Who’s next to fall to BLM’s wokeism
The statue-toppling Black Lives Matter mob is on a revisionist rampage. Even abolitionists are starting to show up on its s-list.
According to BLM and its Woke mob pals, Martin Luther King had it all wrong.
Skin color is indeed grounds for judging a person’s character.
So even the statues of Lincoln and Grant — who won the Civil War and ended slavery — must come down. They were white guys, you see. And skin color not only counts, it’s an essential criterion.
So then, who’s to be next on the angry mobs’ ever-expanding s-list?
The likely candidate: the Democratic Party.
Right now the party is pleased to have BLM function in effect as its political shock troops.
Let the Woke revolutionaries raise holy hell, until a weary populace decides that things are out of and concludes that Trump’s gotta go. That seems to be the Democratic Party game plan.
But revolutions — check out the French and Russian ones — tend to seek out new foes and to start finding them within their own ranks.
This being so, it’s only a matter of time before BLM and the Woke gang turn their righteous ferocity on the Democratic Party. For it’s an unavoidable historical fact that the party carries in its very bloodstream the dread virus of racism. “Systemic racism,” you might say. You can look it up in the history books.
The Woke revolutionaries’ in fact have already started to turn on the Democratic Party. The neo-Taliban iconoclasts have shifted their attention from obscure Confederacy statuary to a previously revered founding father of progressivism — none other than President Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson was the very personification of highminded liberalism, with his PhD, his pince-nez spectacles and his Princeton University academic perch. But suddenly the Woke mob is bent on mounting his intellectual egghead noggin atop a pike.
Wilson’s name has been moved to the “most wanted” spot on the PC orthodoxy s-list. That he championed the eight-hour work day and additional pay for overtime is not likely to save his skin now.
The Ivy League professoriate has taken note, if a bit belatedly, that Dr. Wilson — aside from his voluminous good works in the cause of domestic reforms and international peace — was really no better than a bible-and-gun-clinging deplorable when it came to race relations.
It remains a matter of curiosity why it took the sages of academe an entire century to take note of Wilson’s conspicuously unenlightened attitudes toward
African Americans. Maybe that curiosity will serve as grist for future doctoral theses.
In any event, the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize for creating the League of Nations, forerunner to the United Nations, and who led America triumphantly through the monarchy-smashing era of World War I, is now regarded in bien-pensant circles as little more than a bookish version of Donald Trump.
It’s too late to force old Woodrow to apologize, to resign and slink off into disgraced oblivion. But it’s not too late to throw a rope around his statues wherever they’re found and pull ‘em down, to give the author of “New Freedom” and “Fourteen Points” a valedictory along the lines of that given to Saddam Hussain’s sculptural likeness when Baghdad fell.
In the new estimation of the Woke revisionists, Wilson, despite his hoity-toity airs — the man once taught ancient Greek and Roman history at the fancy ladies’ college, Bryn Mawr — was really of the same ilk as those smelly Walmart shoppers, same ilk as those plebes with mere voc-tech high school diplomas.
Therefore, Princeton will have to be scrubbed of all imagery linking itself to the man who was once the school’s president and governor of New Jersey. His snooty elitism was always acceptable, but not, ultimately, the part of his snootiness that manifested itself in racial superciliousness.
The truth is that Wilson’s racial snootiness was the single and lone quality that gave this haughty progressive any claim to being a man of the people.
With that gone, there’s no saving his legacy now.
But wait. Speaking of racism — racism being very loosely defined, as it always is nowadays — then what about Princeton itself? Might not the university have to be toppled like a horse-mounted Jeb Stuart sculpture on some Deep South courthouse square?
How many black kids were ever admitted to Old Nassau’s hallowed halls? How many even today? Do not the answers to those two questions give off the telltale odor of the ubiquitous racism that, according to the New York Times, festers at the nation’s rotten core?
