and all – as I said, just like a friend. Of course, we want our political parties to always strive to make us a better, stronger nation – but based on our core beliefs, not to “fundamentally change” us as Barack Obama is trying to do, or to “re-imagine” us as Hillary Clinton has urged.
We need a return to the words of John F. Kennedy who proclaimed in his inaugural address that Americans should be “proud of our ancient heritage.” I am proud – and I bet millions of other Democrats are proud of America’s ancient heritage too, including our Judeo-Christian heritage that calls on us to “love one another” and to “proclaim liberty throughout the land.”
And this we have done, first by our “under God” revolution, then by throwing off slavery (and eventually other gross injustices), and then by defeating tyranny and inspiring freedom-loving nations around the world to do the same.
The following is an excerpt from JFK’s inaugural address in 1961. Let your heart respond to his words. It’s a touchstone for mainstream Democrats, a standard by which we can judge our candidates and by which other Americans will hopefully one day be able to judge our party’s leadership when making their voting decisions:
The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe – the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.
We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage – and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
This much we pledge – and more. To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided there is little we can do – for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.
Do you think our current party leadership believes those words? Whatever our historic sins (by which some people like to define us), they are no worse than other prominent nations, and let’s agree here that our strengths have blessed the world far more than any of those nations and peoples who judge us. We are all very lucky to be Americans.
It’s time for mainstream Democrats to stand together for the truth of President Kennedy’s words, and reject those constant critics at home and abroad who would divide us. It’s time to stop voting Democrat until we have gained party leaders who want to stand with us – arm in arm with our Republican friends – as a single light before an increasingly dark and dangerous world.
It can be done if we act with courage now.