WND: 5 phases of the Democratic plantation - Dinesh D'Souza 11/10/18, 8'37 AM

WND: 5 phases of the

Democratic plantation
Originally posted at WND.

Note: The following is an excerpt from Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, “Death
of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party,”
which will be released July 31.

The central premise of my new book – that the plantation defines not merely
the origin but the entire history of the Democratic Party – will seem at the
first glance, and for those unfamiliar with my previous work, far-fetched or
even crazy. The old Democratic plantation system, after all, was involuntary;
it was based on forcibly confining slaves. Today, however, the Democrats
don’t have anyone penned up in this way, and they certainly aren’t forcing
anyone to work.

This objection, however, can be answered by recalling how the antebellum

Democrats regarded the old plantation. Democratic Sen. James Chesnut
regarded his slaves as having it so good on his South Carolina plantation that
they cost more than the work they produced. Asked if he ever had runaways
he quipped, “Never! It’s pretty hard work to keep me from running away from
them.”

Chesnut’s wife, the spirited Mary Boykin Chesnut, wrote in her diary in 1861,
shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, “Now if slavery Is as disagreeable
to Negroes as we think it, why don’t they all march over the border where
they would be received with open arms?” Her point is that the slaves who
want to leave can leave; the white men are all at the front and there is no one
except women and children to stop them.

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Her deeper implication is that in reality many slaves prefer the security of the
plantation to the shock and responsibilities of freedom. The plantation, she
suggests, has become not merely a prison of the body but also a prison of the
mind. It holds its population in debased psychological confinement even
when there is the opportunity to get up and go.

I believe this is the insight that drives the modern Democratic Party. The
Democrats realized, long after slavery was ended, that they could create new
types of plantations that would so degrade and imprison the minds of their
inhabitants that very few would want to leave.

Still, there are massive differences between the old slave plantation and the
political life of today’s Democrats. The old plantation was rural; today’s
Democrats are largely urban. Slavery was a Southern institution; today’s
Democrats have their base in the North and on the coasts. The plantation was
sustained through an ideology of states’ rights; today’s Democrats are the
party of centralized government that opposes states’ rights.

The Little Magician

If we must draw on analogies from the past, today’s Democrats seem closer to
Tammany Hall and the urban machines of the North rather than to the old
rural slave plantation. Didn’t Franklin D. Roosevelt nationalize those urban
machines to create the model of governance for the modern Democratic
Party?

Yes, but the urban machines were themselves based on the slave plantation.
Historians rightly credit Martin Van Buren, nicknamed the Little Magician
for his political wizardry, as the man who invented the northern Democratic
machine. Yet he was the ally and successor to Democratic Party founder and
Tennessee slave-owner Andrew Jackson. Based on his observations of the
rural plantation – and the similarities he noted between slaves in the south

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and newly-arriving impoverished immigrants in the north – Van Buren

adapted the Democrats’ plantation model to urban conditions.

Thus he helped create new ethnic plantations based in the cities, populated by
immigrants who were dependent and exploited by the Democratic Party in
the north in somewhat the same manner as the slaves were by the Democrats
in the south. These urban machines ripped off the taxpayer not only to enrich
corrupt machine bosses but also to buy votes in exchange for promises of
employment and basic provisions. In sum, the urban machines symbolized by
New York’s Tammany Hall were themselves mini welfare states, precursors to
the Leviathan welfare state Democrats would later establish in the 20th
century.

As Van Buren’s wizardry suggests, this is a story of how the old slave
plantation was creatively modified to create the modern progressive
plantation. I’m not saying the Democrats are the same as they were two
centuries ago; this is a story of change as well as of continuity. Democrats like
Van Buren didn’t just extend the rural plantation model from the early 19th
century to the present. Rather, they transformed it to changing conditions, in
response to new demographic realities created by immigrant waves, and also
in response to the singular catastrophe that left the old plantation model in
ruins.

