* One of America’s two major political parties
The Democratic Party is presently the largest major political party in the United States. The words “Democracy” and “Democratic” come from the Greek roots demos (“the people”) and kratein (“to rule”). As of June 2020, 34% of registered voters identified as independents, 33% as Democrats, and 29% as Republicans. On the right-left political spectrum, the Democratic Party currently is far to the left of its chief rival, the Republican Party, and also well to the left of the Democratic Party of Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. The Democrats themselves have a particularly far-left faction in the House of Representatives which is formally organized into the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Other far-left Democrat factions in the House include the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, both of which are firmly rooted in the dogmas of identity politics.
The Democratic Party traces its ancestry to the original Republican Party (initially known as the “Democratic-Republican Party”) founded in 1794 by Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809). The Democratic Party started to assume its modern form during the War of 1812. By the 1820s John Adams’ son, President John Quincy Adams, had become a Democrat. He was opposed by Tennessee Democratic-Republican President Andrew Jackson (1829-37), whose anti-National Bank faction became the core of the Democratic Party. From the mid-1830s until the Civil War, Democrats formed America’s majority party. Meanwhile the Federalist Party disintegrated, replaced as America’s opposition party from 1833 until 1856 by the new party co-founded by Adams, the Whigs, dedicated to high tariffs and protectionism. Democratic President James Polk led the U.S. into and through the Mexican-American War that added today’s Southwestern states to America’s map.
In 1856 the new Republican Party mobilized around opposition to slavery and ran its first presidential candidate, California U.S. Senator John C. Fremont. Four years later, owing to a party schism that put two rival Democrats on the ballot, Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected President by a plurality and led the Union during the Civil War.
Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator and a former aide to Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan, has chronicled the following vital facts about the Democratic Party of 1800 through the 1960s:
Republicans won most of the presidential elections between 1864 and 1912, when a schism between President William Howard Taft and former progressive Republican President Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican vote and led to the election and re-election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Republicans returned to power following World War I, but during the Great Depression, beginning in 1932, were beaten in four elections by Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), who built his New Deal coalition of liberals and Southern segregationists. In the “Solid South,” Democrats for generations grew up in one-party, Democrat states. As Michael Bitzer, associate professor of politics and history at Catawba College, notes: “For nearly 100 years following the end of the Civil War, the party that dominated the South was the Democratic Party, and the GOP was despised…. [I]f you wanted to hold any political office in the South (with the notable exception of east Tennessee), you had to be a Democrat. Thus the expression ‘yellow-dog Democrat,’ as in ‘I’d rather vote for a yellow-dog than a Republican’, [prevailed] for generations.”
Grover Cleveland, who served two terms as U.S. President in the late 1800s, said that freeing the slaves had no more purged black people “of their racial and slave-bred imperfections and deficiencies than it changed the color of their skin. I believe that among the nearly nine millions of negroes who have been intermixed with our citizenship there is still a grievous amount of ignorance, a sad amount of viciousness and a tremendous amount of laziness and thriftlessness.” Cleveland suggested that segregation was not born out of “prejudice”, but out of “racial instinct.” And he praised this “racial instinct” for having “condoned the negro’s share in the humiliation and spoliation of the South” when it was “deluged by the perilous flood of indiscriminate, unintelligent and blighting negro suffrage.” Cleveland urged his listeners to be “considerate of the feelings and even the prejudice or racial instincts of our white fellow-countrymen.”
FDR died in office in 1945 and was succeeded by his Vice President Harry Truman (1945-53), who won election on his own in 1948.
In 1957, congressional Republicans sponsored civil rights legislation that was opposed by Democrats.
In 1960, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy (1961-63) was elected President in a close vote decided by Texas and Illinois, where historians agree that Democratic ballot fraud was extensive. Kennedy subsequently sent the first 16,000 armed U.S. troops into South Vietnam, something his predecessor Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower had refused to do.
In a January 2010 Wall Street Journal article titled “The Fall of The House of Kennedy,” Daniel Henninger pointed out what had been a watershed moment for the Democratic Party 48 years earlier:
“In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force. This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy’s order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities. This in turn led to the fantastic growth in membership of the public employee unions—The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the teachers’ National Education Association. They broke the public’s bank. More than that, they entrenched a system of taking money from members’ dues and spending it on political campaigns. Over time, this transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency.
“They became different than the party of FDR, Truman, Meany and Reuther. That party was allied with the fading industrial unions, which in turn were tethered to a real world of profit and loss. The states in the North and on the coasts turned blue because blue is the color of the public-sector unions. This tax-and-spend milieu became the training ground for their politicians.”
Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963 and was succeeded by his Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69). Johnson signed landmark civil rights legislation, passed in Congress with a higher percentage of Republican than Democratic votes. Johnson also greatly expanded JFK’s war in Vietnam and military conscription.
Johnson’s pro-war Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesota liberal, was defeated in 1968 by Richard Nixon.
In the aftermath of Khrushchev’s 1956 revelations about Stalin’s horrific abuses, most of the world’s Communist parties abandoned Stalinism and, to varying degrees, adopted the moderately reformist positions of the new Soviet First Secretary. The American far left likewise sought to distance itself from Stalin, rebranding itself as the so-called “New Left,” a counter-cultural movement that would hold fast to the overriding ideals of Marxism-Leninsim while formally abjuring the horrific crimes of Stalinism. But before long, this New Left would romanticize the neo-Stalinists of the Third World, embracing a whole new set of totalitarian heroes such as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, and Daniel Ortega.
