Democrats And Race: Seems Like Old Times

Wayne Allyn Root

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.

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Obama didn’t build that. Trump will be judged by the present state of the economy in 2020

“Eleven years ago today, near the bottom of the worst recession in generations, I signed the Recovery Act, paving the way for more than a decade of economic growth and the longest streak of job creation in American history.”

That was former President Barack Obama in a Feb. 17 tweet touting and crediting his administration’s policies with enabling the recovery of the U.S. economy from the financial crisis and Great Recession more than a decade ago.

President Donald Trump responded the same day, tweeting, “Did you hear the latest con job? President Obama is now trying to take credit for the Economic Boom taking place under the Trump Administration. He had the WEAKEST recovery since the Great Depression, despite Zero Fed Rate & MASSIVE quantitative easing.”

This naturally led to a news cycle debating whether President Trump could take credit for any of the economic successes being seen right now—sustained growth, the lowest unemployment in 50 years, rising wages, etc.

But why can Obama take credit for his first few years in office but not Trump?

Here’s the truth.

Incumbents are always judged by the present state of the economy. It’s how the American people hold politicians accountable. Just ask Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush if they think the economy had any bearing on their political fortunes. Both had recessions occur during their first terms in office, which turned out to be their last. No amount of blaming their predecessors would have made a difference.

If the economy were to have entered a recession during President Trump’s watch — recall the headlines from last summer when short term interest rates briefly inverted with long term interest rates — you can bet that President Trump would have been blamed for it.

It stands to reason then that with the economy doing so well, and Americans becoming wealthier, that Trump will undoubtedly receive the lion’s share of the credit when the American people go to vote in November. Voters will likely point to the President’s policies on tax cuts, deregulation and America first trade with new fair and reciprocal trade deals with Mexico, Canada, China, South Korea and Japan as playing a key role.

Obama didn’t build that.

At this point in 2012, the U.S. economy had not produced a single job during the former President Barack Obama’s administration from when he took office in Jan. 2009. It was still down 568,000 jobs, and yet Obama would go on to win the 2012 election.

Was it because Americans blamed Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, for the state of the economy and the 8 million jobs that had been lost in the Great Recession?

Possibly, but the fact is, as tepid as the recovery following the Great Recession were, by 2012, the charts were pointed in the right direction. From the low of 138 million Americans employed in Dec. 2009, by Jan. 2012, it was up to 141.5 million Americans with jobs — a jump of 3.5 million.

If the numbers had kept on sinking throughout Obama’s first term, it might have easily only been a one-term proposition. But things were getting better, albeit slowly, and Obama was reelected fairly easily.

Comparatively, since Jan. 2017 when President Trump took office, the economy has produced 6.5 million jobs in the household survey compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and unemployment remains at a 50-year low of 3.5 percent.

The biggest gains have been made by working age adults, [LNS11300060]with labor participation for prime working age 25-54-year-olds jumping from 81.5 percent when Trump took office to 83.1 percent today, representing an additional 2 million prime working age Americans in the economy than would have been had participation remained the same. That same participation rate for 25-to-54-year-olds had dropped every single year during the Obama administration until it finally bottomed at 80.7 percent in 2015. There was some recovery in 2016, and then most of the gains occurred starting in 2017 to present.

But somehow, like contortionists, the American people are supposed to discount the gains made during the early Trump years because those were really Obama’s accomplishment, even as Obama takes credit — and took credit on the campaign trail in 2012 — for the jobs created since the Dec. 2009 low, attributing it to the legislation he signed into law.

The fact is the American people will be judging President Trump on the present state of the economy when they go to the polls in November, not former President Obama.

The only question that matters is as Ronald Reagan once put it: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

And Trump has a good story to tell in 2020 about the economy. Is that really surprising to anyone who follows politics? When things are bad, the incumbents get blamed. When they’re good, they get credit.

Which is exactly what’s happening now. The latest Real Clear Politics average of recent polls has President Trump’s job approval on the economy above 55 percent. And that’s even before all of the early primaries for the Democratic nomination have even been completed. That leaves Trump in commanding position in the presidential race as the blue-collar economic boom taking place continues. Stay tuned.

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IN BRIEF

COUNTERATTACK: President Donald Trump slams Michael Bloomberg at Phoenix rally, pushing MAGA message during Democrat debate (Fox News)

ECONOMIST/YOUGOV SURVEY: Trump takes 2020 lead, 52%-48%; all Democrats "probably lose" (Washington Examiner)

REMINDER: Denmark tells Bernie Sanders it's had enough of his "socialist" slurs (Investor's Business Daily)

PURGE CONTINUES: John Rood, top Defense Department official who contradicted Trump on Ukraine, latest to be ousted after impeachment saga (The New York Times)

DEFAMATION: A group of Covington Catholic High School students are suing nine media personalities over tweets and commentary about the incident at the Lincoln Memorial last year (Cincinnati Enquirer)

SCOTUS BOUND? A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday it was unconstitutional to force Florida felons to first pay off their financial obligations before registering to vote, siding against state Republican lawmakers who imposed the restriction last year (Tampa Bay Times)

SOME 200 VICTIMS: Pennsylvania diocese, facing more abuse claims, files for bankruptcy (The New York Times)

POLICY: Reconciliation with Turkey should only come with a price (Washington Examiner)

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