For the past sixty years, the Democrat Party has been trying to slap on enough makeup to paint itself as the party of tolerance and equality - and, in equal measure, to try to paint Republicans as the party of racism and xenophobia.
One of the modern Democrat party's key myths, in fact, is the notion of "Nixon's Southern Strategy" - the idea that in the wake of the Civil Rights Act, that "the racists came over to the GOP". And it's half-true - in 1968, Nixon won much of the South (except for the states won by segregationist Democrat George Wallace) - but then Nixon also won California and Vermont that year. And the south's Congressional delegation remained majority Democrat until 1994, and their state legislatures and governors until 2000. So - did all those "racist", er, race from the GOP to the Democrats when they moved down-ballot? Or was the whole thing a fabrication of Democrat message-mongers to deflect from the fact that they'd lost blue-collar whites?
The history of the two parties as re ract is easy and tempting to oversimplify - which is why so many, on both sides but mainly on the left, do so much oversimplifying and bending of history to fit the narrative. As Kevin D. Williamson wrote in 2012:
Built into this response is an intentional misrepresentation of what conservatism is. In essence, liberals look back at history, identify the social changes of which they approve, and define “conservatism” as opposition to those changes, since conservatism is, in this reading, opposition to social change. Thus the hilarious New York Times reference to those seeking to maintain Communism in post-Soviet Russia as “conservatives.”
This doesn’t hold up to very much scrutiny: The abolitionist movement, for example, was populated largely by people who would be viewed with contempt by modern liberals, because they were crusading Christians who sought to write their own interpretation of morality into the law. (Or, in the case of John Brown, militant anti-government activists pursuing Second Amendment remedies.) One of the things I like most about Frederick Douglass is his economic analysis of slavery. In Douglass’s view, one of the great crimes of slavery is that black Americans were denied the profit of their labor and the ability to invest and engage in enterprise. One of his great sources of bitterness was that even after emancipation, black Americans remained excluded from the economy, and therefore unable to better themselves. Lincoln’s views on the importance of a man’s ability to work to better his condition would be right at home on conservative talk radio today. Those of us who believe in the transformative power of free enterprise would do well to study Douglass — not that he was a perfect anticipation of the modern free-trader (I would not want to resurrect his views on tariffs), but because his values are our values. We too often think only in terms of abstractions such as growth and efficiency, but Douglass, because of his own experience, took a more personal view of things.
The whole piece is worth a read for its view on current events.
But speaking of current events, it's apparently becoming acceptable in Democrat circles to bag on immigrants.
The wrong immigrants, anyway.
Maxine Waters on Melania Trump:
"When he [Trump] talks about birthright, and he's going to undo the fact that the Constitution allows those who are born here, even if the parents are undocumented, they have a right to stay in America. If he wants to start looking so closely to find those who were born here and their parents were undocumented, maybe he ought to first look at Melania," Waters said on stage at a rally in Los Angeles, various videos posted to social media show.
"We don't know whether or not her parents were documented. And maybe we better just take a look."
And Jasmine Crockett - the modern Democratic Party's leading public intellectual - on Elon Musk:
Even before Musk took the helm at DOGE, far-left Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, slammed him during a Jan. 20 interview for not being born in the U.S. while suggesting he supported apartheid.
"[Musk] went from being the dork that was jumping around on stage to allegedly being this amazing genius that’s going to save this entire country, the country he wasn’t born in and a country that maybe he doesn’t agree with, the idea of a Democratic Republic, considering the fact that he may have been more so on the side of apartheid," said Crockett.
Musk, of course, left South Africa because he didn't want to do his compulsory military service to fight for apartheid - but that's inconvenient to the narrative.
So xenophobia apparently sells in the modern Democratic party.