The core of the early New Left was formed by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical organization that aspired to overthrow America’s democratic institutions, remake its government in a Marxist image, and help America’s enemies emerge victorious on the battlefield in Vietnam. Many key SDS members were “red-diaper babies,” children of parents who had been Communist Party members or Communist activists in the 1930s.
As U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War escalated in 1965, SDS membership grew exponentially and the New Left became increasingly radicalized with anti-American hatred and a growing tendency to pose conflicts in terms of “us” and “them” – “the movement” on one side, and “the system” or “the establishment” on the other. Liberals were reviled as part of the latter faction, and deviation from the radical agenda was viewed as political treason. For example, New Leftists excoriated the black pacifist Bayard Rustin for advocating coalition politics and opposing “one-sided anti-American” rhetoric; Staughton Lynd accused Rustin of “apostasy.”
By the middle of 1965, New Leftists no longer referred to themselves as part of American society, rarely if ever using the pronouns “us” or “our” when referring to American people or ideals. For a growing number, nothing less than revolutionary transformation, by way of violence in the streets, would suffice.
By the early 1970s, however, the openly defiant and revolutionary New Left had spent its political capital and was a dying movement. But its adherents remained committed to the cause, altering their tactics so as to work within the political and social system in a manner the New Left had previously chosen not to do. These latter-day leftists incorporated the tactics of Saul Alinsky, seeking to change society by first infiltrating its major institutions – the schools, the media, the churches, the entertainment industry, the labor unions, and the three branches of government – and then implementing policies from those positions of power.
Most notably, the ex-New Leftists found a home in the Democratic Party. By 1972, they had seized control of the party, as evidenced by the nomination of George McGovern as the Democratic presidential candidate on an antiwar platform that cast America’s military involvement in Southeast Asia as an immoral, imperialistic venture. Though McGovern lost 49 of the 50 states in the 1972 election, he and the anti-war radicals who flocked to his campaign moved the Democratic Party dramatically to the left. By way of its political ascendancy within the Democratic Party, the New Left, in a political sense, effectively killed off the classical centrist liberals who had vigorously opposed Communist totalitarianism. After accomplishing this parricide, the New Left occupied the corpse of authentic liberalism (i.e., the Democratic Party) and appropriated the name, “liberalism.”
A June 1972 break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex by operatives connected to the Nixon White House led to a scandal upon which the Democrats capitalized, eventually forcing Nixon’s resignation. Eight of the eleven special prosecutors who toppled Nixon were members of the Kennedy brothers’ inner circle and had served on their staffs. Senator Ted Kennedy was the Chair of the Judiciary Committee that prosecuted Nixon, who resigned in 1974 to avoid formal impeachment by the Democrat-controlled House. Nixon’s appointed successor, Vice President Gerald Ford, was defeated in the 1976 presidential election by Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter (1977-81).
During Carter’s single-term presidency, inflation soared to double-digit levels. Carter withdrew American support from the Shah of Iran (whose government had given rights to women and was a U.S. ally) on the grounds that he was a human rights violator. Carter’s destabilization of the Shah’s regime led in 1979 to the theocratic and radical Islamist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. The Carter-induced toppling of the Shah also precipitated the Soviet invasion of adjacent Afghanistan that same year, which empowered Osama bin Laden, the Islamist leader of the anti-Soviet guerrilla group al Qaeda.
In 1980 American voters ejected President Carter and elected Republican Ronald Reagan, who served two terms. Reagan, who won both the 1980 and 1984 elections in massive landslides, had been a passionate New Deal Democrat. Explaining his disenchantment with the Democratic Party’s gradual evolution into a leftist entity, Reagan said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me.”
Reagan was succeeded in the White House by his Vice President George H.W. Bush. In 1992 Bush was defeated by Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, who promised to “end welfare as we know it” and called himself a “New Democrat.” Upon taking office, Clinton immediately forced into law the largest tax increase in American history, and made it retroactive. Clinton also attempted to force socialized medicine into law — a move that, had it been successful, would have nationalized fully one-seventh of the American economy. Even the restored Democratic majority in Congress balked at this plan and refused to pass it.
In 1994 the voters swept Democrats out of power in both the House and Senate. In 1996 Clinton was reelected with less than 50 percent of all votes cast. His second term was hobbled by scandal and perjury that made him the first elected President in American history to be impeached by the House of Representatives.
As the Democratic candidate for President in 2000, Clinton’s Vice President Al Gore lost to Republican George W. Bush. Democrats also reclaimed control of the U.S. Senate, then lost it again in the 2002 election.
During Bush’s first term, Democratic Party politicians demanded that he enact Campaign Finance Reform, ostensibly to reduce the influence of wealthy contributors to political candidates. But the Democrats included in the legislation a tiny provision for so-called “527” organizations that would allow ultra-wealthy radicals such as their ally George Soros to contribute unlimited sums of money to the parties and candidates of their choice. The leaders of one of these “Shadow Party” organizations, MoveOn.org, jointly said of the Democratic Party following the 2004 election (in which Democrat John Kerry lost by three million votes to George W. Bush): “Now it’s our Party: we bought it, we own it….”
In February 2005 the party’s ruling Democratic National Committee (DNC) selected as its new Chairman former Vermont Governor and failed 2004 Presidential primary candidate Howard Dean.
