A United America Is Democrats’ Undoing

Of all the things I loathe about the Democrat party, its celebration of victimhood takes the cake.  As is true of all political parties infected with virulent Marxism, it does not seek to help those truly in need.  It does the opposite.  It seeks out people who might never have seen themselves as victims and convinces them otherwise.  It is a party whose growth in membership is directly proportional to Democrats’ capacity to convert Americans into victims.

Once a person understands Democrats’ pathological need to harvest new victims, it becomes obvious that they are not in the business of solving problems.  Fixing anything in society only reduces the number of future Democrats.  By celebrating victimhood, Democrats are committed to making things worse today than they were yesterday and even worse tomorrow than they are today.  Their growth model depends upon perpetual misery.

Americans saw this self-destructive phenomenon play out during Obama’s presidency.  Before the 2008 election, race relations between black and white Americans had steadily improved since the ’60s.  Racism was widely rejected as a repugnant practice of the past.  In fact, discrimination based upon the color of a person’s skin had become so offensive that courts were dismantling affirmative action programs that explicitly prioritized race over merit.  A lot of Republican voters, unhappy with their party’s nomination of Senator John McCain, crossed lines and voted for Barack Obama’s nebulous promise of “hope and change” with the expectation that a post-racial America would take root.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder chose another path.  They looked for ways to inflame racial tensions.  They deconstructed a half-century of American racial progress by routinely injecting racial controversy into matters that had nothing to do with skin color.  A black Harvard professor is detained in the Democrat stronghold of Cambridge, Massachusetts?  That’s because all cops are unconsciously racist (even the black ones).  A black male dies in a confrontation with a neighborhood watchman?  That’s because black boys are hunted outside their own communities.  Americans don’t want to pay more for worse health care?  That’s because wealthy white Americans are too selfish to understand the appeal of socialized medicine.

Whenever policymakers fought Obama administration policy, charges of racism were not so subtly leveled against them.  Instead of finally terminating affirmative action programs and other race-based discrimination, Obama and Holder reinvigorated an otherwise dying system of racial preferences and rebranded discrimination as a “virtue” under the umbrella of the Marxist tripe we know now as “diversity, inclusion, and equity.”  When Obama was elected, race relations inside the United States had never been better.  After eight years of an Obama-Holder strategy to make every policy dispute a racial dispute, race relations had severely deteriorated.  There is perhaps no better example of how backward Democrats’ notion of “progress” truly is.

Setting aside the tangible social harm that Obama and Holder inflicted upon Americans, it is not difficult to understand why they chose division over unity.  Had President Obama framed his election victory as vivid proof that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream was reality — proof, in other words, that the content of an American’s character matters much more than the color of that American’s skin — a generational struggle against racial prejudice would have been largely resolved.

Had Obama declared victory over racism, he would have become a transformational figure in American history.  But Democrats are not in the business of solving problems.  Solving problems diminishes the supply of potential victims.  And Democrats’ political success depends upon an ever-growing class of self-identifying victims.

When seen from this perspective, it is easy to understand how cancerous the Democrats’ governing philosophy is.  Unity — or the cultivation of a common national identity and purpose — is antithetical to Democrats’ Marxist directive to rally the “oppressed” against their “oppressors.”  By design, Democrats cultivate grievance and conflict.  They isolate subsets of American society, convince those subsets that they are victims, and cynically exploit Americans’ shared desire to seek justice for the oppressed.  For Democrats, whether some isolated group has actually been treated unfairly or unjustly is irrelevant.  They stir social passions by maximizing perceived insults felt from real or imagined grievances.  Then they feed on those passions to create explosive political movements capable of transforming imaginary victimhood into real political power.

Since the nineteenth century, Marxism has tried to cultivate grievance among a majority of blue-collar workers, but America’s working class has stubbornly resisted.  However bad working conditions might have been in the United States since its inception, the country long maintained the highest rate of intergenerational social mobility in the world.  The children of indentured servants became farmers.  The children of farmers became skilled tradesmen.  The children of skilled tradesmen became entrepreneurs.  The children of entrepreneurs became lawyers, bankers, and even politicians.

In other words, for most of America’s history, the United States has been a “land of opportunity” unburdened by traditional strictures of social caste.  Marxists found it difficult to create a class revolution when American workers were too busy making money and buying land.  Coincidentally or not, intergenerational social mobility in the United States declined only after the rise of the Federal Reserve central banking system, the implementation of broadly enforced income taxes, growing encumbrances upon private property, and the rapid expansion of the twentieth-century regulatory state.

In the absence of a politically potent class conflict in America, Marxists turned to another unique characteristic of the United States: its ability to attract workers from all over the world.  For four hundred years, immigrants from distinct cultures and speaking different languages have arrived on America’s shores, and within a single generation, those immigrants have blended into America’s vibrant society.  America’s ability to fuse separate peoples into a common culture gave it the enviable reputation of being a “melting pot” — a land that could take quarrelsome strangers and bind them into an alloy of unusual strength.

American Marxists, having found insufficient power in class conflict, have spent the last century and a half trying to deconstruct this “melting pot.”  Common national identity and purpose forestall Democrats’ Marxist impulse to cultivate grievance and conflict.  That’s why, in recent decades, they have explicitly rejected any virtuous connotation of America’s historic “melting pot” and embraced pluralistic societies living inside and among each other.

What they champion as “multiculturalism” and “diversity” is really a malicious compulsion to turn constituent groups against one another.  Perceived victimhood cannot flourish in societies that value national unity.  Victimhood requires a steady supply of unfounded outrage and fake oppression.  This unhealthy addiction is the source of preposterous Democrat claims that racial minorities in the United States are today treated worse than antebellum slaves.

Why is the Democrat party so hostile to President Trump and his “Make America Great Again” agenda?  The simplest answer is right there in his famous political slogan.  He is interested in lifting all of America — and not just some constituent part of it.

Calling MAGA a “political slogan,” though, hides its real threat to Democrats.  In truth, it is President Trump’s clarion call to the American people: let us get our hands dirty, America.  Let us build and innovate and bring prosperity back to our towns.  Let us dream and turn our dreams into reality.  Let us remember that we are the descendants of revolutionaries who fought for freedom, explorers and adventurers who tamed a continent, and tough and gritty settlers whose courage and resilience fashioned the greatest of nations.  Let us fight when necessary and make peace when possible.  Let us resist all those who insist we are in decline.  Let us accomplish so much so quickly that future generations have no choice but to call this the beginning of America’s “Golden Age.”

MAGA rejects the pessimistic worldview of perpetual victims.  And a united America is Democrats’ undoing.