January 6,
2018
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Deputy DNC
chair Keith Ellison “Endorses” Antifa: The Ideological Evolution of the
Democratic Party and the Cowardice of the Republicans
Friends,
[First, let me wish you and yours a blessed Feast of the Epiphany--Old Christmas, the Feast of the Three Kings, 2018! This in reality is the final day of the "Twelve Days" of Christmas," and is celebrated in many countries with great solemnity.]
The
headline news that Keith Ellison, the Deputy Chairman of the Democratic
National Committee (DNC), has come out via his Twitter account with what in
every respect appears to be an off-hand endorsement of the violent domestic
terrorist group, Antifa—despite hardly any mention from the Mainstream Media
(wonder why?)—has made some waves and raised some eyebrows.
Here
is what The New York Post [January 3]
reported:
On Wednesday [the 3rd], Rep.
Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the Democratic National Committee’s deputy
chair, tweeted a photo of himself
cheekily smiling with a copy of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.” His
caption: “I just found the book that strike [sic] fear in the heart of
@realdonaldtrump.” [https://nypost.com/2018/01/04/keith-ellison-invites-antifa-to-the-party/]
So,
there he was, the first bona fide
Muslim elected to Congress (from Minnesota), holding a copy of Antifa’s
“handbook” for violent revolution, using it as a prop to attack the president,
and by extension anyone who dares to support him.
But,
wait, that was not the half of it. Newsweek—that
once iconic weekly magazine of news and opinion, now a shrieking mouthpiece for the radical Deep State—quickly
leapt to Ellison’s defense, suggesting—weakly—that his tweet may have been in jest:
“Newsweek was unable to reach Ellison for comment about his
tweet, but it is unclear whether or not he “endorsed” the book, or whether he
was simply making a joke.” [http://www.newsweek.com/keith-ellisons-antifa-tweet-spurs-fake-news-backlash-linking-him-terror-group-770958]
But
the most serious aspect of this incident according to Newsweek was not
Ellison’s use of the Antifa “handbook” to attack the president, but the “far
right wing” attack on Ellison for what he had tweeted:
“The deputy head of the Democratic National Committee
is under fire—again—from far-right activists after he posed with a copy of a
"antifa" book and suggested anti-fascist activism is President Donald
Trump's worst nightmare.”
Newsweek emphasized that the attacks on Ellison came from Fox News, anti-Muslims
and “conspiracy website(s),” and were—and let me quote it here—“racially and
politically motivated.”
And then, to finish this effort to
lesson Ellison’s “step in it” and divert attention away from what he said, the
once-respected weekly suggested that the Antifa may not be all that bad after
all. Maybe we’ve misjudged those idealistic Social Justice Warriors:
“Antifa” is not a group; it is a word used to describe
a means of protesting. The protesters involved in the movement have not been
even “formally classified” as a domestic terror organization by the federal
government. FBI Director
Christopher Wray said in late November that some men and women who are inspired
by “kind of an antifa ideology” were
being investigated by the FBI to the House Homeland Security Committee, but
that remark was embedded in a larger discussion about investigating white
supremacists—the very people “antifa” protesters are setting out to disrupt.’
Is
this, then, the face of the Democratic Party in 2018? The answer seems to be
“yes,” and despite the best efforts of Mainstream Media outlets to blame such kerfuffles
on the “far right” or “conspiracy theorists,” the simple fact is that the
center of gravity of the old and storied Democratic Party has moved to the far
left: it has accepted an extremist intellectual and operational template and
pushes a narrative that actually makes the views and vision of the old Soviet
Communists appear rather mild, even conservative, in comparison.
It is not just Ellison; no, by no means is he
alone. When the “grand old man” of “the Democracy” is now aging leftie Bernie
Sanders (although technically a “Socialist”)—when the leaders of the party
range from the ideologically daft, far left Senator Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren
to such extremist luminaries as Representatives Ted Lieu and Maxine Waters—when
as one of two major political formations in this country it now embraces a
forthright and literal “counter-reality,” an openly fraudulent and
disintegrative conception of society and culture—then what we behold is the undeniable
fact that the old Democratic Party that once could boast of a Senator Sam Ervin
(NC), or even a John F. Kennedy, no longer exists, has virtually disappeared.
