I have seen several sanctimonious, self-righteous posts about how noble the left wing is in its choice of causes. They're against injustice, unfairness, and racism, or so they say. Maybe we should look at that history. I'm looking specifically at causes embraced by the left-wing, Democrat progressives and opposed by the right-wing Republicans. Both sides supported the wars in Vietnam and the middle east, both sides have supported the Patriot Act and the general increase in government snooping on us, and both sides support the income tax and the rising deficit, so those issues aren't here.

A more comprehensive and better researched history of the left is available from Irishman Mark Humphrys in his summary. He concentrates more on worldwide tyranny rather than American racism, bad economics, and recent corruption.

     Slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the Ku Klux Klan. In 1854, I think is the year, the Democratic-Republican party split into the Democrats and the Republicans over one big issue, slavery. The Republicans were formed to combat the Kansas-Nebraska Act that would extend slavery into the territories and the Democrats supported slavery and its expansion. When the United States Civil War ended, the Democrats created so-called Jim Crow laws to segregate public facilities in the southern states. "Jim Crow" was a pejorative term for blacks, then called "Negroes." Civil rights legislation as far back as 1875 first had little effect and then greater, always opposed by Democrats. The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were an outgrowth of the same Democratic movement without the force of law but with its tacit approval. It was a violent movement against Negroes and Jews, a large organization in the early twentieth century, and a less-connected, hate-group movement today. This black-hating fabric was the formation and mission of the American Democratic left wing through most of its history. I would argue that even today's alleged pro-black thrust on the left exists, either deliberately or unintentionally, to marginalize and to "infantalize" America's black community.

     Eugenics, Global Warming, and Climate Change. The politics-masqueraded-as-science evil morphed from genetic engineering in the Progressive Era through a series of eco-scares to become global warming, called "climate change" when the globe clearly stopped warming. In 1920 Planned Parenthood was formed to perform involuntary contraception on imbeciles (Negroes). The same movement supported the Final Solution (holocaust) to eliminate the Jewish population with Josef Mengele as their poster-boy hero. More recently, the ethanol program in the United States has diverted the corn that used to feed tens of millions, maybe 100 million, in Latin America into fuel additive that consumes more oil than it saves as fuel and rots the hoses in our vehicles. Al Gore is the global-warming poster boy today.

     While eugenics and the "idiocracy" may have been based on real science, never mind the stupid things that were done about it, global warming was always suspect. The scientific principle of global warming is that burning fossil fuel in 1960 caused the carbon-dioxide (CO2) increase in 1940 which then caused the warming trend in 1920. Bold predictions were made in 1998 about the next fifteen years and those did not happen. Global warming was revealed to be just another political eco scare.

     Have we improved? Is starving tens of millions people for a decade or more today as bad as putting 13 million in gas ovens seventy-five years ago? Is Al Gore as bad as Josef Mengele? Global warming may not be as bad as eugenics and the Nazis, but it's not one of the left-wing-Democrat crowning achievements either.

     Japanese-American Concentration Camps. The notion that "Japs" should be incarcerated came from the left as well. Note that Germany was a similar threat, but Germans didn't look different. These Japs weren't foreign spies with any probable cause to investigate them, they were tried-and-true American citizens just like you and me.

     Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao. The support for communism may have started with Karl Marx, but it extended to dictatorship and brutality under Lenin and Stalin without losing the support of the Progressives in America. Stalin starved eight million in the Ukraine and Mao killed six million in Tibet along with other unspeakable horrors and the American left still supported them. (Pete Seeger sang songs and raised money for Stalin and Hitler.)

     Mussolini, Hitler, and Castro. The fascist movement, having government take over industry, was a hot positive in the left-wing view. No matter how awful things turned out in fascist dictatorships, the Democrats maintained their support. (2015 October 2: People forget that Hitler's message was friendly and appealing, pretty much what Bernie Sanders is saying today. It was easy to get sucked in, as we saw in Europe and the American left wing, but somehow the conservative right saw through the deception and opposed Hitler not just decades later but at the actual time.)

     The New Deal and the Great Society. After Hoover started a depression by monkeying around with government economic controls, the New Deal continued and amplified the mistake and prolonged that depression for another eight years. It also left us with oodles of bureaucracies that persist even today. (How much of our economy is still in our Social Security program that turns capital-equity assets into annuities that die with their recipients? That cost is staggering.) The Great Society is a far deeper evil because it entrenches poor people into a cycle of poverty. Program after program directly reward unproductive, destructive lifestyles. For example, the Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) offers incentive to families with single parents (so the father has to leave the household) and rewards having more children (no matter how poorly they're cared for). Today, half our country is "on the dole" when we used to be a productive, prosperous nation, the economic envy of the world, all with unending, energetic support from the left. (For those who claim that Democrats have changed recently and it's not fair to judge them by their history, no matter how many Facebook pages are proud of that history, I would point out that the fraction of America entirely on government subsidy grew from one-third to one-half in the past eight years of Democrat control.)