As American soldiers encountered a fanatical Islamic enemy on the battlefields of Iraq beginning in 2003, prominent Democrats condemned President Bush as a deceiver who had led them to war through “lies;” as a destroyer of American liberties; as a desecrator of the Constitution; as a usurper who had stolen his high office; as the architect of an “unnecessary war;” as a “fraud;” as a leader who “betrayed us;” and as a president who cynically sent the flower of American youth to die in foreign lands in order to enrich himself and his friends.
These charges were made not by fringe elements of the political spectrum, but by national leaders of the Democratic Party, including a former president, a former vice president and presidential candidate, and three members of the United States Senate (among them a one-time presidential candidate). These attacks occurred not after years of fighting in Iraq, when some might regard the result as a “quagmire,” but during the first months of the conflict, when the fighting had barely begun. They were made not over a war that was forced on Americans, or surreptitiously launched without their consent, but a war authorized by both political parties. They were directed not merely at its conduct, but at the rationale of the war itself—in other words, at the very justice of the American cause.
Although they voted for the bill to authorize the war, leaders of the Democratic Party, such as Senator Hillary Clinton, turned around after it was in progress and claimed that it was “George Bush’s war,” not theirs. They argued that Bush alone had decided to remove Saddam Hussein, when in fact it was a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who had made regime change the policy of the United States.
Four years before Bush ordered American troops into Iraq, Clinton had asked Congress to pass an “Iraq Liberation Act,” which specifically called for regime change by force. To emphasize the seriousness with which he regarded the threat that Saddam posed, Clinton ordered the American military to fire more than four hundred cruise missiles into Iraq. The Iraq Liberation Act authorized American aid for any insurgent group that was ready to overthrow the regime. It was ratified by both political parties—Democrats and Republicans—with barely a dissenting vote.
In late 2002, when President Bush asked Congress to authorize the use of force to drive Saddam from power, a Democratic majority in the Senate supported his request. When American forces entered Iraq on March 19, 2003, a large majority of the Democratic leadership, including the former president, his secretaries of state and defense, and his entire national security team, supported the invasion. When the Iraqi regime was overthrown three weeks later, the Democratic leadership joined in the celebration, although some dissenters, such as Representative Nancy Pelosi, were already complaining that it cost too much.
But by mid-2003, many leading Democrats were contending that the war was “unnecessary” because Iraq posed “no threat.” They maintained that because the war in Iraq was a war of “choice,” it was therefore immoral.
Above all, they claimed that the president had manipulated intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and thus the premise of the war. But copies of the National Intelligence Estimate on which the president’s decision was based were provided to every Democratic senator who voted for or against it. The findings were confirmed by government intelligence agencies around the world, including those of France, Britain, Russia, and Jordan. In other words, President Bush could not have manipulated the intelligence on which the vote was based and the war was actually authorized.
It was July 2003, only four months after American forces had entered Iraq, when the Democratic Party launched its first all-out attack on the president’s credibility and the morality of the war. The opening salvos were reported in a New York Times article: “Democratic presidential candidates offered a near-unified assault today on President Bush’s credibility in his handling of the Iraq War, signaling a shift in the political winds by aggressively invoking arguments most had shunned since the fall of Baghdad.”
While American forces battled al-Qaeda and Ba’athist insurgents in the Iraqi capital, the Democratic National Committee released a television ad that focused not on winning those battles, but on the very legitimacy of the war. The theme of the ad was “Read His Lips: President Bush Deceives the American People.” The alleged deception was sixteen words that had been included in the State of the Union address which he delivered on the eve of the conflict.
These words summarized a British intelligence report claiming that Iraq had attempted to acquire fissionable uranium in the African state of Niger, thus indicating Saddam’s (well-known) intentions to develop nuclear weapons. The report was subsequently confirmed by a bipartisan Senate committee and a British investigative commission, but not until many months had passed and the Democratic attacks had taken their toll. On the surface, the attacks were directed at the president’s credibility for repeating the British claim. But their clear implication was to question the decision to go to war—in other words, to cast doubt on the credibility of the American cause. If Saddam had not sought fissionable uranium in Niger, it was suggested, then the White House had lied in describing Saddam as a threat.
In the midst of a war, and in the face of a determined terrorist resistance in Iraq, Democrats had decided to launch an attack on America’s presence on the field of battle. This separated their assault from the normal criticism of war policies. Senator John Edwards, then a candidate for the Democrats’ 2004 presidential nomination, had voted to authorize the war and was still claiming to support it. In an interview with The New York Times, he identified the significance of the Democrats’ attack: “The most important attribute that any president has is his credibility—his credibility with the American people, with its allies and with the world.” But even as Edwards said this, he joined the Democrats’ attack, publicly insinuating that the president was a liar who had deceived the American people on the gravest issue imaginable. “When the president’s own statements are called into question,” Edwards explained to the reporter, “it’s a very serious matter.”
No president can marshal his nation’s resources if his people distrust him or don’t believe in their own cause. To attack a president’s credibility in the middle of a war, over a matter as ambiguous as a sixteen-word summary of an allied intelligence report, is an attempt to undermine the war itself. General Ion Mihai Pacepa was the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to defect from the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. In a commentary about the attacks on President Bush during the war in Iraq, Pacepa recalled in an August 2007 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal: “Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels.”
During the Vietnam War, General Pacepa wrote, Soviet intelligence had “spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America’s presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren’t facts. They were our tales, but … as Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.”
