The Demoncrats' temper tantrum in the House of Representatives is just the latest sad reminder of how far the party of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan has fallen. From leading a bipartisan foreign policy projecting American strength, to advocating tax rate reductions and social policy rooted in traditional Judeo-Christian morality, they are now reduced to reliving their imaginary glory days of occupying university administration buildings during their youth in the 1960s, while relentlessly pursuing a policy mix catastrophically destructive not only to the country at large, but specifically and especially to the very people they claim to champion.
The (not-so) "Great Society" welfare state has reduced multiple generations of Americans, disproportionately blacks, not just to infantile dependency, but to social and familial disintegration that even slavery hadn't accomplished. Democrats' minimum wage laws and antibusiness regulation take a baseball bat to the kneecaps of any black youth uppity enough to try to step on the first rung of the economic ladder. Seven and a half years of the Obama administration has given us an economy and a job market like a manual transmission with a burned clutch.
Everywhere that Democrats are ascendant, misery, unemployment, crime and social conflict rise. And everywhere that Democrats hold unchallenged power -- like Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, D.C. -- the misery index together with murder rates, especially via "gun violence," are off the charts.
And yet they have the gall to engage in a sanctimonious and self-righteous media stunt in demand of policy that not only runs counter to the fundamental constitutional law of our society, but which in our country has the most noxious racist origins. Gun control hardly existed in the United States until a group of Klansmen got together and decided that allowing n*****s to own guns after the Civil War had put them on an equal legal footing with all other Americans, was an intolerable idea (minimum wage laws likewise were invented by racist white unions who didn't want to have to compete with young blacks).
I'm grateful to have been able to extricate myself from the spell of this cult into which I was largely born, by virtue of concerted study and soul-searching over many years. But it shouldn't take a genius, or any amount of scholarship for that matter, to figure out that the Democrat Party of today is at war with anyone and everyone who is not already a member of their elite upper echelon of power brokers. Black, white, Hispanic, gay, transgendered, even if you're liberal, you can go to hell if you don't toe the ever-shifting party line with absolute loyalty.
And what a price for that loyalty! Daniel Patrick Moynihan, respected Democratic senator, warns that a 25% illegitimacy rate is potentially devastating to the black community; he is denounced as a racist, the welfare state metastasizes under Democrat design, and the black illegitimacy rate, together with the black murder and incarceration rates, triples. A black man is nominated to the Supreme Court, but because he's not a cheerleader for affirmative action, he is subjected to a high-tech lynching at the hands of white Democrat senators, including former members of the KKK. Joe Lieberman speaks out publicly just a liiiiitle bit too forcefully in defense of Israel and is purged from the very party that nominated him to be their Vice President, even before his term would have run out had he been elected.
White men, whether liberal or conservative, Ivy League or redneck, are intimidated into silence when non-whites or women are forcibly advanced ahead of them in disregard of merit or the free choice of those with whom they are contracting, while simultaneously being browbeaten into confessing their "racism", apologizing for their "privilege", and disowning their manhood.
Successful business people of any race, ethnicity or gender configuration (an endangered species under the Obama regime), or even people who merely aspire to be successful (which is to say, people who earn or try to earn a dollar more than the average government employee via the design and delivery of products and services for which people willingly exchange their dollars in a free market) become the targets of the most vicious attacks (the "undeserving rich"). Small wonder the rate of young entrepreneurship is only a third what it was during the eighties.
Gays and LGBTs decide not to be sitting ducks, buy guns, join the Pink Pistols and get vilified by the Democratic lieutenant governor (and soon-to-be governor) of California.
Meanwhile, Democrat-party designated "gun-free zones" morph as they must by the inexorable laws of human action into open kill zones, and we are admonished never to let it enter our minds, against evidence as literally self-evident as blood, bombs, bullets, bodies and the terrorists' own consistent, scripturally validated and repeated words, that Islam has anything whatsoever to do with it; or that we ought to have the right to defend ourselves in a worst-case scenario.
Marxists have long dreamed of the day that the oppressed proletariat masses of America acquire the consciousness of their own collective power and rise up against their capitalist oppressors. But while they have made quantum leaps toward this goal in the last two or three generations, accelerated in last seven fundamentally transformative years, the reality may be the opposite; they may live in terror that the millions of people whose lives they have destroyed may finally turn their wrath against the ones who have treated them the most contemptibly as pawns.
Ronald Reagan, campaigning for Governor of California in 1966, in reference to the sit-ins, occupations of university property and other unlawful disruptions at UC Berkeley said, "It began a year ago when the so-called free-speech advocates, who in truth have no appreciation for freedom, were allowed to assault and humiliate the symbol of law and order of policemen on the campus, and that was the moment when the ringleaders should have been taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of the University once and for all."
It's never too late.
Howard Hyde is author of the book "Escape from Berkeley: An EX liberal progressive socialist embraces America (and doesn't apologize)".