Democratic Party Now the Plutocratic Party

AMAC Exclusive – By Barry Casselman

Five years ago, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, I wrote that a national political identity switch had begun, and subsequently I have written that this process was relentlessly continuing.

The Democratic Party now has even more explicitly turned its back on its founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, and has become more rigidly the party of political correctness and intolerance of free speech. It is turning away from its traditional base of ethnic and working class voters, and turning instead to extremely wealthy Americans, big business, newly affluent classes, and academic elites. The Republican Party, on the other hand, is now appealing to working class voters, religious and ethnic groups, and those who own and operate small businesses.

If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, he would easily recognize the transformation of U.S. politics as very analogous to what happened in his own day, when his new political party opposed slavery while their Democratic opponents either supported it or tolerated it.

Today the liberal party in the United States has exhausted decades of labeling the conservative party as the party of the rich, and in fact now openly courts the support of big money, big tech, big business, and the academic establishment as it attempts further to expand big government.

The rapid expansion of the central government in the U.S. actually began after World War I and was set off starting with the response to the Great Flood of 1927, a devastating flood of the Mississippi River that covered some 27,000 square miles of land in up to 30 feet of water. President Calvin Coolidge appointed Herbert Hoover, who had fed post-war Europe in 1919, to be in charge. Through the Army Corps of Engineers, Hoover asserted federal jurisdiction and power in several flood-ravaged southern and midwestern states. The crisis passed, but the precedent had been set for much greater federal power. Only a few years later when a great economic depression hit the nation, new Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt established his New Deal policies and programs in an effort to revive the national economy and relieve the widespread economic suffering and unemployment, massively expanding on the precedent set by Coolidge and Hoover.

After World War II, New Deal programs and ideas were institutionalized to meet the interests of millions of veterans returning from Europe and the Pacific. Even the first Republican president in 20 years, Dwight Eisenhower, and eight years later, Richard Nixon, brought little change to New Deal policies. Between Eisenhower and Nixon, Democrat Lyndon Johnson upped the New Deal ante with his Great Society government social welfare programs.

After the disastrous first and only term of Democrat Jimmy Carter, the liberal party’s political base began to drift away as many blue collar workers voted for conservative Ronald Reagan.

Yet the Democrats’ core base remained intact, enabling the election of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and in 2020, Joe Biden.

Donald Trump made gains in both 2016 and 2020 with traditional Democratic voters, and since the Biden administration adopted and advocated the views of the far-left,  Hispanics in particular, as well as blacks, Jews, and Asian-Americans have begun switching parties in even greater numbers.

Recent polling and early primary results indicate that the 2022 midterm elections will display this widespread party voter identity switch. As in 2016, 2018, and 2020, Democrats are receiving the lion’s share of their funding from the richest Americans, big business, big tech, and the largest labor unions — even as they accuse the GOP of being the party beholden to the plutocratic class.

Pluto was the Roman deity of the underworld, and today the term “plutocrat” is a negative word used to describe the rich and powerful. As in Lincoln’s day, however, Democrats have abandoned the values of their founders and embraced the values and support of those they used to say they opposed.

If he were alive today, and campaigning for his Republican Party candidates in 2022, Mr. Lincoln, echoing his views of 1859, might say that the Democratic Party is now the Plutocratic Party.