     Forced Segregation, Forced Integration, and Affirmative Action. Let's not forget that the black-white segregation in the United States was a Democratic cause with Republican dissent. The progressives who are so proud of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in this country are the same progressives who fought and voted against it in 1964. When it became clear that blacks could not be kept away from "decent" white folks, the left did a fantastic pirouette: If they couldn't keep blacks away from whites, then they could marginalize them. Forced integration meant less control for blacks and whites over their children's education, "We'll tell you where your kids can go to school."

     Then the vilest form of racism of all, Affirmative Action, went into effect, just five years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act, telling us exactly how many blacks, Hispanics, and women we had to admit or to hire, no matter how poor their qualifications. What message does that send? And the beauty of the whole thing is that those who do not believe in discrimination are labeled "racist" and "sexist." (The beauty of it all is that it marginalizes competent, hard-working people in the promoted, minority classes. Everybody looks twice at blacks and women who are promoted.) We speculated how far it could go before somebody would ask what limits we should have on how far incompetent minority people could go and we got our frightening answer in the 2008 presidential election.

     Public funding of contraception and abortions. It doesn't take a lot of open-minded thinking to realize people should be able to make personal choices on drugs, contraception, and abortion. The bible is pro-choice on the abortion issue as Adam did not become human until God breathed humanity into him, that a fetus becomes a human life upon its first breath. So how could the progressives screw it up when they were so clearly on the good side? By requiring those who do not approve to pay for it anyway. We'll take away your wealth, your livelihood, to pay for other people to do things you disapprove of at the deepest and most-personal level. (Hobby Lobby was vilified by the left not for banning or forbidding some kinds of birth control but simply for not giving it away free to their employees. What's next? Requiring free pornography from our employers?)

     Federal Government Health Care. I have a great deal more to say on the cost of healthcare elsewhere, but America was the healthcare envy of the world as recently as 1990, despite our overregulated, over-bureaucratized medical mess. Despite our Constitution's tenth amendment's direct prohibition, there are those who think the federal government should provide the kind of health care the rest of the world came to our country to escape.

     If 67 million people want a centralized health care system, then there's nothing out there preventing it, right? I believe enough in centralized, "socialized" car insurance that I bought an insurance company. Okay, I bought one 60 millionth of one, State Farm is a mutual, owned by the subscribers. I would never think of requiring others to join, however. The only reason to require the other 68 million to participate is that we are a ready source of funding and body parts. That's not a nice picture, but it's the left-wing progressive view of health care.

     Bush's Last Two Years and The Obama Presidency, the last eight years of economic strife. In 2006 the United States created a Democrat majority in both houses of Congress, and, boy!, did they run amok. When the Internet bubble burst (during Republican leadership) the government did nothing and things settled down in a year. When the housing bubble similarly burst (under Democratic leadership) the government tried to help. $800 billion in so-called stimulus went to friends of those in Washington, nothing to stimulate anything, and there were bailouts galore. Bush is to blame for not stopping it, of course, but in 2008 the Obama campaign said, "Gee, we'll do more of the same things Bush did," and the left-wing Democrats voted for it! The economic cost has been staggering, about one-quarter of the U.S. economy, not counting the extra eight percent for Obamacare.

     Corporatism and Union-ocracy. President Eisenhower oversaw (and bemoaned) the development of a military-industrial complex, a kick-back community of friendly government paying friendly companies for overpriced defense contracts. The cost was about twice as much as private enterprise for about twice as much stuff as we needed. At least we got cool stuff from the military-industrial complex, we got to watch Neil Armstrong and what's-his-name walk on the moon.

     Today the corporatism is naked and utterly unproductive. Trillions of dollars, far more than the middle-east war costs, have been squandered bailing out companies who supported the left-wing candidates in Washington, and elsewhere. General Motors became Government Motors, naked fascism. Unions are similarly protected from any sort of legal pressure against their lawless behavior. The Democrat progressives passed laws requiring membership and looked the other way when union workplaces because havens for goons and thugs whose morals we wouldn't tolerate in gang wars.

     There is a new corruption in America. We have always felt above European corruption and laughed at Latin-American and African corruption. The last eight years here have had so much more corruption that the entire history of America 1789-2006 looks like a single dirty strand of spaghetti in a cubic mile of fetid landfill. Would Nixon's transgressions or Clinton's kickbacks even be noticed in the mire of today's trillions in stimulus and bailout and naked give-aways? I doubt it.

