Opinion

Democrats Are Turning On Their Own History

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A month after the purge of the Confederate flag, Democrats are now beginning to scrutinize their own party’s history, and they are responding to the discoveries like rioters who protest injustice by burning down their own neighborhood.

Troubled that their party’s two founding fathers — Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson — were both slave-holders, and that Jackson was a zealous pursuer of Indian lands, state Democratic Parties in Georgia, Connecticut, Iowa, and New Jersey have erased the names of Jefferson and Jackson from their annual fund-raising dinners.

When the flag came down this summer, it was because it was the flag of the Confederacy. When statues of Lee and Davis have been removed and vandalized, it has been because they were Confederate leaders. How long can it be then, before someone demands an accounting from the political party of the Confederacy as well?

For which American institution better embodies our nation’s bitter racial past than the party of Jackson, Jefferson, and Jefferson Davis? Which party snakes so seamlessly through American history side-by-side with slavery and Jim Crow?

During its brief existence, the Confederacy had one President, one Vice-President, five Secretaries of War, three Secretaries of the Treasury, and four Secretaries of State. All fourteen of them were white men. All fourteen of them were Democrats.

Even the Twentieth Century presents problems. A writer for The Week speculated that Franklin Roosevelt would replace Jefferson and Jackson “in the Democratic pantheon,” but in a party that commands the votes of three-quarters of this nation’s Asian-Americans, how can the Democrats embrace the president of Japanese internment?

And for all the castigation of the Republicans for their use of the “Southern Strategy” for the last forty years, when members of #BlackLivesMatter met last week with Hillary Clinton, they confronted her about “her and her family’s history with the war on drugs” and “how she felt about her involvement in that violence that has been perpetuated.” (They were referring to the 1990s, not the 1890s.) The group’s leader then remarked that Hillary had never heard “a reflection on her [own] part in perpetuating white supremacist violence.” I bet she hadn’t.

By their own design, the demographic tidal wave that is hitting the nation is running right through the Democratic Party. This was encouraged by the party’s leadership as long as their voters knew their place as the party’s foot-soldiers and day-laborers, as long as the sea of diverse faces continued to cheer for the next white liberal millionaire at the top of the ticket.

But with every interruption of Martin O’Malley, with every stealing of the microphone from Bernie Sanders, it is becoming more and more apparent that it is the bleeding-heart white Democrat that is becoming an endangered species. They have bragged for two decades that America is changing, but they are being changed first. To the party’s diverse young constituency, the aging white Baby Boomers are no longer the heroes but the has-beens.

It has been fashionable to suppose that the Republican Party is the one facing demographic doom, but we are beginning to see evidence that the seasoned political observers miscalculated. While crowds turn out to hear both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump criticize free trade and open borders, Democratic representative Luis Gutierrez says that he doesn’t know if Sanders “likes immigrants because he doesn’t seem to talk about immigrants.” After Sanders’ last interruption, Van Jones criticized the “racial paternalism, arrogance and condescension” of “Sanders’ outraged supporters” and alleged that “the mostly white, liberal crowd ‘turned ugly.’” Perhaps we should begin to wonder if demographics will cause the party of the white working class to go the way of the Whigs.

It may not be this election cycle or next; it may take ten or twenty years, but with the end of the Age of Obama and the beginning of the Age of #BlackLivesMatter, the white faces of the Clintons and the Kerrys, the Sanders and the O’Malleys, are starting to look like the ghosts of the past.

Quentin B. Fairchild is an attorney who writes from Florida.  His columns have appeared in the Orlando Sentinel, the Fort Myers News-Press, and the Florida Weekly.