Nor did this Soviet campaign to discredit the United States stop with Vietnam. As Pacepa explained: “The final goal of our anti-American offensive was to discourage the United States from protecting the world against communist terrorism and expansion. Sadly, we succeeded. After U.S. forces precipitously pulled out of Vietnam, the victorious communists massacred some two million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Another million tried to escape, but many died in the attempt. This tragedy also created a credibility gap between America and the rest of the world, damaged the cohesion of American foreign policy, and poisoned domestic debate in the United States.”
Dissent is a cherished and justly protected right in a democracy. But it is also a privilege. The right to dissent exists only on condition that the government that guarantees it is able to defend itself against enemies who would destroy it. No bulwark has been more durable or more important to the stability and survival of America’s democratic order than the solidarity of its leaders in wartime. A president under relentless attack from the domestic opposition has less political space for flexible response. The more severe the attacks, the more limited his room for political maneuver. If the Bush administration was slow to admit error in the Iraq War, or to take corrective measures on the field of battle, the unrestrained attacks on its integrity and motives were undoubtedly a significant factor.
The reckless criticism by Democratic opponents of the war also buoyed enemy morale.
Meanwhile, Democrats offered an explanation for their defection from a war that they originally supported: the president was to blame. But this is a claim that will not stand up to even the most cursory inspection. Between the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, which the Democrats supported, and their attacks on the legitimacy of the war, which began in June, three months later, no event transpired on the battlefield and no change took place in the administration’s war policy that would explain their defection. What changed was the internal politics of the Democratic Party, and this was a direct result of the antiwar campaign organized by the Left.
By coincidence, the buildup to the war took place during the early stages of a presidential-primary campaign, in the winter and spring of 2003. By June, the candidacy of an obscure Vermont governor named Howard Dean, a veteran of the anti-Vietnam Left, had gathered such momentum that he appeared to have become the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. It was this political fact that precipitated an about-face on the war by more prominent Democrats, such as John Kerry and John Edwards, who eventually captured the party’s nominations. It was the antiwar radicals in the Dean campaign, not any events on the ground in Iraq, that produced the change in the position of leading Democrats and eventually of the Democratic Party as a whole. It was the political force of the antiwar movement, rather than any fact about the war, that explains the change.
In attempting to potray the war in Iraq as a sinister plot of the Bush administration, Democrats claimed that it was a distraction from what would have been a legitimate war with the Islamic terrorists who had attacked America on 9/11. “The issue is the war they got us into,” Nancy Pelosi told 60 Minutes in October 2006, just before she became Speaker of the House. “If the president wants to say the war in Iraq is part of the war on terror, he’s not right.” The dialog continued as follows:
60 Minutes: Do you not think that the war in Iraq now, today, is the war on terror?
Pelosi: No. The war on terror is the war in Afghanistan.
60 Minutes: But you don’t think that the terrorists have moved into Iraq now?
Pelosi: They have. The jihadists in Iraq. But that doesn’t mean we stay there. They’ll stay there as long as we’re there.
60 Minutes: You mean if we leave Iraq, the terrorists will leave?
Pelosi: Yes.
Democrats claimed that the War on Terror began as a blunder committed by the Bush administration, even an invention of the Bush administration, rather than an actual war that was declared on America by Osama bin Laden and the global forces of Islamofascism. This was the point of the celebrated statement that candidate John Edwards made in 2007, during the presidential primary campaign: “The war on terror is a slogan designed only for politics,” Edwards claimed. “It is not a strategy to make America safe. It’s a bumper sticker, not a plan.” And further: “We need a post-Bush, post-9-11, post-Iraq military that is mission-focused on protecting Americans from 21st century threats, not misused for discredited ideological purposes. By framing this as a war, we have walked right into the trap the terrorists have set—that we are engaged in some kind of clash of civilizations and a war on Islam.”
The same point had been made by the billionaire Democrat financier George Soros a year earlier. In a Wall Street Journal article, he explained that the War on Terror was “a misleading figure of speech [which] applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts—Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia—a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world . . . [W]e can escape it only if we Americans repudiate the war on terror as a false metaphor.”
In this view, George Bush and America were responsible for the war that radical Islam had launched against the United States.
In the midterm elections of 2006, Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. In 2008 they increased their majorities in both houses of Congress. Also in 2008, they took control of the White House when Barack Obama was elected President.
On December 8, 2009, former DNC Chairman Howard Dean said that “cooperation” between European socialists and the Democratic Party had “intensified significantly” over the preceding several years and involved “regular contact” at “Congress, Senate, party and foundation levels.” He added that “efforts have been remarkable from both sides.”
In April 2010, the official website of the Social Democrats USA (SDUSA) revealed that organization’s ties to the Democratic Party. Describing itself as a “Party Within a Party,” SDUSA stated the following:
“The Social Democrats, USA kept the name Socialist Party for our political arm because we are the party of Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Helen Keller, Carl Sandburg, Norman Thomas, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and thousands of people who worked to build the civil rights and trade union movements in this country. Many good folks gave their lives in these movements.
“The Socialist Party, USA, in 1956, chose to stop running candidates of its own, except on rare occasion. During the 1960’s, we began to work in the Democratic Party. This is where our allies in the civil rights and trade union movement worked and continue to work politically. We are proud of what we helped accomplish within the Democratic Party, particularly the civil rights legislation and anti-poverty programs of the 1960’s. The struggle continues….
