The Death Of The Democratic Party
By Judson Cox (06/19/03)
I have just witnessed the death of the Democratic Party. While moving from the mountains of North Carolina to central Virginia, I found myself waiting for a truck to arrive at a Ryder Truck Rental facility. With me was friend who passed the true test of fidelity; gladly agreeing to help one move.
We were joined by a stranger, a man who owned a moving service, and was renting trucks until he could buy one. We were a diverse group. My friend, Terry, is a white factory worker in his late forties. Our companion, Curtis, a black man in his late thirties. I am a white guy, in my mid twenties, slowly working my way through college. None of us would be considered wealthy.
Not knowing Curtis, we exchanged pleasantries with him as he joined us in the rental office. We were listening to a radio talk show of conservative affiliation, and ceased commenting on it when Curtis joined us, not knowing his political ideology. The talk show host was playing a speech by (the supposed reverend) Jesse Jackson, and extrapolating there upon. Being unsure of Curtis’ position on racial issues, I grew momentarily tense. A pleasing wave of relief swept over me when Curtis suddenly put forth, “I don’t know what y’all think, and I don’t want to offend anyone, but that Jesse Jackson is what’s wrong with America!” I perked up immediately, being a staunch conservative, as did Terry who is more moderate than myself, but whose views tend to be on the right. “Yeah,” I asked? “Yeah, him and that Farakon, and all those Democrats. They are hurting black people, and really hurting our country.” Terry and I agreed vocally, and pressed him to expound. “Black people’s killing each other and killing themselves, and Jackson blames white people! I talk to my cousins in Charlotte (NC), and they always putting me down. They say, ‘A black man don’t work. You just trying to act white. You think you’re better than everybody else.’ And, they just live on welfare. They don’t work. They just lay around getting high and getting in to trouble. I don’t know what y’all’s religion is, but I’m a Christian, and the Bible tell’s you that’s not the way to live.” Being Christians and people who believe in work and personal responsibility ourselves, we encouraged him to continue. “My sister,” Curtis went on, “lives outside of Durham (NC), and works in the city. She was driving to work last week, and her car broke down in a black neighborhood. Now, she’s a black woman, and she didn’t think nothing of being there, and so she’s standing beside her car, calling her husband on her cell phone. Then, this bunch of young black guys, I don’t know if they was a gang or not, comes up to her. They start saying stuff, and putting they’re hands on her, and one is going through her car. She’s about to get killed, and she knows it, so she starts screaming. Then this old man comes running out of his house with a shot gun! He runs those kids off from there, and tells her to come inside while she waits for a tow truck and her husband. He’s black too, and he’s lived in that neighborhood all of his life. He was eighty years old! He told her that he and his wife take turns sleeping while the other one holds the shotgun and watches the door. They done been broken in on twice!” “Don’t the police patrol the neighborhood,” Terry asked? “They did until Jesse Jackson come down and called them all racist. The police is afraid to do nothing cause somebody’s gonna say they racist! It wasn’t like that when I grew up down there. My parents worked hard, and we didn’t have much, but they told us to go to school and get a job so we could do better. And now I’m not rich, but I own my own place, and I’m working for myself. Someday, I’m going to have plenty of money, because I work. These kids down there now, they think somebody owes them something. They can go to school for free, busses take them there for free, the library is free, but they say a black man doesn’t do that. They just take welfare and do drugs, rob people, and have babies they ain’t gonna raise. They killing each other! I haven’t met a black man younger than me that hasn’t been in prison. They need to get jobs and stay out of jail. If you work, you don’t have time to be getting high or shooting people.”
We talked a while longer. We discussed politics, religion, and social issues and found that on every topic we may not have been reading the same sentence, but we were on the same page. This is wonderful news for America, because it intones death for the Democratic Party. Obviously, there was no racial bigotry or malice between us. For decades, the Democratic Party has grown and strengthened by pitting races, genders, and other interest groups against one another. They buy votes from one by promising to oppose the other. The Democratic Party’s existence hinges on bigotry. When racial unity and gender equality are found, no one has reason to vote for a Democrat. Here in was racial unity.
Here in was the bulk of the Democratic constituency: the racial minority, the (unionized) factory worker, and the college student. Subtract the above three from the party base, and the only Democrats left are whiny, pasty NPR types who think baseball should be abolished because it encourages aggression, who and can’t tell a spark plug from a hammer, and a handful of lesbians who can’t decide whether to devote their lives to living in a tree in order to save it from loggers, or to agitate for universal taxpayer funded abortions.
Here in was also something far more dramatic and a far greater reason to celebrate. This was a reversal of the deterioration of freedom in America. Just as the recalcitrant child is told, “As long as you live under my roof you will abide by my rules,” one cannot be free until one is independent and self reliant. Over the past few decades, Americans have willingly traded their freedoms for greater protection and provision by the state. To become wards of the state was not what our founders envisioned. They envisioned a free people governing themselves representatively. We were three people representative of the groups Democrats purport to speak for repudiating the Democratic Party and all it stands for. We were three people affirming our founder’s vision.
Curtis condemned the Democratic Party for what it has done to his race. Terry complained that he could not financially get ahead, because whenever he would work a substantial amount of overtime, he would be taxed at a higher rate. His retirement was also jeopardized because what monies he had to invest were confiscated in to a social security plan that he knew would only provide him with a one percent return on his money, if the plan did not go bankrupt by the time he retired. As for myself, many people wonder how a man of my young age, who was among the most activist liberals of his class in high school and in his early years of college, could become even more so devoted to conservative principles. I shall simply quote Ronal Reagan who quoted Ecclesiastes when asked why he had switched party affiliation from Democrat to Republican, “When I was a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child would reason. When I became a man, I put away childish things.” Perhaps it is overly optimistic to view us as cultural indicators, or maybe, “It’s morning in America.”
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