Democrats love tyranny.
When the Left talks about the U.S’s slave period, Dred Scott decision, segregation laws, prohibition law, the internment of Japanese and German U.S. citizens during WWII etc. etc., the introduction of socialism (hence the determined undermining of the US constitution over the past 100 years) they always dress it as ”American failures”, never as the product of the Democrat Party and its politicians.
Democrat mindset 101:
Rights From Government, Not God
The antebellum slavery defense mounted the first real challenge in America to the idea of the Lockean social contract, which was embraced at the Founding (only the Bible and Blackstone were referenced more than the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke in early American political writings). Calhoun and his fellow slavery advocates openly disagreed with Enlightenment social contract theory and instead saw rights as developing organically within society and government. Consequently, liberty for the Calhounites did not exist in a pre-government state of nature, to be protected from government incursion, but rather grew organically out of a communitarian society, including government. Calhoun wrote:
As, then, there never was such a state as the, so called, state of nature, and never can be, it follows that men, instead of being born in it, are born in the social and political state; and of course, instead of being born free and equal, are born subject, not only to parental authority, but to the laws and institutions of the country where born and under whose protection they draw their first breath.
Ann Coulter, Kevin D. Williamson, Sean Trende, and others have pushed back on the idea that the modern Republican Party is primarily built on racism. However, a further examination of what makes the modern parties, and more importantly, the modern philosophies of conservatism and progressivism, is essential. Little attention has been paid to the thinkers who made Democrats the party of slavery in the lead-up to the Civil War, and their influence on modern liberal ideas.
Conservatives and liberals alike may be surprised to find that in reality John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina antebellum statesman and political theorist, and his pro-slavery allies, stand firmly as the intellectual forebears of the political philosophy of Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and the modern left. Calhoun and the antebellum thinkers behind the positive defense of slavery in the nineteenth century represent the first major criticism of American founding principles – principles the American conservative movement seeks to preserve – as well as the intellectual seed for the later Progressive movement and what is considered modern-day liberalism.