“Our movement has been involved in the left wing of the Democratic Party since 1947. Socialist Party members helped found Americans for Democratic Action. ADA is this country’s premiere ‘anti-Communist, liberal’ organization. We are proud of our long relationships with Eleanor Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, and others. We look forward to forging a good working relationship with our fellow pro-labor, anti-totalitarian, left Democrats.”
Late in 2010, Communist Party USA member C.J. Atkins called for his comrades to drop their “Communist” label, so that they could work more effectively inside the Democratic Party. Soon thereafter, Joe Sims, co-editor of the CPUSA publication Peoples World, acknowledged not only that collaboration with the Democrats “will be an area of engagement for those wanting to make a difference,” but also that communists might someday be able to “capture” the Democratic Party entirely. Sims warned, however, against dissolving the CPUSA entirely into the Democratic Party. Rather, he advised his organization to remain a separate entity, working both inside and outside the Democratic Party as circumstances required.
In January 2011, Washington Examiner executive editor Mark Tapcsott enumerated the forces and special-interest groups that had come to dominate the Democratic Party:
“[B]ig Lawyers … and three other special interests — Big Labor union leaders, Big Green environmentalists, and Big Insiders with billions of dollars in personal wealth and foundation grants — together essentially dictate what Democrats can and cannot support on many key public policy issues…. These four groups provide most of the campaign funding and workers, political and policy expertise, legal and regulatory muscle, and strategic communications for the Democratic Party. Consequently, most Democrats are prisoners of a narrow agenda of constantly growing government budgets, regulation and taxing. have influenced the agenda of the Democratic Party and moved the party far to the left of mainstream America. These special interests have used the power of the purse to co-opt the agenda of the Democratic Party vis-a-vis campaign contributions and independent expenditures.”
On September 4, 2012, The Weekly Standard reported:
The 2012 Democratic party will officially adopt an extreme position on the issue of abortion on Tuesday. According to a copy of the party platform, which was released online just before midnight on Monday, “The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay.”
That last part–“regardless of ability to pay”–is an endorsement of taxpayer-funded abortions, a policy that President Obama has personally endorsed. Obama wants Medicaid to pay directly for elective abortions, and Obamacare will allow beneficiaries to use federal subsidies to purchase health care plans that cover elective abortions.
According to a 2009 Quinnipiac poll, 72 percent of voters oppose public funding of abortion and 23 percent support it. In other words, public funding of abortion–a policy President Obama actively supports–is as unpopular as banning abortion in the case of rape, a policy on which the media have focused much attention over the past two weeks despite the fact that neither presidential candidate supports it.
The 2012 Democratic party also endorses an unrestricted right to abortion-on-demand. According to the platform, on the issue of abortion “there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way.”
On September 4, 2012, FreeBeacon.com reported the following:
Several pro-Israel sections of the 2008 Democratic Party platform have been removed from the 2012 platform—on Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, and Hamas. The new platform represents another shift by the Obama Democrats toward the Palestinian position on key issues in the peace process.
For Jerusalem, the new platform has been brought into line with the Obama administration’s policy of not recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and supporting its division. Jerusalem is unmentioned in the 2012 document, whereas the 2008 and 2004 Democratic Party platforms declared “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel…It should remain an undivided city accessible to people of all faiths.” The Obama administration’s refusal to recognize Jerusalem has been a point of significant controversy in recent months.
On the issue of Palestinian refugees, the new document has removed language from the 2004 and 2008 platforms specifying that Palestinian “refugees” should be settled in a future Palestinian state, not in Israel.
The 2004 platform: “The creation of a Palestinian state should resolve the issue of Palestinian refugees by allowing them to settle there, rather than in Israel.”
The 2008 platform: The peace process “should resolve the issue of Palestinian refugees by allowing them to settle there, rather than in Israel.”
The 2012 platform contains no language on the matter.
Previously, Obama has incorporated the Palestinian positions on Jerusalem and borders into his administration’s policies. It appears that with his party’s new platform, he is also doing so with refugees.
Gone as well is the language from 2008 on the terrorist group Hamas, which currently controls the Gaza Strip. That platform declared, “The United States and its Quartet partners should continue to isolate Hamas until it renounces terrorism, recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and abides by past agreements.”
The 2012 platform contains no mention of Hamas.
Previous platforms also contained promises to maintain Israel’s “qualitative military edge” in the region. The 2008 platform, for example, spoke of a “commitment which requires us to ensure that Israel retains a qualitative edge for its national security and its right to self-defense.” The 2012 platform mentions only that “[t]he administration has also worked to ensure Israel’s qualitative military edge in the region,” with no commitment to doing so in the future.
In January 2015, Communist Party USA National Committee chairman John Bachtell published an essay in People’s World stating that American communists were eager to work with the Democratic Party in order to advance their goals. For further details about this alliance, click here.
In July 2015, pressure from the NAACP caused Connecticut’s state Democratic Party to vote unanimously to remove the names of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from its annual Jefferson Jackson Bailey fundraising dinner. At issue was the NAACP’s complaint that the two former presidents owned slaves, as well as Jackson’s role in the removal of Native Americans from the southeastern United States. Scot X. Esdaile, the head of Connecticut’s NAACP, said: “I would applaud the current leaders in Connecticut in making the symbolic first step and striving to right the wrongs of the past. You can’t right all the wrongs, but I think it’s a symbolic gesture of our support for their party.” “I see it as the right thing to do,” agreed Nick Balletto, the party’s first-year chairman. “I wasn’t looking to be a trailblazer or set off a trend that’s going to affect the rest of the country. Hopefully, they’ll follow suit when they see it’s the right thing to do.”