The old plantation was destroyed by the Civil War. Prior to that, the
plantation was the model of Democratic governance and Democratic political
domination. Democrats had concocted a whole ideology – the positive good
school of slavery – to uphold and defend the plantation. This Democratic
apologia for slavery as an institution to be cherished and expanded was
radically different from the Founders’ shared understanding of slavery as a
necessary evil that should be curbed until it could be eliminated.

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The Founders hoped and expected slavery to disappear. In 1782 Jefferson

wrote of “a change already perceptible. … The spirit of the master is abating,
that of the slave rising from the dust … the way I hope preparing, under the
auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation.” Nothing could be further from
the vision of the Democratic Party whose most “moderate” faction saw slavery
as a matter of moral indifference and an institution that should be continued
indefinitely.

‘Democratic socialists’

Interestingly the Democrats’ prime apologist for slavery, George Fitzhugh,

was a self-proclaimed socialist who contrasted the happy inhabitants of the
Democratic plantation with what he took to be the exploited laboring class of
the capitalist, Republican Northern states. Fitzhugh’s arguments seem
chillingly familiar because his beloved plantation still shapes the ideology of
his 21st century Democratic successors.

So does the pro-slavery ideology of Democratic presidential candidate

Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln’s supreme antagonist. Douglas was a
Northern Democrat, and contrary to today’s conventional wisdom that views
the plantation as a purely Southern creation, Democrats both in the North
and the South protected it. Douglas and Fitzhugh were also full-blown
Democratic white supremacists who railed against blacks in a manner
unthinkable of the founders.

When Lincoln in his House Divided speech alleged a four-man conspiracy to

nationalize slavery, he named just one Southern Democrat, Roger Taney of
Maryland, and three Northern Democrats: Stephen Douglas of Illinois,
former President Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, and the current
president, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. A few years earlier, Buchanan
said that at a time when slavery was besieged throughout the country,

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slaveholders “have no other allies … except the Democracy of the North,”

meaning the Northern Democratic Party.

“The great support of slavery in the South,” said Whig senator and later
Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward, “has been its alliance with the
Democratic Party of the North.” These are the same Northern Democrats that
tried to thwart Lincoln during the war. Their goal was to force him to
reconcile with the Confederacy and to restore slavery. Lincoln termed them
the “fire in the rear,” more dangerous to the nation than even the
Confederacy. Eventually, through Lincoln’s efforts, the ruin of the plantation
in 1865 became also the ruin of the national Democratic Party.

So the Democrats had to reconstruct themselves after the war. This

reconstruction – very different from the Reconstruction attempted by
Republicans to integrate blacks into the economic and political life of the
country – involved not an abandonment of the plantation but its reinvention,
both in the North and in the South.

The new Big House

The Democratic urban machine, of course, outlasted the war and continued
to hold immigrants in its iron clasp. But for the postbellum Democratic Party
of the late 19th and early 20th century, sharecropping replaced slavery and
segregation and racial terrorism enforced Democratic control in the South
not just of blacks but also poor whites.

Progressive Democrats led by Woodrow Wilson then sought to rebuild a new

type of plantation for the 20th century. They were quite familiar with the old
plantation, being just a single generation removed from it. Contrary to many
pundits who camouflage this fact, progressives are the ones who invented
white nationalism and white supremacy in their modern and most virulent
forms for the purpose of keeping poor whites in thrall to the Democratic

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Party. Progressives, in other words, were America’s original hate group, and
their opponents, the conservative Republicans, were the original “black lives
matter” movement.

The other signal contribution of progressivism was to introduce the idea of

the centralized state as the Big House, with racial terrorism and eugenics as
their macabre mechanisms for controlling the population of their new
plantation and maintaining quality control for its labor. Through
progressivism, Wilson inaugurated, one might say, the “birth of a nation” that
departed radically from the American founding, one now represented by the
ominous symbol of the night-riding Ku Klux Klan, serving as the domestic
terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.

