On January 14, 1963, Alabama’s Democratic Governor George Wallace delivered his inaugural address that included the infamous line, “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” As unimaginable as it seems to us now, that was the Democratic Party’s position just 57 years ago. While modern Democrats denounce the bluntness of Wallace’s speech, the sentiment behind it remains the key to their power.
I’m accusing Democrats of being white supremacists, as they were then, but they are still the party of segregation. Gone are the politicians standing in the doorway of a college, blocking entry to minority students, as Wallace did, now they stand there in the name of “diversity,” still separating people by their differences.
If you watched any of the Democratic primary debates (which ratings for most of them suggest you haven’t), you’ve seen all the candidates, at one point or another, declare their plans to “help” people based on immutable characteristics. In other words, to treat people differently based on things about them over which they have no control.
This is the cornerstone of bigotry – that people are different and should be treated differently because of their skin tone, sexuality, etc. Democrats a generation ago found their path to power through preaching the superiority of one group over another. Whether they all believed it or not is a question for history to answer, it was simply a tactic that worked.
When that position became electorally untenable, the party flipped. Or so it seemed.
Segregation was a powerful motivator for voters in the South. Democrats, in the name of power, merged their desire for it with the path of least resistance for obtaining it. It wasn’t a difficult move, the Democratic Party was the party of slavery; when Republicans banished that to the dustbin of history, they created segregation and Jim Crow Laws to keep its sentiments in place. When that fell out of favor, they adapted to what they are today.
Each of these tactics have the same result – dividing people to make it easier to manipulate them.
After the legal destruction of Democrats’ segregation, the United States was on the path to becoming a “melting pot,” where individuals were treated as such; where Americans were Americans, regardless of ancestry. This tended not to favor Democrats.
The popular narrative of the left is this idea that all the Southern racists suddenly, after Civil Rights legislation, switched to the Republican Party. That’s not true. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” is credited with this conversion. But the South didn’t switch to GOP control until 1994, and only 2 elected Congressional Democrats actually switched parties in the years following the Civil Rights Act. Jimmy Carter won the South, as did Bill Clinton.
It took Democrats some time to reconstitute itself after the Republican Revolution in 1994, after years adrift following the collapse of their segregation tactic, but now they have. And if it seems like old times, that’s because it is. It’s segregation again.
Separate dorms for students based on skin color, sexuality, or national origin. Separate graduation ceremonies, separate admission and hiring standards, etc. “Tolerant” leftists promise and implement targeted government spending and programs based on those same characteristics. The phrase “especially (X group) of color” is uttered with regularity on the campaign trail. We’re being taken from a melting pot to a series of chafing dishes.
People separated – trained to identify with people they don’t know because they look like them – are easier to manipulate. The word “community” has been redefined to apply to immutable characteristics and not geography. Your neighborhood, all manner of people around us, were our community; now the left would have you care more about what happens to someone on the other side of the country because they happen to share your ethnic heritage, than what happens to someone living across the street who doesn’t.
The target of this new “tolerance” is young people; millennials. It’s easier to instill in people the fear and hatred necessary for this tactic to work than it is to change the minds of people who instinctively know it’s garbage. That’s why the protests, the chants, the screaming of victimhood emanate from there. It’s also why fake hate crimes do too.
I wrote in my book about the phenomenon of fake hate crimes and why they are so prevalent. The kids reporting them have been inundated with the idea of this grand conspiracy; an omnipresent hidden hand working to oppress them. They set out to destroy it, but can’t find it because it doesn’t exist. But they’ve been told by people in positions of trust that it does exist. Rather than question what they’ve been told, they create it so they can expose and fight it. Buying a can of spray paint and writing slurs on walls is much easier than accepting you’ve been lied to.
But they have been lied to. America is not a “fundamentally” insert your favorite “ist” or “phobic” word here country. When a college student stands up to announce there are too many white people in the new multicultural student center and it’s making her feel uncomfortable, this is the fruit of that poison tree . That it wasn’t roundly condemned for the racism it was is fertilizer.
Democrats need people divided, groups of people are easier to manipulate than large numbers of individuals. The alternative would be trying to win people over with failed policies that empower elites at the expense of individuals, and that’s still a tougher sell.
In pursuit of power, Democrats have always been willing to do anything. Gone is the dream of Martin Luther King that his children would be judged not on the color of their skin, but the content of their character; replaced with “anything for a vote.”
Democrats have gone from separating people by irrelevant characteristics in the name of hatred to separating people by irrelevant characteristics in the name of tolerance. The tactics have changed, the objective never has. It was racist in the past, and it’s racist now.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!), host of a daily radio show on WCBM in Maryland, and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.