And it would be utterly disingenuous to think otherwise.
Back
in the 1960s, here in North Carolina, there were still what we would call
“conservative” Democrats around, millions of them. The old Democratic Party,
since the decades prior to the War Between the States, had been something of an
evolving coalition that included a “Southern wing” (emphasizing states’ rights,
constitutionalism and local autonomy) and Northern allies (most especially from
the 1840s on, Irish Catholics and other immigrants, but also millions of
Northerners who had rejected the abolitionism and economic policies that
characterized the Republican Party).
That
coalition continued throughout the last half of the 19th century and
during the first five decades of the 20th. It was not just the
much-debated “civil rights” legislation of the 1960s and 1970s that terminated
it; rumblings of disaccord and division were apparent thirty years earlier with
the expansive government programs—and overreach—during the administration of
Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was prominent US senators like North Carolinian
Josiah Bailey and Virginian Harry Byrd, and later Georgian Richard Russell, who
led the “just-below-the-surface” opposition to FDR’s tentative attempts to
extend government power and authority.
But,
through it all and in spite of the growing friction, the South remained
Democratic, giving its votes to Adlai Stevenson (in 1952 and 1956), and, yes,
President Kennedy in 1960 (who, despite his public “liberal” face, knew well
how not to alienate his Southern support).
Many,
if not most, political scientists attribute the mass disaffection of
conservative Democrats, most particular Southerners, to the “civil rights” movement,
the resulting civil rights bills and the embrace of that agenda by the national
Democratic Party. Southerners, you see, were inherently “racist.” While this
explanation is superficially appealing, it neglects more profound reasons for
the exit of millions, not just of Southern Democrats but eventually other,
mostly working class and Midwest Democrats, from the party.
Rather,
it was—and is—the statist and increasingly authoritarian nature of the old
party of Grover Cleveland and Andrew Jackson—the party that once defended
states’ rights and individual liberty—a nature that has become readily visible
to even the most inattentive registered party member. It seems that when in
power, Democrat hierarchs (and increasingly Republican ones as well) seek to
extend the arms of government into every aspect of peoples’ lives, into every
facet of human endeavor—in education, in the family, in the area of personal
responsibility, even in what you can say…or think.
But
it is not just that. For more than a century the Democratic Party was a
defender of traditional morality. As a coalition of mostly Northern ethnic
descendants (e.g., Irish Catholics) and Southern conservatives (mostly
Protestants and Evangelicals), the party was in the forefront of opposition to advancing
liberal attacks on the nation’s traditional moral beliefs on abortion, same sex
marriage, gay rights, and birth control. Indeed, it was only sixty or so years
ago that the archetypal New England Republican and progenitor of the Bush family,
Prescott Bush, could take classic progressive positions on such
questions—positions that were more characteristic of the Republican Party than of
the Democrats of the period.
Just read a few lines
from the Wikipedia about him:
“Prescott Bush
was politically active on social issues. He was involved with the American Birth Control League as early as
1942, and served as the treasurer of the first national capital campaign of Planned
Parenthood in 1947 [....] From 1947 to 1950, he served as Connecticut Republican finance chairman, and was the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1950. A
columnist in Boston said that Bush ‘is coming on to be known as President
Truman’s Harry
Hopkins. Nobody knows
Mr. Bush and he hasn’t a Chinaman’s
chance.’ (Harry
Hopkins [a Communist fellow traveler] had been one of FDR‘s closest
advisors.) Bush’s ties with Planned Parenthood also hurt him in heavily
Catholic Connecticut, and were the basis of a last-minute campaign in churches
by Bush’s opponents; the family vigorously denied the connection, but Bush lost
to anti-abortion Democrat [William]
Benton by only 1,000 votes.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescott_Bush]
Such
sentiment dominated the Republican Party of the time and was certainly one of
the major reasons that the GOP made very few inroads in the South or among
working class, blue collar Catholics (and conservative Protestants) in states
like Pennsylvania, or West Virginia. And one could argue that despite the Goldwater and
Reagan revolutions of the 1960s and 1980s, the Nixonian strategy of a great
“silent majority” realignment and the resulting exit of conservative Democrats
from the party of their fathers, some of those “establishment” godfathers of
the GOP, despite paying lip service to the new “conservative” recruits and
emphasis, have never gone away….
