Opus 2021-222: What Would Karl Do?

One reason I read the book was to find out if the title was satire or sincere.  Who would write a book called,  Ain’t You Glad You Joined the Republicans?  A guy named John Calvin Batchelor, I guess.  It was billed as a history of the Republican party but was more a political commentary on the time the Republicans have been around.  I take notes as I read.  That would be a waste of time if I didn’t think I would refer to them again some day.  This is one such day.

On pages 129-30 he quoted an editorial from a newspaper called The Tribune, written in the winter of 1896 called “American Silver Communists”.  It is a bit long but sounds like it was written today.  The issue then was the use of silver to back the dollar.  They would have called you insane if you told them about the Infrastructure Bill in congress today with nothing backing the money being printed.

    “Man and blind hatred of property, hatred of those who appear more fortunate and seem to have easier lives, notions that all men ought to be equal in income and expenditure and tastes and engagements, as well as legal rights with a passionate desire to tear down the existing state of things if it cannot be made to suit such a fanaticism - that is the desperate and dangerous force which only uses the silver issue as a means of striking at all property and all the prosperous.
    “Does anybody ask how such a brainless craze came to exist in this free country?
    “The Democratic party cultivated it laboriously and patently for twenty-five years, especially in all the Western and Southern States, as its only hope of defeating the Republican party.
    “Every day and every night it appealed persistently to the mean hatred of success by those who do not succeed, of property by those who have none, of employers by employed, of capital by labor, and contrived at last to create a communistic spirit in free American which is as ignorant, as stupid, as vindictive and madly destructive as that which lightened the torch and danced around the corpses in Paris.”

The party names are the same.  The stated issue has changed.  The actual goal of the Democrats has not changed.  I am not really shocked that years before the Communist Revolution the Democrat party was already Communist.  That makes me wonder if Karl Marx was really a Democrat.

There was a fad of wearing a bracelet that said WWJD (What Would Jesus Do).  The Democrats today should be wearing T-shirts that say, “WWKD” (Substitute Karl).  America needs to spend a little time considering the history and thinking about the modern phase of attack on the Land of the Free.

Batchelor, John Calvin.  Ain’t You Glad You Joined the Republicans?  New York:  Henry Holt
    Company, 1996.

homo unius libri