Yet it was not Wilson but his progressive successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
who in the 1930s and 1940s institutionalized progressivism in the operations
of government and thus created the foundation for the modern Democratic
Party. FDR began by replacing the Democratic urban machines with the labor
union movement and local Democratic Party bosses with a national boss,
namely himself. He introduced the idea of a national plantation – Tammany
on the Potomac – with a progressive “brain trust” and progressive
administrators as its overseers.

FDR and his team also gave the plantation a fascist facelift – deliberately
introducing elements of Mussolini’s Italian fascism into the New Deal – while
at the same time drawing on models of Nazi conformity, what the Nazis
termed Gleichschaltung. (Hitler, for his part, created his own plantation
drawing on schemes that he self-consciously lifted from the Democratic Party
and from American progressives.) Some of the fascist elements first
introduced by FDR, both in policy and in strategy, are also evident in today’s
Democratic Party.

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Moreover, as Democratic presidents did in the antebellum period, FDR relied

on Northern Democrats to play the role they played before the Civil War,
namely to ally with Southern Democrats to protect the infrastructure of
racism that continued to sustain FDR’s national Democratic plantation. Thus
while FDR didn’t share Hitler’s form of racism he was not above making a
Faustian pact with the worst racists in America, blocking anti-lynching
legislation and excluding blacks from New Deal programs, to get his
progressive agenda passed. FDR and the Democrats’ shameful complicity
with fascism and white supremacy are virtually ignored by progressive
historians, and virtually no textbook even mentions them.

By the 1930s, we can see in FDR’s version of the plantation the familiar
outlines that define the Democratic Party today. Today’s Democrats have the
same attachment to the centralized state, the new Big House, and they display
the same fascist streak when, for example, they use the instruments of the
state against their political opponents. But we cannot stop with FDR; our
story would be incomplete without showing how Lyndon Johnson again
modified the plantation in the 1960s, and how Bill Clinton and Barack Obama
further expanded it in recent decades.

Democrats and the KKK

LBJ was lifelong bigot who has somehow in progressive historiography been
transformed into a convert to the cause of civil rights. From the recently-
released JFK Files, we have good reason to suppose LBJ was once a Ku Klux
Klan member. An internal FBI memo refers to “documented proof” that LBJ
was in the Texas Klan during his early political career.

This is hardly surprising, and if true, he would join Woodrow Wilson, Harry
Truman and Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black as high-level Democrats who
were also Klansmen. Yet we are asked to believe that this leopard magically

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changed his spots. Apparently a long list of other Democratic bigots,

including West Virginia Klansman and Dixiecrat Robert Byrd who became
Obama and Hillary’s mentor, the “conscience of the Senate,” were also
converts to the cause of black equality and advancement.

Yet where are their conversion stories? One might expect that when someone
undergoes a wrenching transformation from being a white supremacist to an
enemy of white supremacy, they would have quite a story to tell. Whittaker
Chambers certainly did, when he made the traumatic transformation from
Communist to anti-Communist. Chambers records his intellectual volte face
in his autobiographical magnum opus “Witness.” Yet there are no such
Democratic conversion stories.

This is the dog that didn’t bark, the clue that tells us that people like LBJ and
Robert Byrd never underwent any big transformation. There was no dark
night of the soul, no road to Damascus. They merely transitioned from an
earlier incarnation of the Democratic plantation to a newer one. LBJ, for
instance, remained the priapic plantation boss he was when he started his
career. His transformation was purely tactical; he pushed the Civil Rights Act
and the Voting Rights Act not so much to combat an upsurge of white racism
but rather in response to the need for a new approach in the wake of rapidly-
declining white racism.

White racism and white supremacy declined dramatically in the aftermath of

World War II – Hitler did more to undermine it than even the civil rights
movement which benefited from the discrediting of fascist doctrines of
Nordic supremacy – and this meant LBJ could no longer count on a solid
South of white racist Democrats. There were quite simply fewer and fewer of
them.

