United Liberty

February being Black History Month, last week began a retrospective of blacks in America and the Republican Party. As noted, the Republican Party was formed in 1856 by anti-slavery members of the Whig and Free-Soil Democrat parties, for the express purpose of ending the evil of slavery in America. During this time, Democrats sought to protect slavery where it existed, and expand it into new U.S. territories. A Democrat-heavy Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford that blacks could never be U.S. citizens, and attempts to limit slavery were unconstitutional. A few years later, war broke out when slave-state Democrats declared secession from the Union and formed the Confederacy. More than 600,000 soldier deaths later the Union, battered, bloody, and exhausted, would remain intact, though heavily fractured.

It is difficult to overstate the viciousness with which the Democrats would defend the institution of slavery and the oppression of blacks. For example, in 1856, prior to the war, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts took to the floor of the Senate and railed against the institution of slavery and its protectors, at one point singling out pro-slavery Senator Andrew Butler for excoriation, saying “Senator Butler has chosen a mistress. I mean the harlot, slavery.” In retaliation, two days later Senator Preston Brooks, livid at the criticism, entered the Senate chamber and approached Sumner, who was working at his desk. Using his gold-tipped cane, Brooks began beating Sumner in the head, blow after crippling blow slamming into the poor man’s skull. Sumner was only spared from death by the men who heard the commotion and ran to Sumner’s defense, dragging Brooks away. Undaunted, four years later Sumner would deliver a historic anti-slavery speech entitled, “The Barbarism of Slavery”.

In honor of February being Black History Month, I thought it might be informative to look at one aspect of the history of blacks in America; namely, the history of blacks and the Republican Party. Though black voters in America have in recent decades become a monolithic voting block for the Democrat Party, such has not always been the case. In fact, I think it would come as a great surprise for many blacks today to learn that not only have Republicans not always been thought of as their political enemies, they once had a political and ideological alliance. Even today these two groups agree on a wide range of issues, from educational choice and traditional marriage, to the importance of religion, specifically Christianity, to our history and culture.

On March 20, 1854, a group of people opposed to the Democrats’ policies supporting slavery met in Ripon, Wisconsin with the express purpose of organizing to end the moral evil of slavery. Just ten days later, on March 30th, President Franklin Pierce, a Democrat, signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a law which authorized the expansion of slavery into U.S. territories. As a result, these anti-slavery members of the Whig and Free-Soil Democrats would form the Republican Party, and within a few short years had established a major power base in the northeastern and Midwestern states.

In 1856, the Republican Party held its first national nominating convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where it nominated John C. Freemont as their presidential candidate. Freemont ran under the slogan “Free soil, free silver, free men, Fremont”. He would lose that election to Democrat James Buchanan after Democrats warned the election of the anti-slavery Freemont would lead to civil war, but despite the loss in the 1856 election, the Republicans had established themselves as a major party, and would win the presidency just four years later with Abraham Lincoln.

In March of 2009, at a Georgia GOP county convention, Sen. Johnny Isakson gave a stump speech in which he pleaded for the help of the faithful grassroots in returning him and other Republicans to power because, as he told the assembled crowd, we had to defeat the Democrats and Barack Obama to stop the reckless, runaway spending in Washington, D.C. I turned to my wife in abject shock and asked if he’d really just said that.

Afterward, I went to him and respectfully but pointedly reminded the Senator that, when Georgia W. Bush was president and spending money like he had a golden goose, as our senator he’d voted for every one of those pork-filled, bloated budgets. Yes, Obama and the Democrats were on a drunken spending binge, but the Republicans had only been better by degree. I told him that the Republicans will never regain the trust of the American people unless they governed in a way that mirrored their conservative campaign rhetoric. I also told him the surest sign I’d seen that they had not yet learned their lesson was the fact that the Senate Republicans had re-elected the porkmeister, Mitch McConnell, as Senate Minority Leader. It is hard to take seriously a party which talks about fiscal responsibility and then elects as their leader of the upper house a man who campaigned on the amount of pork he’d brought back to Kentucky.

And now we have the re-election of John Boehner, the eternally weeping love child of George Hamilton and the Great Pumpkin, as Speaker of the House. The ONE branch of the federal government controlled by the Republicans and they re-elect the man who received the MVP Award from Team Obama; a man whose chief negotiating tactic is to fold faster than a card table in a hurricane.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1816, Letter to Charles Yancey

I’ve come to the conclusion that Dante, in writing his classic “Inferno”, actually missed the final level of Hell. Or rather, I have not so much concluded that, as discovered it. The deepest level of Hell is to be forced to watch the news and read the printed and online media, and see falsities, half-truths, and outright lies perpetuated ad nauseum, and be completely impotent to get people to realize the truth. You can convince a large majority of the people to believe just about anything as long as you say it in a serious, contemplative voice, or preface it with the statement “Experts agree” or “A new study has discovered…” I don’t mind people disagreeing with me (indeed, there are few things I enjoy more than debating against someone that is informed and well-prepared) but it drives me berserk at the absolute stupidity that some people are willing to believe.

So, as we head into the new year, my last column will be dedicated to correcting oft-repeated fallacies, in the hope that it will create a spark that leads to a reassessment of things that people believe, but just aren’t so. In no particular order, here is the truth about some common fallacies that I wish could be corrected once and for all…

What in heaven’s name has happened to the country I grew up admiring? That is the question I’ve been asking myself over and over since the re-election of Barack Obama. While it’s easy to blame the crumbling of those principles, values and characteristics on Obama and liberal Democrats, that’s an easy way out, a little white lie we tell ourselves as a comfort mechanism. We blame it on Obama having run a campaign of distractions and outright lies to hide his failures (he did), or Romney not running an effective ground game (he didn’t) or being an eloquent spokesman for conservative principles (he wasn’t). We blame it on widespread voter fraud by Democrats (there was), or the media being complicit in protecting Obama by helping cover up the truth about scandals like Fast and Furious, or Benghazi (they were).

Yet not even those things reveal the underlying truth about the hastening erosion of what was once the foundation of American exceptionalism. We once valued hard work, honesty, fidelity in marriage, humility, and personal responsibility. We held up as men and women to be admired those who were industrious and entrepreneurial. These were traits we aimed for, even though we often fell short. Yet where are these values today? John F. Kennedy, the iconic president adored by Democrats, once exhorted us to “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Contrast that Democrat’s pseudo-messianic figure in Obama, who shuns the call for sacrifice, for hard work, telling us we have a right to free health care, welfare checks, food stamps, and a plethora of other goodies, all paid for by taxing at ever greater levels the hated, evil rich.