In the summer of 2015, the Democratic National Committee officially endorsed the increasingly violent Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Specifically, the Democrats embraced a statement condemning the U.S. for its allegedly systemic police violence against African-Americans. A draft of the BLM statement included the following language:
WHEREAS, the Democratic Party believes in the American Dream and the promise of liberty and justice for all, and we know that this dream is a nightmare for too many young people stripped of their dignity under the vestiges of slavery, Jim Crow and White Supremacy; and
WHEREAS, we, the Democratic National Committee, have repeatedly called for race and justice – demilitarization of police, ending racial profiling, criminal justice reform, and investments in young people, families, and communities — after Trayvon Martin, after Michael Brown, after Tamir Rice, after Freddie Gray, after Sandra Bland, after Christian Taylor, after too many others lost in the unacceptable epidemic of extrajudicial killings of unarmed black men, women, and children at the hands of police …
WHEREAS, without systemic reform this state of unrest jeopardizes the well-being of our democracy and our nation;
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the DNC joins with Americans across the country in affirming “Black lives matter” and the “say her name”[2] efforts to make visible the pain of our fellow and sister Americans as they condemn extrajudicial killings of unarmed African American men, women and children …
In the document, the DNC also “renews our previous calls to action and urges Congress to adopt systemic reforms at state, local, and federal levels to prohibit law enforcement from profiling based on race, nationality, ethnicity, or religion, to minimize the transfer of excess equipment (like the military-grade vehicles and weapons that were used to police peaceful civilians in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri) to federal and state law enforcement; and to support prevention programs that give young people alternatives to incarceration.”
The DNC delegates approved the foregoing resolution on the same day that a white sheriff’s deputy in Texas was shot to death by a black suspect in an unprovoked attack. The next day, Black Lives Matter demonstrators marched near the Minnesota state fair chanting violent anti-police slogans and carrying signs reading “End White Supremacy.” Activists shouted “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon” — a reference to dead police officers in body bags — while walking (protected by police) on a highway south of the fairgrounds.
In September 2019, the Democratic Party launched an impeachment inquiry against Republican President Donald Trump. The process ultimately resulted in a party-line vote to impeach in the Democrat-majority House of Representatives, followed by acquittal in the Senate trial. For details about this impeachment process from start to finish, click here.
At the Munich Security Conference in February 2020, several Democrat members of Congress met privately with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif without informing, or obtaining approval from, the State Department of President Donald Trump. One of those Democrats, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, defended his actions in an online post: “I have no delusions about Iran — they are our adversary, responsible for the killing of thousands of Americans and unacceptable levels of support for terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East. But I think it’s dangerous to not talk to your enemies … A lack of dialogue leaves nations guessing about their enemy’s intentions, and guessing wrong can lead to catastrophic mistakes.” Asserting that “if Trump isn’t going to talk to Iran, then someone should,” Murphy said that he had: (a) asked Zarif whether Iran’s reprisals against the U.S. for the recent killing of the Iranian terrorist general Qasem Soleimani were over; (b) told Zarif that it would be “unacceptable” if Iran-affiliated groups in Iraq were to attack American forces; (c) raised the issue of American prisoners held by Iran; and (d) discussed the recent increase in attacks by the Houthis, an Iranian proxy group based in Yemen.
In his online post as well, Murphy said that “Congress is a co-equal branch of government, responsible along with the Executive for setting foreign policy.” But that is not true, as The Clarion Project explains:
“It is for this reason that Murphy and other Democrats were wrong in meeting with Zarif…. [A]ccording to the Constitution, it is the responsibility of the executive branch of government (the president) to set foreign policy. It is the responsibility of the Senate to ratify treaties (which the Obama administration brazenly circumvented when making the Iran deal). In fact, there is a law on the books that addresses such meetings. The Logan Act, promulgated in 1799, prohibits private citizens from conducting official diplomacy and makes it a felony for unauthorized Americans to negotiate with governments in disputes with the U.S.
“The U.S. cut off diplomatic relations with Iran after President Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear agreement in May 2018. Since then, the U.S.’ policy has been to isolate and bankrupt Iran – the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world – through a ‘maximum pressure campaign.’”
“Meetings such as Murphy’s and other Democrat members of Congress with an Iranian regime official defy that policy. Moreover, they send a message of disunity – and hence, weakness — to Iran. During the conference, ‘Murphy and Zarif both criticized U.S. foreign policy during a two-hour discussion on the Middle East,’ The Federalist reported.”
According to The Federalist:
“Murphy’s meeting with Zarif comes while Murphy has defended Democratic rogue meetings with foreign leaders in the past while offering harsh criticism of Republicans who sent an open letter to the Iranian regime while the Obama administration stamped out the details of a nuclear agreement with the Middle Eastern adversary. Murphy, a staunch defender of the agreement, said the Republicans were ‘undermining the authority of the president.’
“In 2017, Murphy also condemned former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn following anonymous leaks of a phone call between Flynn and Russian ambassador Sergey Kysylak surfaced.
“‘Any effort to undermine our nation’s foreign policy – even during a transition period – may be illegal and must be taken seriously,’ Murphy said at the time.”
Other Democrats who attended the Munich Security Conference included Senators Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. Former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry was also there.
