Nothing new under the sun

By Jim Terry

The Democratic Party. The party of: slavery, racism, hatred, the Ku Klux Klan, anger, tyranny, rebellion, socialism, progressivism, communist sympathizers, God haters, anti-Semites, Christian haters, and hypocrisy. The Democratic Party is the party of polarization, division and anarchy. It is a party that foments violence against its opponents. The motto of the Democratic party is: the end justifies the means. Have I left out anything?

Do we need any more evidence of the violence the Democratic Party foments than the attempted assassination of Rep. Steve Scalise, the Republican majority whip, and other Republicans, by a volunteer in the campaign of Democrat presidential candidate Bernie Sanders?

In a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire October 24, 2016, Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said this of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, "He became the first person, Republican or Democrat, who refused to say that he would respect the results of this election. Now, that is a direct threat to our democracy." Apparently her fellow Democrats disregarded her statement just as American voters disregarded her during the election.

In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump received forty-six per cent of the popular vote to Clinton's forty-eight per cent. He is the fifth person elected to the American presidency who lacked a popular vote win. However, what mattered was the electoral vote where Trump received fifty-seven per cent to Clinton's forty-three per cent. That is a landslide.

Almost immediately after the election returns were in, left wing Democrats rioted across the country, burning American flags, burning cars, breaking windows, chanting "not our president," and threatening to assassinate the new president, Donald Trump. Trump supporters were physically attacked in cities across the nation. And, this is still going on eight months after the election.

There is nothing out of the ordinary about democrats taking to physical violence when they don't get their way. In 1968, thousands of young left wing radicals rioted outside the International Amphitheater in Chicago, the site of the Democrat convention, in protest to the war in Vietnam, while the Democrat delegates inside the convention participated in their own violence with delegates and reporters being beaten and knocked down.

But the violence of the Democratic Party goes back much further than 1968.

In the presidential election of 1860, four candidates sought the office: Abraham Lincoln, of the Republican Party; John Breckenridge of the Southern Democrat Party; John Bell of the Constitutional Union Party; and Stephen Douglas of the Democratic Party.

Lincoln received only thirty-nine percent of the popular vote, while he won the electoral vote with fifty-nine percent. Compare those numbers to the 2016 election results. Lincoln carried

fifty-four percent of the states. In 2016, Donald Trump carried sixty per cent of the states. Yet, Democrats today cannot accept the results of the 2016 election just as Democrats could not accept the results of the 1860 election.

Since the most important issue for Democrats in 1860 was the continuation and expansion of slavery in the United States, they would not accept the new anti-slavery president and his party-Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans.

Democrats controlled politics across the South and had controlled national politics for several years prior to the 1860 election. Southern Democrats viewed the loss to the Republicans as an end to their way of life and prosperity-the prosperity earned from slave labor. And, they expressed the view that they, now the minority in the land, would not succumb to the will of the majority. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, is said to have expressed this view, "We seceded to rid ourselves of the rule of the majority."

After Lincoln's victory, several southern states, which had been threatening secession, some for a decade, began to hold conventions where they laid out their grievances in what was called their Declaration of Causes. These declarations spelled out the grievances against the United States and justified secession.

Georgia's Declaration contained a paragraph which summed up the attitude of the southern states, "For forty years this question has been considered and debated in the halls of Congress, before the people, by the press, and before the tribunals of justice. The majority of the people of the North in 1860 decided it in their own favor. We refuse to submit to that judgment,..."

All the southern states eventually passed Ordinances of Secession which declared their severance from the United States. Some of these ordinances also listed grievances against the United States.

Alabama clearly stated in its Ordinance of Secession why it was leaving, "Whereas, the election of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin to the offices of president and vice-president of the United States of America, by a sectional party, avowedly hostile to the domestic institutions and to the peace and security of the people of the State of Alabama... is a political wrong of so insulting and manacing (sic) a character as to justify the people of the State of Alabama in the adoption of prompt and decided measures for their future peace and security..."

Seven southern states called conventions and passed their Ordinances of Secession by February 1, 1861- more than a month before Lincoln's inauguration. Several of those states submitted the proposal to the voters. Six of those states met to form the government of the Confederate States of America on February 9, 1861, and elected Jefferson Davis as president. Texas joined the confederacy after this meeting because the vote to ratify its Ordinances of Secession wasn't held until February 23, 1861.

In his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861, Lincoln spoke directly to the actions of the southern states:

Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it, does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.

Lincoln, by calling the action of the southern states anarchy, had correctly named the Democrat Party the party of anarchy, for it was the Democrat Party that controlled the politics of the South. It was the Democrat Party through its political action of secession from the United States that started the American Civil War in order to perpetuate slavery. And today, the Democrat Party retains not only that label, but the same disrespect for authority and the law as it did 156 years ago.

After the Civil War and Reconstruction, when Democrats regained political control of the southern states-from about 1877 to the early 1970s- although they had lost the slavery issue, Democrats began a pogrom of sorts with their Jim Crow laws. These laws created segregation of the races throughout the South. Even after the Democratic South suffered such devastating loss in the Civil War, Democrats still didn't understand, or wouldn't understand the concept of freedom and liberty for all.

Ninety-four years after the Civil War began, the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. Congress began passing legislation on civil rights. The racist laws of the Democrat Party finally passed away.

Ironically, the battle now on to eradicate the southern heritage of those who fought for the Confederacy is fueled by Democrats. In their zeal to remove hurtful and offensive reminders of the past, Democrats are removing reminders of Democrat heroes and Democrat institutions. But, history cannot be changed by destroying reminders of past events.

I oppose these efforts to eradicate the past. These monuments are symbols and affirmation of the pro-slavery, racist, anarchy of the Democratic Party and they should be kept as a reminder of that.

The bloodiest conflict in American history began 156 years ago because Democrats would not accept the election of a Republican president. Will today's Democrats push this nation into another civil war because they will not accept the election of a Republican president?

© Jim Terry