You may call me hopeful or hopeless, lost in history or attuned to it, a partisan or soul wary of partisanship, but a reckoning is in the air. Like doomed political parties of America’s past, modern Democrats are way, way off track. They will either get real, rejoin the country, or split and vanish.
Modern Democrats are objectively lost. They appear to be defined – much as the Whigs, No Nothings, and Greenbacks – by losing positions, out of touch with real people, doomed by ideology.
They are for concentrated power, big government, suppression of many individual liberties from speech, worship, gun ownership, and traditional rule of law, to equality of sexes, defined by Title IX.
They are silent – even encouraging – of behaviors destructive of community cohesion, rampant illegal immigration, drug and human trafficking, deriding law enforcement prosecutors, and the Supreme Court, spending without any accountability, misuse of energy resources, uncorrected abuse of federal monies, unlimited government versus limited government, overregulation, objectively weakened defenses, appeasement not deterrence.
The list of federal and state policy errors by Democrats, both in one-party states and federally, is jaw-dropping and historically has few precedents. Seized with ideology, an irrationality borne of ideological obsession or hatred of another, they have traded centrist logic for blind partisanship.
Typically, if not invariably, this ends badly. The off-balance party usually splits, with some finding their way back to rationality, traditionalism, and moral light, while the rest fade away into third-party splinter groups, looking for allies, eventually reforming closer to the center.
Examples are legion, but a few are worth noting. Like the Whigs, who won presidential elections in 1840 and 1848, the modern Democrats have outspoken, uncompromising, ideologically devout leaders. They were often articulate while diminishing values held firmly by the majority.
Leading Whigs, until the party disappeared under the weight of defending slavery, included Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Within the party, a kind of percolating conscience worked to destroy the party’s prior identity. The Northern Whigs, opposed to slavery, split from Southern Whigs.
Northern Whigs were eventually absorbed into the newly formed Republican Party, soon led by Abraham Lincoln, while southern Whigs aligned themselves with the confederacy, sealing their fate.
In this case, the split—as with a potential split in the modern Democratic Party—is fascinating because ideology and loyalty to doomed ideas took precedence over unity, the Union, and a moderated view of the future. Southern Whigs refused to see the Union as paramount, ending the party.
The so-called “Know Nothings” were populist. Their real name was “Native American Party,” and they had a good run. They were called “Know Nothings” because – like Seargent Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes or the Modern Democrats asked to explain why they did not clap for average Americans in a joint session – they often said they “know nothing.” This irked average Americans.
Preoccupied with religious hatred, they did not like Catholics, another odd coincidence – when one relooks at the 2024 campaign, how the Harris-Walz campaign disrespected, even shut out Catholics. In the 1850s, preference was not for atheism, secularism, or antisemitism but for Protestantism.
The real undoing of the “Know Nothings,” however, was their disconnect from average Americans. They pushed a losing candidate, Millard Filmore, in 1856, then sided with pro-slavery forces after the anti-black Dredd Scott decision came out, which literally split the party.
From this distance, what happened was an extreme ideology took hold, just as Marxism, centralized power, and misuse of legal process by Obama-Biden-Harris. The potentially destabilizing, not corrective, fraud-focused, or speedy, but abusive positions spilt the party.
Finally, the “Greenbacks” offer a sobering lesson for modern Democrats – one they will likely ignore. Greenbacks – officially known as the “National Independent Party” or “Greenback Labor Party” – had another problem, one being experienced by modern Democrats, which bodes ill for them.
The Greenbacks were a force from 1874 to 1889, and were – like the Democrats – all about ideology, practical, day-to-day, honest, grassroots, and basic decision making aside. Post-Civil War, they actually favored unbacked currency versus gold-backed and thus were okay with high debt.
If that does not remind you of modern Democrats, look twice. They overspend at federal and state levels and care little about debt, deficits, overtaxing, and the downstream monetary effects of inflation, high interest, and an unaccountable centralized government.
The Greenbacks, who might have been called Spendthrifts, dissolved toward the end of the century but re-emerged as the Progressives in the early 1900s. Isn’t that funny, in a peculiar, sad way?
In short, modern Democrats are ideological, increasingly anti-limited government, anti-constitutional, anti-solvency, anti-accountability, anti-individual liberty. They disrespect institutions back to our Constitution. Doomed? Who can say, but more likely to split than stay unified in defense of absurdity. Other parties in their mold … are gone. A reckoning is coming.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).