On January 7, 2021, all 237 House Democrats as well as one House Republican — Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — called for the second impeachment of President Trump following a January 6 incident where hundreds of people claiming to be Trump supporters had temporarily occupied into the U.S. Capitol to protest what they viewed as an illegitimate, fraudulent presidential election two months earlier. Accusing Trump of having personally incited the riots, House Democrats began drafting articles of impeachment claiming that the president represented a “threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution.” “President Trump thus warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any sort of office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States,” the articles stated.
On January 28, 2021, House Democrats Ron Wyden and Earl Blumenauer introduced the “Vote at Home Act,” which aimed to “massively expand vote-at-home ballot access” by implementing automatic voter registration and providing voters with pre-paid ballot envelopes. The two congressmen issued a press release claiming that the legislation was intended to “fight voter suppression.” “Our democracy is stronger when every American can vote, without standing in ridiculous lines or having to take time off work or school to exercise their Constitutional rights,” Wyden said in a statement. Meanwhile, Blumenauer said in a statement of his own: “The individual right to vote, the cornerstone of our democracy, is under threat in communities across America. Last year we saw a widespread expansion of vote-at-home access as a safe and secure way to participate during the COVID-19 pandemic. We should continue to make voting easier, not harder. This important bill would strengthen and clarify the right to vote at home, the most secure and convenient way for voters to exercise the franchise.”
The bill advocated that: (a) all registered voters should receive ballots in the mail weeks before Election Day; (b) all registered voters would be permitted to cast their ballots by mail or at ballot drop boxes; (c) the U.S. Postal Service would receive increased taxpayer funding to cover the costs associated with transporting ballots; (d) states would be required to automatically register voters when they provide identifying information to the state Department of Motor Vehicle, and voters preferring not to remain registered would have three weeks to opt out.
The Democrat legislation stood in stark contrast to a bill introduced by Republicans several weeks earlier, which sought to prevent automatic voter registration, prohibit states from disseminating unrequested absentee ballots, and ban the use of public ballot-collection boxes.
The Democratic Party views America as a nation that is systemically infested with white racism, and thus, as a nation in need of immediate, sweeping, fundamental “transformation.” To view numerous quotes articulating Democrats’ desire to transform and remake America, click here.
This section features a host of racist statements made by leading Democrats in political office. To view these statements, click here.
In 2019, the Democratic National Committee adopted a resolution condemning those who cite religious freedom concerns when defending themselves against “discrimination” charges. Said the resolution: “[T]hose most loudly claiming that morals, values, and patriotism must be defined by their particular religious views have used those religious views, with misplaced claims of ‘religious liberty,’ to justify public policy that has threatened the civil rights and liberties of many Americans, including but not limited to the LGBT community, women, and ethnic and religious/nonreligious minorities.”
Throughout his 2020 presidential campaign, Joe Biden pledged that, if elected to the White House, he would “respect religious freedom,” calling it the “foundation” upon which America was built. Kamala Harris, for her part, said in the early days of her term as vice president: “Religious freedom and tolerance have been core principles of this country since our founding, and Joe and I will uphold and protect them — while protecting believers of all faiths.” These promises proved to be empty and unfulfilled. To view the track record of Biden and Harris vis-a-vis religious freedom, click here.
On January 4, 2021, Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Administration Chair Zoe Lofgren, and Democracy Reform Task Force Chair John Sarbanes together re-introduced H.R. 1, The For the People Act of 2021, in the House of Representatives. They then issued the following statement:
“Our democracy is in a state of deep disrepair. During the 2020 election, Americans had to overcome rampant voter suppression, gerrymandering and a torrent of special interest dark money just to exercise their right to vote. Across the country, people of all political persuasions – including Democrats, Independents and Republicans – are profoundly frustrated with the chaos, corruption and inaction that plague much of our politics.
“That’s why House Democrats are doubling down on our longstanding commitment to advance transformational anti-corruption and clean election reforms by again passing H.R. 1, the For the People Act.
“H.R. 1 will protect the right to vote, ensure the integrity of our elections, hold elected officials accountable and end the era of big, dark, special-interest money in our politics.
“Our historic reform effort will clean up decades of dysfunction in Washington, return power to the people and build a more just, equitable and prosperous country for all Americans.”
The Heritage Foundation, in an overview that can be found here, laid bare the provisions and agendas of the For The People Act, which would encourage and facilitate massive amounts of fraud and chaos in political elections.
On March 1, 2021, the Biden White House announced the President’s support of the “For The People Act of 2021.” Said the Administration in a statement of policy: “The Administration supports House passage of H.R. 1, the For the People Act of 2021. In the wake of an unprecedented assault on our democracy, a never before seen effort to ignore, undermine, and undo the will of the people, and a newly aggressive attack on voting rights taking place right now all across the country, this landmark legislation is urgently needed to protect the right to vote and the integrity of our elections and to repair and strengthen American democracy.”
On March 3, 2021, the House of Representatives voted 220-210 along party lines to pass the bill. Every Republican opposed the bill, and only one Democrat, Bennie Thompson, opposed it.
On May 18, 2021, House Democrats rejected a bid by House Republicans to hold a vote on legislation that would have cut off funding sources for the terrorist group Hamas, which in recent days had fired more than 3,000 Iranian-made rockets toward Israeli population centers. The margin of the vote was 217-209.
