Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party Read Free

now what it has been from the beginning—the party of subjugation, oppression, exploitation, and theft. The Democrats are not the party of justice or equality, but rather, of systematic injustice and inequality. Far from championing the cause of women, blacks, and other minorities, Democrats have historically brutalized, segregated, exploited, and murdered the most vulnerable members of our society.
    During all this time, the main opposition to these horrors on the part of the Democratic Party came from Republicans. This book makes anastonishing claim: of all Americans, Republicans are the ones who have the least reason to feel guilty about slavery or racism. This claim comes as a surprise because Republicans are the ones who are regularly chastised by progressives for their alleged bigotry. Let’s see who the real bigots are.
    From the beginning, Republicans have been the good guys, fighting to stop Democratic schemes of exploitation, murder, and plunder. Republicans fought a great war, and hundreds of thousands of them died, to thwart the nefarious practices of the Democrats. Even after slavery, Republicans fought vigorously though not always successfully to defeat Democratic schemes of segregation and racial terrorism.
    The bad guys—the Democrats—put up a great fight but the Republicans won in the end. It was Republicans who made possible the Civil Rights laws that finally and belatedly secured equal rights for blacks and other minorities. Democrats are the ones who bitterly resisted the Civil Rights Movement, and had the Democrats been the only party in America at the time, none of these laws, from the Civil Rights Act to the Voting Rights Act to the Fair Housing Bill, would have passed.
    As I will show, American history is really the story of Democratic malefactors and Republican heroes. I begin with Andrew Jackson. He—not Thomas Jefferson or FDR—is the true founder of the modern Democratic Party.
    Progressives today are divided about Jackson. Some, like Walter Russell Mead, admire Jackson as a “man of the people” but trace the Jacksonian legacy today not to the Democratic Party but to Donald Trump. 9 Most progressives are simply uncomfortable with Jackson. Some now want to remove him from the $20 bill and erase him from our collective memory. He was, in this view, a very bad American.
    I support the debunking of Jackson, but not because he was a bad American—rather, because he was a typical, crooked Democrat. Jackson established the Democratic Party as the party of theft. He mastered the art of stealing land from the Indians and then selling it at giveaway prices to white settlers. Jackson’s expectation was that those people would support him politically, as indeed they did. Jackson was indeed a “man ofthe people,” but his popularity was that of a gang leader who distributes his spoils in exchange for loyalty on the part of those who benefit from his crimes.
    Jackson also figured out how to benefit personally from his land-stealing. Like Hillary Clinton, he started out broke and then became one of the richest people in the country. How? Jackson and his partners and cronies made early bids on Indian land, sometimes even before the Indians had been evacuated from that land. They acquired the land for little or nothing and later sold it for a handsome profit. Remarkably, the roots of the Clinton Foundation can be found in the land-stealing policies of America’s first Democratic president.
    I show in a subsequent chapter how the Democrats were the party of slavery, and how the slave-owner mentality continues to shape the policies of Democratic leaders today. The point isn’t that the Democrats invented slavery, which is an ancient institution that far predates America. Rather, Democrats like Senator John C. Calhoun invented a new justification for slavery, slavery as a “positive good.” For the first time in history, Democrats insisted that slavery wasn’t just beneficial for masters; they said