Indeed, might it not be said — consonant with today’s rhetorical themes — that the elite university’s history fairly exudes an exclusionary stink indicative of white- supremacist, academic apartheid?
If that is a somewhat exaggerated assessment, do not today’s rules of public discourse allow, indeed encourage, the accommodation of such over-inflated hyperbole?
What’s more, Wilson may be the least of Princeton’s problems. There’s the university’s most distinguished alumnus, James Madison — Father of the Constitution.
Although Madison recognized slavery as a blight that must be terminated, eventually, he nevertheless owned slaves himself. His papers show that he once sold a batch of them to raise funds to cover unanticipated household expenses.
According to the dictates of Wokeism, this historical fact must now totally define Madison to the exclusion of everything else he did. Never mind his authorship of the
Bill of Rights and co-authorship of the Federalist Papers. Madison’s gotta go, too.
Come to think of it, Madison’s slavery connection makes it sounds like
Princeton U. would be an ideal candidate for the privileged white snots of Antifa to set up an “autonomous zone” and occupy it until the school agrees to redistribute its massive endowment riches to the cause of slavery reparations.
But even the dismantlement of Princeton looks to be only a first step on the long journey to racial justice. The road on that journey leads — no avoiding it — to the elimination of the Democratic Party itself. For, you see, the party and racism are inextricably entangled.
The party’s founding presidential candidate, Andrew Jackson, despite his populist sympathies for the little man and his heroic military actions preserving the existence of the young United States, was a slave owner, too. Case closed against him. Down with Old Hickory! Erase his offensive mug from the $20 bill!
But how do you throw out Jackson without also jettisoning the party he founded and long personified? It’s not as if, regarding dubious views on race, Jackson and
Wilson were Democratic Party outliers.
The PC propaganda sessions that now pass as history classes in our schools don’t go near the subject, but an unenlightened attitude where race is concerned has been the recurring leitmotif of the Democratic Party throughout its history.
Democrats were the driving constituency behind secession and creation of the Confederacy. They were the political constituency that waged a Civil War not only in defense of existing slavery but in support of its westward expansion.
Thwarted in that goal, an entrenched faction of the party proceeded, post war, to wage a long rearguard action in opposition to civil rights.
To this end, Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan. All through the last four decades of the 19th Century and the first five decades of the 20th Century, a powerful faction of congressional Democrats — the “Dixiecrats” — resisted even legislation aimed at eliminating the scourge of racial lynchings, forget about civil rights.
All of the memorable — and powerful — black-harassing segregationists were Democrats. All of them. Every last one. Bull Connor. Orval Faubus. George
Wallace. Lester Maddox. Democrats all.
To note this, let us hasten to say, is not to try to sneak in a good word for the GOP.
While fraudulently posing as advocates of momand-pop free enterprise, that party has long been the political toadies of powerful transnational corporations, of resourcefully contrived legal entities that have more allegiance to the bottom line than to America — that have, as a matter of fact, refused to open board meetings with the Pledge of Allegiance out of fear of offending, say, the Politburo overlords of China with whom they have profitable business arrangements.
Decades ago the Republican Party morphed into a party of surreptitious agendas including, for example, “free trade” arrangements that disassembled U.S. factories and reassembled them abroad to take advantage of cheap labor.
The GOP also morphed into the party that on the sly favors open-door immigration to bid down wages. And it morphed into the party that favored disastrous military meddling in distant squabbles of marginal concern to Americans.
Ironically, there were certain Swamp Democrats who, in a spirit of bipartisanship, found none of this particularly objectionable, for example — ahem — Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump was the politician who tore up this script, which fact surely accounts for at least some of the establishment-ruffling hysteria he arouses.
Aside from all this, the Republican Party has over the years been perfectly content to ignore African Americans and, whether out of racism or (more likely) out of indifference, to concede the Black vote to the other party as its captive constituency.
