Q Fabius

One of the greatest ironies of today's political landscape is how closely the Democratic party, and all of its subsidiary interests, align with the thought and action of the antebellum (pre-Civil War) South.

The first time idea of explicitly racial politics gained traction on a national scale, it was brought about by John C Calhoun, South Carolina Democratic senator whose ideas primarily led to the Confederacy. "The Marx of the Master Class," Calhoun essentially developed a political philosophy based around the idea of slavery's natural goodness.  He envisioned an essential socialist utopia for white people, supported by slavery. He realized that slavery would not work with the American regime as it existed; he realized he needed to flatly deny the principle of equality as presented in the Declaration of Independence (because he and everyone else knew the Founders meant all people,, not just whites and not just males). To justify slavery, he called equality a "self-evident lie." He asserted that, instead of being granted inalienable rights by Nature and Nature's God, groups of people instead "earned" rights based upon their civilizational development throughout history.  He asserted whites had earned their freedom, while blacks had not. Rights are not natural but dependent on history. Therefore, whites had the "right" to assert unlimited control over the back race without their consent.  Your social status depends on membership in a group - that's identity politics. For Calhoun, group identity was defined by race.

If that doesn't sound familiar, think of the growing idea today (predominantly on the Left) that white people, because of their ancestors' history, don't deserve to have an independent voice in moral political matters. People of color, on the other hand, have pre-determined authority in moral and political matters because their history of being oppressed. White people, because of their history, do not have legislation made with the explicit aim of granting them access to college, employment, etc. Since civil rights legislation of 1965, people of color (and other minorities) are by law given preferential treatment in these areas. Since 1965, culture has been pushing in this direction further and further (reference Amazon's "black business" program, the lobbying of the NBA and NFL, or nearly anything else that is deemed morally questionable if it doesn't intentionally pander to minority groups). "Protected class" used to be an ironic term to refer derisively to affirmative action, now it's an actual legal term with legal standing. The message today is: what you deserves depends upon your skin color, gender, sexual orientation, and how those traits line up with what we like or dislike in history. Rights are historically contingent. People's moral worth is dependent upon their membership of a group; today, the groups are race, gender, and sexual orientation.

That's the deeper theoretical basis for the similarity between the Left and the Confederacy. More mundane political matters are even more amusing.

Think about California's active disregard for federal immigration law, or even the state's threats to secede when Trump became president. Those are mirror images of state nullification debates in the early 1800s (led by Calhoun) or the actual secession of southern states in 1860. We've seen that movie before.

Think also of Roe v Wade or the Obergefell court cases. Both are attempts to end widespread national political debates (i.e. debates rightly settled by the people voting through their representatives) by judicial fiat that implements a national mandate. Sounds suspiciously familiar to the Dredd Scott case, where Justice Roger B Taney essentially declared that slavery was legal throughout the US and it's territories (so long as a slave owner would take his "property" across state lines). Such a decision would mandate slavery's legality everywhere, regardless of states that had already banned slavery through democratic means.

You might take the last two examples to say that "the Left will use whatever mechanism of power to achieve what they want." That's true, but nullification and judicial legislation (and all the other ways the Left pushes their agenda) actually follow logically from the first premise of denying natural equality. Equality is the theoretical basis for political consent; they are two sides of the same coin. Without the former, there is no reason for the latter. Once equality is done away with, there is no moral or political reason to abide by the consent of the governed - consent is no longer important. So long as the goals is good--as the Left and Democratic party supposes they are--using un-democratic means to achieve those goals is not only unproblematic, but salutary. When ballots failed, the Democratic South resorted to bullets. When ballots fail today, the Democratic Party resorts to whatever it can short of bullets (but lots of rioting and looting..."guns are for hicks") to get what it wants.

In the early 1800s, the Democratic Party twisted and distorted the institutions of American government around one "peculiar institution," slavery. Today, the Democratic Party is twisting the institutions of government around the multiple interests that compose the Left's agenda. Both stem from the denial of equality, and both are antithetical to American government as it was founded. Today's "party of civil rights" takes it's cues from the world's first slave state.

-QFMV