The following is adapted from Dinesh D'Souza's new book "Hillary's America,"
available now.
This is not an election about Donald Trump; it is an election about Hillary Clinton. The big question goes beyond the two candidates: Which gang are we going to put in power, the Republican gang or the Democratic gang? There is only one answer: the Republican gang.
Why? It’s not because the Republicans necessarily deserve to rule. It’s not because they always know how to rule. There’s a reason some people call it the stupid party. Even so, I’m a proud member of the stupid party because the alternative is the evil party.
Politics is not an individual endeavor; it is a team activity. The Democrats led by Hillary are trying to steal America, and Republicans led by Trump are trying to stop this from happening. That’s the basis for my conclusion that every Republican—not matter who he is—is preferable to every Democrat.
Look at who the Democrats are. For more than a century, this party focused its oppression on blacks. The venue of this oppression was the slave plantation. Then, in the early part of the 20th century, the Democrats broadened this to include immigrants and other minorities. In this era, one may say that the Democrats took everything from some people.
Since the rise of progressivism in the 1930s, the Democrats shifted to a new strategy. This was an urban rather than a rural strategy. As blacks moved to cities, Democrats re-created the plantation there. These urban plantations were build to accommodate not just blacks but also poor immigrants. To the plantation, one might say, the Democrats added the ghetto and the barrio.
In all these places, poor people were kept from rising beyond a minimal level, and black suffering was used to justify the expanding and increasingly confiscatory progressive state. So in this era, Democrats went from taking everything from some people to taking something from everyone.
But now we are in a new era. The Hillary Democrats want to complete the stealing of America that has already come a long way in the Obama years. Progress toward the goal of complete seizure and complete control—this is what Democrats mean when they use the word “progressive.” These thugs have gone from taking everything from some people to taking something from everyone to — their final goal — taking everything from everyone.
Once this happens, we have lost America, or to put it differently, we will all be serfs in Hillary’s America. The medieval serf typically turned over half his produce to the lord he served. Serfdom, in this sense, represents the midway point between freedom and slavery, because slavery means we have no claim whatever on what we produce.
For Hillary, serfdom is not enough. The Hillary Democrats would not be satisfied with a marginal tax rate that topped out at 50 percent. They want full control over the wealth and productivity of America, which means full control over your wealth and the fruit of your labor. Essentially Hillary wants to take the historic Democratic rip-off scheme to its final limit. She wants to turn all of American into a plantation.
How to stop Hillary’s America? There is only one way. To see why, let’s consider how previous incarnations of subjugation, exploitation and theft have been stopped in this country. The British, of course, were the original culprits, ruling America from afar and slowly but systematically stealing wealth from this country. It took the American founders—led by George Washington—to stop them.
There was no Republican Party in 1776, but the Republican Party has, from its founding in 1854, been the custodian of the principles of the American Revolution. In fact, this is what it means to be a conservative in America today; we are conserving the ideals of the nation’s founding. So conservatives and Republicans are the inheritors of the founding legacy.
There is, admittedly, an irony in this: American conservatism is distinct in that it protects not the ancient regime or tradition per se. Rather, it protects a revolutionary tradition. Moreover, this revolutionary tradition is the tradition of classical liberalism and involves three types of freedom: political freedom, economic freedom, and freedom of thought and religion.
The founders didn’t just care about freedom; they also cared about justice. For them, justice had two main components, the justice of economic allocation and the justice of rights. The justice of economic allocation is the justice of free market capitalism: the basic idea is that people should keep the fruits of their labor. The other main form of justice was equality of rights under the law. The founders knew this second type of justice was betrayed by slavery; that’s why they set up institutions designed over time to get rid of that form of systematic theft.
The contradiction between the principles of the founders and the practice of American slavery came to a head two generations later, in the Civil War. In 1860, once again America’s core principles, and indeed America’s survival as a nation, were threatened. The threat came not from “the South.” The idea that the South is wholly to blame is a progressive canard. What the canard leaves out is what caused Southern secession in the first place.
Why does this matter? After all, it was the South, not the Democrats, who seceded. But the South seceded because its party, the Democratic Party, lost the election. Had the Democrats won, slavery would have been safe and the South would have remained within the union. The defeat of the pro-slavery party in 1860 caused the Civil War.
Once the Civil War started, northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas panicked. They had coddled slavery but they had not expected to carve the nation itself in two. So the northern Democrats condemned secession and pledged fealty to Lincoln. But it was a false fealty; a powerful faction of Copperhead Democrats worked overtime to undermine Republican prospects for winning the war.
The truth is that the Copperhead Democrats wanted Lincoln to lose the war. They wanted to make peace with the South so that slavery, if not extended, could at least be retained. The slogan of the Democratic Party in 1864 was to keep things just as they were before the war. In other words, restore the union but let the South have slavery.
These grim facts make it clear that it was Lincoln’s re-election, and the success of Lincoln’s armies, that ultimately sealed the fate of slavery. So slavery was not ended by “the North” because the North was divided between Lincoln loyalists and Copperhead Democrats. Slavery was actually ended by the Republican Party.
After losing the war, the Democrats could not restore slavery so they switched to enslavement. They carried out this enslavement through a series of horrific schemes aimed at blacks: the Black Codes, segregation, Jim Crow, and the domestic terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan.
Republicans again fought back with Reconstruction, going to the extent of having military governors throughout the South to thwart the Democratic effort to suppress, disenfranchise and murder blacks. The GOP measures were heavy-handed at times but a certain amount of heavy-handedness was necessary to deal with Democratic thuggery and exploitation.
Republicans didn’t always win. They could not overturn segregation laws that were passed by Democratic legislatures, signed by Democratic governors, and enforced by Democratic sheriffs and other government officials. Republican anti-lynching bills were thwarted by one progressive Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, and then by another progressive Democrat Franklin Roosevelt. Both were allied with some of the worst racists in America.
Although GOP anti-lynching measures were defeated, the party did stop the Klan just a few years after its founding, at least until it was revived again by Democrats in the early twentieth century. Republicans also led the First Civil Rights Revolution, which resulted in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, as well as the three Civil War Amendments: the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.
The Democrats de facto nullified these amendments, turning them into dead letters in the South and preventing blacks and other minorities from enjoying their rights for another three quarters of a century. But the GOP won in the end, even though it took a second Civil Rights Revolution, almost a century later, to actually enforce the Civil War Amendments.
Ironically it was a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, who introduced the Civil Rights Act, but he did so out low political motives. The main opposition came from his own party, not from the GOP. Indeed, without Republican pressure, and without Republican votes, LBJ would not have been able to sign, and likely would not have wanted to sign, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Bill.
Contrary to progressive propaganda, the Democrats have, almost without interruption, proven to be the party of bigotry while the Republicans have a consistent record of opposition to bigotry. The Democrats are the party of subjugation and oppression while the Republicans are the party of equal rights and the level playing field. From slavery through modern progressivism, Democrats have always stolen the fruits of people’s labor while Republicans stand for letting people keep what they produce and earn.
In the end, that’s what this election is about. It’s about protecting the American dream. Worse than Obama, Hillary is the frightening culmination of all that is twisted and wrong about American politics. All the #NeverTrump nonsense collapses when we realize that this has always been a Hillary up or down election. My position is #NeverHillary.
Moreover, every Republican is preferable to every Democrat. Not everyone on our team is a good guy but the team that jointly works to prevent stealing and exploitation is always an improvement on the team that carries out the stealing and exploitation. The party that takes down the plantation is always preferable to the party that builds and maintains the plantation.
Dinesh D'Souza is a conservative author and film maker. His latest book is "Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party."
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