Apart from forfeiting an entire racial constituency, Republicans find themselves at a further tactical disadvantage. They’re no competition for Democrats when it comes to stirring up envy and resentment and offering voters utopian visions of the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Democrats have long excelled at promising freebies for all, leaving dyspeptic Republicans grumping that their rich pals might get stuck paying the bill.
Taking into full account the GOP’s agenda and attitude, African Americans’ lockstep political support for the Democratic Party becomes a somewhat less baffling phenomenon. Still, there’s no denying the Republican Party its noble historical legacy regarding matters racial — noble at least in comparison to the other party.
The GOP was the party that opposed slavery, or at least opposed its westward expansion. The party was founded with that single objective as the reason for its establishment.
The GOP was the party of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment. The Democratic Party was the party that opposed all of these, that fought against them tooth and nail.
When Lyndon Johnson became president upon John Kennedy’s assassination, he departed company with his old segregationist Democratic buddies on Capitol Hill and introduced the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. His old buddies, however, stood firm against the legislation.
The measure was rescued from defeat when Republicans rallied behind it and delivered the votes necessary for passage. In the House, 60% of Democrats voted against it, in contrast to nearly 75% of Republicans who voted for it. In the Senate, 46% of Democrats voted against the historic bill, in contrast to 78% of Republicans who supported it.
The Democratic senators who stood firm against the Civil Rights Act constituted a Who’s
Who of the nation’s political luminaries. They were the Democratic poobahs who chaired the powerful committee fiefdoms and held the key party leadership posts.
They included the likes of Sen. William Fulbright, D-Ark., foreign policy intellectual, proof that erudition does not always preclude the ignorance of bigotry. To keep himself in office, Fulbright, boyhood idol of Bill Clinton, voted consistently segregationist.
Opponents of the Civil Rights Act also included Sen. Robert Byrd, West Virginia Democrat, a man who entered politics via the Ku Klux Klan, attaining the rank of
Exalted Cyclops before, decades later, belatedly renouncing the organization. His half-century long service in Congress was fulsomely hailed by such colleagues as Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Joe Biden.
Other staunch foes of the Civil Rights Act included Sen. Al Gore Sr., Tennessee Democrat, father of Al Gore Jr., and Sen. Sam Erwin, North
Carolina Democrat, later to become a heroic figure of the Nixon impeachment.
Filling out the phalanx of civil rights opponents were the Senate’s most powerful Democratic bosses — Richard Russell, Ga.; George Smathers, Fla.; Russel Long, La.; James Eastland, Miss.; John Stennis, Miss.; Strom Thurmond, S.C. (who later changed parties to Republican), and Harry Byrd, Va.
If iconoclasm is to be the BLM rule of the day, surely this list of Democratic worthies offers plenty of statues, busts and portraits as targets. And surely the list offers up the Democratic Party as a juicy target itself for having surrendered the moral high ground for more than a century to those who maintained that the words of the Declaration of Independence — the words that all Americans are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — did not apply to Blacks.
The Woke vandals, BLM and others, have instead targeted a statue of Republican Theodore Roosevelt,
first president to invite a Black man to the White House as a dinner guest, a gesture that rippled through the ranks of the Democratic Party as a ghastly scandal.
Sen. Robert C. Byrd, the one-time Exalted Cyclops, could all by himself keep the BLM’s idoltopplers busy fulltime. As chairman of the Senate’s appropriations committee barony, he funneled more than $1 billion of pork into his home turf.
Now bearing the old Cyclops’ name are the Robert C. Byrd Highway, the Robert C. Byrd Bridge, the Robert C. Byrd Auditorium and National Conservation Training Center, the Robert C. Byrd High School, the Robert C. Byrd Greenbank Telescope, the Robert C. Byrd United Technology Center, the Robert C. Byrd Bio-Technology Science Center, the Robert C. Byrd Cancer Research Center, the Robert C. Byrd Library and so on and so on.
How long can the Democratic Party keep itself off of BLM’s s-list? The guess here is surely not much longer.