Many a book will be written and many trees felled for the abundant paper necessary to pen the demise of the Democratic Party. It has come a long way since its founders, like Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, envisioned a party of the people, of the working class, for the people. Agrarian based.
It reached its peak from the advent of FDR’s New Deal from 1932 to 1974, when the Republican Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, and Democrats swept the off-year 1974 elections.
After the ‘74 elections, the Republicans controlled only one state, Kansas, where they had the legislature and the governorship. However, the forty-nine other states had near or total Democratic control. After 1974, the GOP had only about a dozen governors out of fifty.
The GOP was, for all intents and purposes dead, as a political party, and the remaining fragments contained conflicting ideologies, some conservative and some liberal.
Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Senator Jacob Javits of New York. They of course agreed on nothing.
As one writer once said, “If the Republicans had been a stray cat, it would have been hauled away to the animal shelter and immediately euthanized. No one would have claimed it.”
The same happened to the Whigs in the 1850’s, though the issue back then that divided them was slavery and how to contend with it. They could not reach a consensus, so they fell apart and many went on to join the new Republican Party such as Abraham Lincoln.
The near extinct GOP actually manufactured buttons which read, “Republicans Are People Too!” in the early 1970’s. In bright yellow no less to show their cowardice.
When the Republicans fell apart in 1974, they only had eighteen percent approval. The current Democrats now stand at 21 percent approval, only three points better.
The current Democrats don’t stand for anything except to roadblock President Trump. And viciousness, murder, mayhem. That is not an ideology, just obstructionism.
Calling for violence is not an ideology as Governor JB Pritzker has done, nor is another costly impeachment. It is the last thing the American people want. They want peace and prosperity. Right now, the only politician and party offering this is Donald Trump and the Republicans.
The Democrats of today are all but extinct. They stand for nothing and antagonize everybody. They have no consensus.
A liberal Democratic senator recently went to a late-night big box store and there the cashier, upon learning of the senator’s profession said, “Democrats are assholes!”
The only thing left is to manufacture buttons which say, “Democrats Are People Too!”
Historian and Reagan biographer Craig Shirley is the author of Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All; Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America; December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World; Last Act: The Final Years and Emerging Legacy of Ronald Reagan; Reagan Rising: The Decisive Years, 1976-1980; Citizen Newt: The Making of a Reagan Conservative; Mary Ball Washington: The Untold Story of George Washington's Mother; April 1945: The Hinge of History, as well as many articles and essays on politics and the conservative movement.
- 2024 Election
- Democrat party
- 1974 Elections
- Democratic control
- Republican Party
- Whig party
- Democrat opinion polls
- Donald Trump
- Democrat agenda
- political violence
- impeachment