Attracted by the message of free markets, anticommunism, patriotism and

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upward mobility, nonracist whites in the South had started to move rapidly
toward the Republican Party. The Democrats were losing their base of white
racist voters and LBJ saw that this represented perhaps the greatest
catastrophe for the Democratic Party since the Civil War shut down the old
Democratic plantation. Something drastic needed to be done.

LBJ’s – and Obama’s – new plantation

If the Democrats intended to retain their majority, LBJ saw they needed to
get more black votes. This was quite a change for a Democratic Party whose
history was largely based on exploiting black labor and suppressing the black
vote. But LBJ saw the opportunity to create a new type of plantation in which
blacks could be exploited in a different way. On this plantation they had a
different casting role, not as exploited workers who did not vote but rather as
exploited voters who did not work. In other words, LBJ recognized the
importance of turning blacks into a constituency which Democrats had never
before done in their party’s history.

The landmark immigration law of the mid-1960s, which opened the door to
25 million new immigrants mostly from Asia, Africa and South America,
created the foundation for the Obama Plantation, one that encompasses not
only blacks but also Latinos and other minorities. Today’s Democratic
plantation has come a long way from its roots in the rural antebellum South.
It’s much bigger now and includes African-Americans, Hispanics, native
Americans and to some extent even Asian-Americans. Today’s Democratic
plantation is grimly visible in the urban black ghettos, the Latino barrios, the
native American reservations.

Obama presided over the Democrats’ move toward a multicultural plantation,

complete with a sustaining ideology of identity politics that reconciles each
ethnic group to its political captivity, seeking to create the modern equivalent

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of the contented slave. Of course today’s enslaved, while free in principle to

leave the plantation, in practice rarely do so. This can be explained through
psychologist Martin Seligman’s concept of “learned helplessness.” The
Democrats have created learned helplessness among their captive
constituencies, and this keeps them bound by invisible cords to the plantation
lifestyle.

There is one important difference between the old Democratic plantation and
the new one. The old one was based on forced black labor; the new one is
based on the dependent black, Latino or native American voter. This voter
ideally does not work but rather lives off welfare and government provision,
which become of course his motives to sustain the providing party in power.
Democrats use coalitions of dependent ethnic minorities in order to generate
an electoral majority, thus placing progressive Democrats in charge of the Big
House. From there they loot the national treasury in the same shameless
fashion that the old Tammany bosses looted city hall.

Progressive Democrats benefit themselves and live high on the hog – just like
the Clintons and Obamas who went from nothing to multimillionaires, from
minor overseers to plantation big bosses – all the while declaring their
motives as the tireless pursuit of social justice. These Democrats proclaim
themselves the benevolent supervision of needy, impoverished minorities
whom in fact they keep needy and impoverished. These minorities, deprived
of the skills for education and advancement, rely on the Democrats to provide
for them, thus keeping themselves in dependent subordination and keeping
the progressives in power.

Yet despite this difference, the new plantation bears a striking resemblance to
its ancient predecessor. In his classic work “The Peculiar Institution,”
historian Kenneth Stampp identified the five distinctive features of the old
slave plantation: dilapidated housing, which the slave-owners termed slave

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quarters; broken families, the product of slave rules that abolished the
institution of marriage and permitted the sale of family members at the
master’s whim; a high degree of violence to police the plantation, necessary of
course because slavery was based on captive labor; no opportunity for decent
education or advancement, notwithstanding the Democrats’ insistence on
slavery as a “school of civilization”; and finally the plantation’s emotional
characteristics of hopelessness, despair and nihilism.

We can verify the existence of Democratic plantations today by finding these

exact five features in inner-city Oakland or Detroit; in the Latino barrios of
California and south Texas; and on native American reservations like the Pine
Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Other features of the plantation – a
leisure class of people who devoted themselves to leisure, gambling and duels
provoked by petty slights – can also be found in today’s ghettos and barrios.
In this respect the inhabitants of these places resemble not so much the old
slaves as the old slave-owners.

Read more at WND.

Lincoln united his party and saved America from the Democrats for the first
time. Can Trump—and we—come together and save America for the second
time?

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