The true face of - The Democrats

A Whiggish Admission: The Democrats’ Long, Strange Trip (Indeed).*

With a lot of help from my AI friends

Fogy has long wanted to peer into the grubby, sprawling history of the Democratic Party — a political beast so old it practically predates coherent thought. Those who follow Fogy’s pronouncements might expect the usual lack of reverence for institutions that survive mainly by shedding their skin and forgetting their sins.

“Evolutionary success!” is not quite the word. It seems painfully clear to Fogy — and, I suspect, to any rational observer not dazzled by the orange-and-blue glow of perpetual American self-congratulation — that the Democrats are a nation’s contradictions made flesh.

It’s almost unfair to judge the modern, supposedly progressive party by its noxious, slave-owning, states’-rights beginnings under Andrew Jackson in the 1820s. Yet for more than a century, it was a sanctuary for the worst kind of reactionaries — the Solid South, fiercely defending Jim Crow long after the Civil War. That such an entity could survive, and then pivot, is less a tribute to American democracy than a testament to its bottomless pragmatism — or perhaps its bottomless cynicism.

And is this chameleon-like survival an isolated case? Hardly. If not the blueprint, it is at least the echo of other ideological creatures that endured through sheer adaptability. One might glance at the Soviet Union’s transformation into modern Russia, or the opportunistic shape-shifting of global finance; all prove that power will warp principle into whatever grotesque form ensures survival.

The grand mid-20th-century pivot, when FDR forged the New Deal coalition of urban workers and immigrants, was merely a change of costume. When the South finally bolted in the 1960s over civil rights, the party simply abandoned its most shameful tradition and rebranded itself as the champion of the marginalized, conveniently adopting the language of federal intervention and social justice.

The Americans — and particularly the modern Democrats — have perfected this art of ideological amnesia, convinced that their current platform somehow washes away the historical grime. It is not entirely their fault, of course. When such a tidal wave of righteousness carries a nation forward, complacency sets in — the comforting belief that past sins cannot possibly contaminate present virtue.

What can be done, you might ask? Very little, it seems. We are left to watch the great political machine lumber on, hoping that the party’s current sickness — the heavy dependence on virtue signalling and performative politics — does not infect the genuine and necessary goals it still claims to champion.

The cure, as always, begins with the courage to admit that the “oldest party” is really just the oldest survivor, shedding its skin not for moral clarity, but for the simplest of human motives — the will to endure.

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