Democrats understandably try to divorce their modern party from its past. That’s because the history is shameful. Their icons practiced slavery (Thomas Jefferson), engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans (Andrew Jackson), and herded Americans of Japanese, German, and Italian descent into concentration camps (Franklin Roosevelt).
Democrats and their media allies are at least pretending to be deeply offended that Republican Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano wore a Confederate uniform in a faculty photograph at the Army War College, where he teaches. Just to be clear, Mastriano is a history Ph.D. and Civil War battle enthusiast who represents Gettysburg in the state Senate and gives tours there.
His wearing of that uniform makes a lot more sense in that context. But if we really want to talk about historically questionable associations while ignoring the context, then we ought to look at the Democratic nominee, Attorney General Josh Shapiro. Shapiro, after all, represents the historical party of slavery, segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan.
If we are going to focus on history in such a strained and peculiar manner in order to create a controversy around Mastriano, then surely, Shapiro’s membership in a discriminatory, historically segregationist, pro-slavery political party is equally relevant.
Democrats have had every chance in the last 160 years to rename and rebrand their party since the defeat of the Confederacy that Democrats founded, defended, and extended into the modern era through Jim Crow laws. But they chose to keep the same brand, in large part to avoid alienating their base as long as possible.
Democrats were not ashamed at all when they formed and led the Confederate States of America. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a Democrat, as was Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found a terrorist organization known as the Ku Klux Klan. In1868, the Democratic Party nominated a Copperhead — a northern Confederate sympathizer — named Horatio Seymour. He had been an instigator of the 1863 New York City draft riots and a fervent opponent of breaking up the Confederacy by prosecuting the Civil War.
The Democratic Party was not ashamed to carry its allegiance to racism, segregation, and domestic terrorism into the 20th century, either. President Woodrow Wilson was an ardent racist who re-segregated the military and the federal civil service. Decades later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed a former Klansman (Hugo Black) to the Supreme Court over the objections of Republicans. And FDR’s best Depression recovery program jobs were for whites.
Democrats opposed Republican President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1957 Civil Rights Act and the subsequent Civil Rights Acts of 1960 and 1964. Indeed, even when Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the 1964 bill, his motives were more exploitative than altruistic. “I’ll have them n*****s voting Democratic for 200 years,” he said by way of explanation.
This century, Democrats had a former KKK leader as a U.S. senator (Robert Byrd) until 2010. Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) called Barack Obama, in 2007, a “bright and clean” African American. The following year, U.S. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada called Obama a “light-skinned” African American with no “Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.”
This is the Democratic Party leadership of the 21st century, not the 1860s.
Doug Mastriano spent 30 years in the U.S. Army serving his country in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a member of the Republican Party, he can count himself the political heir to Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and Sen. Edward Brooke (R-MA), the first popularly elected black U.S. senator.
The historical legacy of Mastriano’s party is that it outlawed the Ku Klux Klan, passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution — outlawing slavery, making blacks citizens, and guaranteeing them the right to vote, respectively. Republicans passed the first civil rights laws since Reconstruction and enforced desegregation of the solidly Democratic South. Republicans implemented the Philadelphia Plan, desegregating the building trades. Republicans appointed the first black secretary of state (Colin Powell) and the first Black national security adviser (Condoleezza Rice).
Neither Doug Mastriano nor any Republican has to be ashamed of the party’s history. Democrats do.
And sure, Democrats can say their party has changed — just like maybe someone could wear a Confederate uniform in a historical context and say it doesn’t represent slavery and secession the way it might have in 1865. But, of course, both of these claims would require context. Democrats don’t want to give the context, so why should they receive the benefit of context?
Josh Shapiro and the Democrats, if they want to live by their own standards, are going to have to do something about the problematic organization they belong to and represent on the ballot.
Michael Tremoglie is a writer in Pennsylvania.
