Today’s GOP is the party of ante-bellum slave holders

Today’s Republican Party is the treasonous “Confederate” Democratic Party of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Southern Redemption.

In 1964 Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater took the stage in San Francisco to accept the Presidential nomination of the Republican Party.  Goldwater’s them was to become the rallying cry for a new generation of Republicans: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.  And . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no vice.”

While Republicans who rallied to Goldwater called themselves “Movement Conservatives,” a century before their predecessors called themselves “Confederates.”

Like the slaveholders before them, today’s Republican Party is in thrall too and under the control of a philosophy set out by the aristocratic “plantation” * owners of the Old South.  That is:  We are the ruling class, selected by god, by our white skin, by our “superior intellect” and we are set to rule the lower people –Black, Brown, Yellow, Women, Homosexual and other Deviants.

In 1858, one “plantation” owner put it this way:  The upper class should rest on the lower class – people whom he called “mudsills” – the same way a stately building rests on timbers driven into the mud for support.

* NOTE:  A word of explanation.  What the aristocratic South called “plantations” were, in fact, nothing but forced labor, slave labor camps operated the same a slave labor camps of Nazi German, Stalin’s Russia, and Mao’s China.  Hence, this essay and those linked to it will use the term “Confederate slave labor camps.”

While Goldwater’s supporters in 1964 talked generally about liberty, their actual complaint was specific:  the business regulations and social welfare legislation of FDR’s New Deal and Eisenhower’s Middle Way had trampled their rights.  In the wake of the Great Depression, the US government had focused on creating economic security and equality of opportunity.  These widely popular programs became known as “the liberal consensus,” because most Americans agreed that government should protect the country’s most vulnerable citizens and regulate the economy.

Movement Conservatives, however, claimed that the liberal consensus was destroying America.  They hated the fact that the government had taken on popular projects since the 1930’s – roads, highways, dams, power plants, schools, hospitals, as well as social welfare legislation.  According to Movement Conservatives, all this constituted a transfer of wealth from those who “deserved” their wealth to the poor, often poor people of color, and amounted to a distribution of wealth from the “makers” to the “takers.”

Most recently, Trump and his Republican allies in Congress slashed taxes for the wealthy; cut healthcare and other aid to middle- and low-income people; and created an administration of white men that attacked people of color and women.  Of the 150 judicial appointments Trump made, only three were Black and he nominated no Black or Latino judges to the federal bench.  Trump and his supporters defended Confederate monuments and accepted support form the KKK.

The parallels between the antebellum Democrats and today’s Republican Party are too clear to miss.  Just as the owners of the South’s slave labor camps believed, so too do today’s Republicans believe that equality and opportunity for all is a threat to liberty.  Today’s Republican Party is the traitorous Confederate Democratic Party of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Southern Redemption.


The following articles expand on the fact that today’s Republican Party is the same as the pre-Civil War Democratic Party.

Today’s Southerners are the “rednecks from the hills,” not the aristocrats living in the big mansion.