Yet,
even if an ideological tussle has continued within the Republican Party, now
coated with a “Reaganesque” brush, the radical and extreme change in “the
Democracy” was even more notable. While even a Bill Clinton—a former governor
of conservative Arkansas—could run for president as a “moderate” in 1992 and
work with Republicans in Congress on what were ostensibly “conservative
reforms,” uttering opposition to such now-dominant narratives on same sex
marriage, for instance, NO Democrat
now, certainly no Democrat seeking higher office (outside of perhaps West
Virginia) could come close to approximating such public statements today.
In
fact, the long range revolution, or rather, the subversion and conversion of
the Democratic Party, which began many decades ago, has essentially secured
total control of one of this nation’s two major political parties, while
engendering abject fear in the opposing Republican Party, most of whose leaders
simply feign or avoid real opposition, or, increasingly “go along, to get
along” with the many of the more noxious propositions, whether on issues of
“sexual liberation” and feminism, or on illegal immigration, or on healthcare
and Obamacare. After all, their bread,
too, is “buttered by the Deep State.”
On
immigration, for example, NumbersUSA has just published the results of a major
national poll indicating that a very large majority of American citizens oppose
“chain migration” (57% to 30%). An even larger majority oppose the visa lottery
(60% to 29%) and insist that ANY form of legalization of status for younger
immigrants must include the strict application of E-verify rules (57% to 23%).
[https://www.numbersusa.com/blog/poll-most-voters-agree-trump-end-chain-migration-reduce-overall-immigration
] And most
citizens believe that overall legal immigration should be substantially
reduced. Yet, many Republicans in Congress, especially in the Senate (e.g.,
Lindsey Graham, John McCain, Jeff Flake, Thom Tillis, etc.) seem to take their
marching orders from the illegal immigration lobby and their big business
Chamber of Commerce donors.
Or,
take same sex marriage: prior to the much-debated and highly controversial
decision of the Supreme Court [2015], the campaign to make it legal was
enjoying limited success…success in certain characteristically “liberal”
states, but failing uniformly in other states. In North Carolina, for instance,
the amendment to the state constitution to ban same sex marriage (May 8, 2012),
was approved by a popular vote 61% to 39% (with a record 35% voter turnout and
majorities among white and black voters). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Carolina_Amendment_1]
Overwhelmingly
rejected by the voters in most states, it took the Supreme Court’s arbitrary
judicial fiat, based on
incomprehensibly obtuse and constitutionally specious reasoning, to make the
extreme views of a raucous and loud minority the “law of the land.”
In
these efforts, the Democratic Party has been in the forefront. Zealously
championing an “open door” policy on immigration, and counting on the
acquiescence and support of certain GOP “cultural traitors” (e.g., McCain,
Graham, Flake, Tillis), it pushes a “pathway to citizenship” for new, eventual
voters whom it hopes will compensate for the millions of real citizens who
continue to be disaffected by the party’s leftward plunge.
And
not only does it embrace the narrative of the extreme culturally Marxist Left such
topics as immigration, feminism and sexual liberation, and racism, with
overwhelming support in the media, the academy, and in most of our cultural
institutions, the Democratic Party has been able to set the agenda generally
for decades, subduing or scaring off most effective GOP opposition—at least
until the advent of Donald J. Trump.
That
is the lay of the land in 2018…and the incredible challenge that President
Trump faces, even in the best of circumstances (and discounting the numerous
voices both in and outside the White House who counsel him to lower the volume
and accede to at least some of the advances of the Revolution). And it also
illustrates the continuing evolution of Democratic Party to the extreme Left
under leaders like Keith Ellison and helps explain the fanatical and unbridled
opposition to the president and his agenda, even in its most mild or
superficial applications.
Dr.
Boyd D. Cathey
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