On May 20, 2021, House Democrats voted against a measure seeking to provide Israel with $73 million in emergency funding for its Iron Dome missile defense system, which had recently been used to block and destroy most of the aforementioned rockets fired at Israel by Gaza-based Hamas terrorists. The vote was 218-209, with just one Republican — Thomas Massie — voting with the Democrats against the measure.
In November 2024, 19 of the Senate’s 50 Democrats voted to advance some or all of a series of three anti-Israel resolutions led by Sen. Bernie Sanders. The resolutions sought to block the U.S. from providing Israel with several types of weaponry including tank rounds, mortar shells, and guidance kits for bombs — the latter of which are called Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs).
On May 10, 2021, three Democratic members of the House of Representatives – Steve Cohen, Bobby Rush, and Barbara Lee – hosted a forum about COINTELPRO, the FBI program that tracked the activities of radical leftist organizations in the 1960s and ’70s. Speakers at the forum heaped praise upon several convicted and incarcerated cop-killers – including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Mutulu Shakur, and H. Rap Brown (a.k.a. Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) – describing them as “political prisoners.”
Barbara Lee, who had worked closely with the Black Panther Party (BPP) in the 1970s, introduced former Panther leader Ericka Huggins at the Democrat forum and described her as a “former colleague and comrade.” Huggins and another forum speaker, BPP co-founder Bobby Seale, had been charged in 1970 with the May 1969 torture and murder of 19-year-old BPP member Alex Rackley, who was suspected of providing information about the BPP to police. Though the charges against Huggins and Seale were eventually dropped after a jury was unable to reach a verdict, a tape recording that was introduced as evidence at their trial proved conclusively that Huggins had indeed been present while Rackley was being tortured. Moreover, in a 1977 retrospective of the case, The Washington Post reported that Huggins had admitted to: (a) boiling water that was subsequently poured onto Rackley as part of the torture, and (b) kicking Rackley and verbally abusing him while he sat tied to a chair.
In May 2021, the Senate Republican-backed COVID-19 Origin Act — legislation calling for the U.S. Director of National Intelligence to declassify information related to the possibility that the deadly COVID-19 pandemic had originated in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology — was passed unanimously in the Senate. On July 20, Republican Rep. Michael Burgess (Texas) brought the Senate bill to the House floor, where Democrats voted it down. The final vote on considering the measure was 216 against and 207 in favor.
The Epoch Times reported: “House Democrats’ action came as CCP [Chinese Communist Party] officials said they would not comply with a second World Health Organization probe into the pandemic’s origins. For months now, the Chinese regime has said the virus was first transmitted from an animal to a human at a Wuhan wet market, and they’ve denied the pathogen originated from the Wuhan lab. The vice minister of China’s National Health Commission chief, Zeng Yixin, on Thursday said WHO’s suggestion does “not respect common sense and violated science,” noting further that Beijing “cannot accept this kind of plan for origin-tracing.”
In a May 2022 appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, pro-Democrat political commentator Donny Deutsch said that despite President Biden’s extremely poor poll numbers, Democrats could had a chance to perform well in the upcoming midterm elections if they could “scare” enough voters into believing that Republicans were running on a “heinous” platform rooted in racism. To lay the groundwork for his remarks, Deutsch made reference to a recent (May 14, 2022) incident where an 18-year-old white man shot and killed 10 people in a Buffalo, New York supermarket located in the heart of a predominantly black community, and where 11 of the 13 shooting victims were black. Prior to committing his barbaric crime, the gunman, who was politically a leftist, had written a 180-page manifesto that, at one point, articulated his rage over so-called “replacement theory” — a belief among many conservative that leftists were seeking to replace America’s existing white majority with nonwhites who could be relied upon to vote heavily Democrat in the future. But contrary to Deutsch’s implication that this belief was nothing more than a racist conspracy theory, numerous Democrats over the years have clearly articulated that such a “replacement” is indeed their long-range objective. Deutsch, however, sought to portray conservatives who had simply noticed this leftist strategy, as racists. Against that backdrop, Deutch told MSNBC host Joe Scarborough:
On March 7, 2024, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 7511, the “Laken Riley Act,” which sought to require federal officials to arrest illegal aliens charged with committing theft in the United States, by a vote of 251-170. All voting Republicans and 37 Democrats supported the bill, while 170 Democrats voted against it. The legislation was named in honor of Laken Riley, a young Georgia nursing student who had been brutally murdered in February by a 26-year-old illegal alien from Venezuela. Prior to killing Miss Riley, the perpetrator had already been arrested: (a) in New York City for driving an unregistered car with a 5-year-old child inside, and (b) in Athens, Georgia for stealing food and clothing from a Walmart store.
The text of H.R. 7511 read, in part, as follows: “The Biden administration should not have released Laken Riley’s alleged murderer into the United States; The Biden administration should have arrested and detained Laken Riley’s alleged murderer after he was charged with crimes in New York, New York, and Athens, Georgia; President Biden should publicly denounce his administration’s immigration policies that resulted in the murder of Laken Riley; and President Biden should prevent another murder like that of Laken Riley by ending the catch-and-release of illegal aliens, increasing immigration enforcement, detaining and removing criminal aliens, reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy, ending his abuse of parole authority, and securing the United States borders.”
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The Coup We Never Knew: An America We No Longer Recognize
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Trevor Loudon’s 2019 List of Socialists & Communists in Congress
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Racist Statements & Allegations by Democrat Legislators
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The Nunes Memo: “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation”
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