Blogs For Victory

And Threedonia proves it by unearthing Grover Cleveland’s 1893 inaugural address – to quote:

…Manifestly nothing is more vital to our supremacy as a nation and to the beneficent purposes of our Government than a sound and stable currency. Its exposure to degradation should at once arouse to activity the most enlightened statesmanship, and the danger of depreciation in the purchasing power of the wages paid to toil should furnish the strongest incentive to prompt and conservative precaution.

In dealing with our present embarrassing situation as related to this subject we will be wise if we temper our confidence and faith in our national strength and resources with the frank concession that even these will not permit us to defy with impunity the inexorable laws of finance and trade. At the same time, in our efforts to adjust differences of opinion we should be free from intolerance or passion, and our judgments should be unmoved by alluring phrases and unvexed by selfish interests…

…The verdict of our voters which condemned the injustice of maintaining protection for protection’s sake enjoins upon the people’s servants the duty of exposing and destroying the brood of kindred evils which are the unwholesome progeny of paternalism. This is the bane of republican institutions and the constant peril of our government by the people. It degrades to the purposes of wily craft the plan of rule our fathers established and bequeathed to us as an object of our love and veneration. It perverts the patriotic sentiments of our countrymen and tempts them to pitiful calculation of the sordid gain to be derived from their Government’s maintenance. It undermines the self-reliance of our people and substitutes in its place dependence upon governmental favoritism. It stifles the spirit of true Americanism and stupefies every ennobling trait of American citizenship.

The lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned and the better lesson taught that while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their Government its functions do not include the support of the people…

Do read the whole speech.

More than a century has passed and the Democrat party was handed off to Bryan and Wilson and FDR and LBJ…to reach final degradation in the hands of Bill Clinton. Obama will always remain a unique, historical figure in that he is the first non-white person to be elected to our highest office…but in policy he’s just mindlessly following the dictates of those who took a party of the people and turned it in to a corrupt agglomeration of special political and corporate interests. There was a reason my great-grandfather, grand-father and father were Democrats – with Dad only switching his registration in 2008 in order to participate in the Nevada GOP caucus; and he died in April of 2009. The reason is that the Democrat party was once upon a time an American political party – not the plaything of grasping special pleaders.

Do keep in mind that the GOP was also wrecked in the course of history – the party of Lincoln, abolition and the free market became, in its turn, the party of the vested interests. But our party was rescued by Ronald Reagan….himself once a Democrat. Our party was wrested from the hands of corrupt, special interests (though, to be sure, the rear-guards of these forces continue to linger on, hoping against hope to take it back, and make it just another tool of the Ruling Class) and became a party of the people…an American party, dedicated to the ideals which make America the greatest nation in human history.

Who will rescue the Democrat party? Who will articulate for the Democrats what Reagan did for the GOP? Who will reach back across the chasm of history and revive the spirit of Cleveland? I don’t know – I don’t see any one or any group…but if someone doesn’t come along, then the Democrat party is ultimately doomed, because the American people will – and already are – rejecting it as a vehicle for American aspirations.