     Along the same vein is massive voter fraud in the past eight years. Nowhere have I received more vitriol than over voter identification. When the cornerstone of a political process is having non-qualified people participate, we're going to see strong opinions against keeping it honest. I've heard about blacks told to go the wrong polling place to be turned away so they can make a big fuss that their right to vote is being denied out of racism, busloads of mentally-incompetent people brought to the polls and "shown" how to vote for democrats, and other flagrant violations of due electoral process. We joked about it when Kennedy beat Nixon, it wasn't funny then, and it certainly isn't funny now.

     Common Core, School Lunches, and Other Educational Meddling. Who controls education controls the future, an "Orwellian" political fact not lost on the left wing. When the left-wing, Ku-Klux-Klan-sponsored law to require public education in Oregon was smashed by a more-rational Supreme Court than today's, the left had to resort to more insidious means of control. We tell kids, now at a federal level, what they can learn, what they can eat, and what they can say.

     The Obama President. Who would have thunk it? A guy with the briefest and most corrupt political history refuses to share his personal records as other candidates have done and finds himself promoted to the most powerful position on our planet. We don't even know his name, nobody remembers him from Columbia or Harvard, his wife had a $300 thousand-a-year, no-show job (raised from $60 thousand when he became a senator), and nobody on the left thinks anything is wrong. He's Marion Barry moved up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and any complaint about his behavior is deemed "racist."

     My own scariest moment in American history was when the Capitol Steps did their post-election show in 2008 November. They tore into Reagan and the Bushes openly and, of course, had a field day with Clinton, but nothing, and I mean nothing was said about Obama. In one song, a white guy with curly hair said, "I'm Barack Obama," and, later, "I look different on television." That was it! More recently, there's a black guy imitating Obama but with none of the pointed satiric venom of earlier administrations. I think they're afraid, and I think they should be afraid. For the first time in American politics, satirists and humorists need to worry about what's going to happen to them if they point too many fingers at left-wing politicians.

     While we're here, what are the divisive issues the right-wing Republicans supported?

     The Religious Right. "Religion is the right profile of the same monster whose left profile is politics." Religion and politics were indistinguishable during the middle ages in Europe and that worked well for both, not so well for the rest of us. The American founders (who I believe were atheists themselves) recognized the importance and urgency of keeping religion and politics separate. In the 1950's, a movement arose in the right to re-unite them, adding a superfluous "under God" to our Pledge of Allegiance and changing our national motto from "E Pluribus Unum" (one out of many) to "In God We Trust." Many of us don't trust in their god, or any god for that matter. If you wouldn't be comfortable with "under Allah" in the Pledge and "In Allah We Trust" on our currency, then you should support going back to a non-theocratic government in the United States. (Recall that the Spanish Inquition, with all its horror, was still going on when our Constitution was signed. There is much to fear from religious zealotry.)

     Joe McCarthy and the Cold War. The Republican thrust against Communism may have been well intentioned, but it sure didn't turn out well for American civil rights, or the America we left Europe for and fought for all these years. There was an evil suspicion of just about everybody everywhere and this is one time the left wing in general, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in particular, were clearly on the good side.

     Resistance to Same-sex marriage. This one I don't get. If guys want to marry guys or women want to marry women, then what's the big deal? Of course, the left isn't satisfied with that and wants to force right-wing, anti-gay institutions to participate, to force churches to marry homosexuals, et cetera, but the right is wrong to tell people what to do here.

    

The left wing, progressive Democrats promoted slavery, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan; eugenics, global warming, and climate change; Planned Parenthood and involuntary contraception for Negroes; the Final Solution (holocaust) in central Europe; Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Castro, and Mao; FDR and his New Deal that prolonged a depression for eight years; Japanese-American concentration camps; LBJ and the Great Society that created a permanent poverty class; corporatism, union-ocracy, and corruption on a massive scale; and the Obama secrecy and lies. What has the right wing done, what could they do, to compare to that kind of naked evil?

     These may or may not be the most-serious offenses of the left-wing, progressive Democrats. There are also the economic pseudo-science of Paul Krugman, the shameless jealousy of the Occupy movement, economic subsidy to illegal immigrants when there is a legal process, a vitriolic, anti-Israel hate of all things Jewish, the frightening left-wing alignment of news and entertainment media, support for the world's most despotic, religious-genocidal dictators, and blaming everything bad on Bush racism (even Hurricane Katrina I've heard from liberal friends). I chose these because they had the most-direct opposition from the right-wing Republicans and they're easy to understand. For example, today, even the most left-wing people I know no longer sympathize with Stalin and Hitler.

     I'm certainly not making the case that the Republicans are saints or even that the Democrats are devils, only that the smug, sanctimonious, self-righteous story of the Democrats' history isn't very sweet when we peak under the covers.

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