The People v. The Democratic Party

In the latest in a series of 48-page broadsides from Encounter Books, writer Michael Walsh puts the Democratic Party on trial and presents the case for abolishing what is nothing more than “a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.”

Michael Walsh is an American Book Award-winning novelist, music critic, screenwriter, and media critic. Formerly the editor of Andrew Breitbart’s BigJournalism.com, he writes political commentary for the New York Post and also for the National Review under both his own name and that of his alter ego David Kahane, whose Rules for Radical Conservatives: Beating the Left at its Own Game to Take Back America is a must-read guide for waging political warfare. Now Walsh brings his erudition, humor, and political killer instinct to his Encounter pamphlet, The People v. The Democratic Party.

Not one to urge Republicans to reach across the political aisle in search of compromise, Walsh begins by pulling no punches in his condemnation of those on the other side of that aisle. “From the inception of the Republic,” he writes, “the Democratic Party has been a public enemy – an organization antithetical to our nation’s traditions, civic virtues, and moral values.” In fact, “the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition has always been in the forefront of everything inimical to the United States of America.”

He proceeds to sketch the history of the Democratic Party by noting that one of its founders and its first vice-president, Aaron Burr Jr., shot and killed one of the Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton, in a duel and plotted sedition against his own president: “If one man besides George Washington can be said to have set the American experiment on its future course – in this case not for good but for ill – that man is Burr.” The duel embodied the struggle between the Federalists and the Democrats, and a two-party conflict has been waged ever since. Burr went on to lead Tammany Hall, a New York City political organization which became the iconic standard of big-city corruption and of politics as special-interest factionalism and legalized bribery.

Walsh moves on to a brief discussion of the Civil War, during which it was the Democratic Party that was “on the wrong side of history” (as the left always likes to accuse Republicans of being). They denounced the Republican President Lincoln as a tyrant and advocated a settlement with the South. Lincoln was later assassinated by a Democrat, John Wilkes Booth.

Picking up the story again with the history of the corrupt Society of Tammany, which “set the Democrats fully on their strategic path of political tribalism,” and its immigrant gangland alliance all the way into the 1920s and ‘30s, Walsh points out that

The Democratic Party has always appealed to the basest instincts of the American people, molting and changing shape as the political winds dictated but solely devoted to its raison d’etre: the accumulation and retention of political power.

Despite the Democratic Party successfully selling itself as the political champion of social justice for the poor and the dispossessed, its actual history reveals it to be otherwise:

Always wrapping itself in the false cloak of righteousness and celebrating the folk wisdom of the demos, the Democrats have consistently championed class envy, social division, and often – quite nakedly – racism, if they thought it would buy them votes.

Only the Democrats could reinvent themselves so effortlessly, molting from the party of the Ku Klux Klan to the party of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. From the party of the aggressive atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who destroyed school prayer and helped set the country on its downward moral spiral in 1963, to the party of Bible-toting Baptist presidents (Bill Clinton) and the racist ravings of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. When your only principle is power, it’s easy to embrace flexibility and nuance.

He moves on into the ‘50s, when the Cold War ratcheted up Democratic corruption and Soviet infiltration in the State Department, which as Walsh says, “remains the most consistently left-wing, at times anti-American, entity in the executive branch.” He briefly relates tales of such Communist agents as George Koval, “perhaps the Soviet Union’s most effective atomic spy” who looted secrets from the Manhattan Project labs, and Walter Kendall Myers, a State Dept. analyst who received a life sentence in 2010 for spying for Cuba for 30 years.

A significant segment of the left,” Walsh writes, “sees absolutely nothing wrong with what they did”:

[S]omething in Marxism, Communism, and – especially, I would argue – totalitarianism fires the imagination of the “peaceful and tolerant” left, which can’t wait to seize power and impose its will on the citizens of the United States – for their own good, naturally.

He ties this in with President Obama, the progressive word-made-flesh, the living embodiment of the Cloward-Piven strategy: “Obama is the ne plus ultra of the twin strains of anti-American leftist thought, the spawn of the gangster ethos of the 1920s and ‘30s and the fashionable Marxism of the ‘revolutionary’ year of 1968.”

Walsh then addresses more contemporary facets of the Democratic Party’s “political perfidy, cultural malevolence, and, when necessary, sedition and outright treason,” such as voter fraud and the left-leaning media’s complicity.

In his closing argument for this short but wide-ranging and entertaining work, The People v. The Democratic Party, Walsh posits that it’s time to consider abolishing that party entirely, for the good of the country:  

Is there a place in the American political system for a truly loyal opposition – one that does not seek “fundamental transformation” of our constitutional Republic but rather its betterment and continuance? Of course there is.

But is there a place for a criminal organization masquerading as a political party? If our nation is to survive, not any more.

(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 7/26/12)