The Jackass Party was given birth at 1 pm on February 17, 1801 in Washington DC, upon the 36th ballot in the House of Representatives electing Thomas Jefferson president. This according to an observing diplomat, Carlos Martinez de Irujo, a Spanish Count & closet Freemason, and only recently revealed in the heretofore private letters of Jefferson, now in his archives at the University of Virginia.
The Party dominated the American political scene for the next 4 decades, until the Depression of 1837, caught then-president Martin Van Buren with his pants down. That depression lasted until gold was discovered in 1848, in quantities large enough to refloat the national money supply, and new mass technologies like the steam engine appeared on the scene.
It’s also interesting 1848 was the same year Samuel Kier discovered abundant “rock oil” (petroleum), drilling for salt in western Pennsylvania ….but I digress.
Originally a Party modeled after Jefferson’s deep agrarian suspicions of Alexander Hamilton’s urban, moneyed, and industrial classes, the Democrats came to champion states’ rights in their defense of that dominant economic paradigm of the American South: slavery.
The dawning fact that this practice was so abhorrent to an entire geographic section of the country didn’t matter. It made the Southern elite fabulously rich, and incredibly influential in national politics.
For 23+ years after the Depression of 1837 …events, themes, cultural differences boiled to a head, like a giant, puss-filled carbuncle on the American body-politic. The Civil War was the metaphorical “lance to that boil,” except cleanup was badly botched. This post Civil War period, 67 years, also began the Democrats’ long trudge into the political wilderness.
Amazingly, it was punctuated by one particular, utterly odious Democrat President, Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow loved the KKK, segregation, racial eugenics, and then went on to give Americans the income tax, the Federal Reserve System, and his most notable accomplishment: World War I.
Wilson finally, and clinically, lost his mind in the waning 24 months of his tenure. The cover story was he‘d had a series of strokes, but it still took him another 3 years after leaving—for his own, oh-so-special soiree with Satan.
It would not be another 12 years, after Woodrow-the-Terrible, come 1932, would Democrats get enough total power to avenge their long travail since 1860. They got this opportunity when clueless GOP Pachyderms, ignoring the hyenas of Wall Street, allowed credit conditions to blow-up in 1929, setting the stage for the Great Depression of the 1930’s, and World War II.
The Democrats took the mid-term elections of 1930, and then set about to torment the very unpolitical GOPer President, Herbert Hoover, like a roast pig on a spit, for the next 2 years. The fact that Hoover chose to run again in 1932 (and lose BIG) is a testament to smug, Republican cluelessness.
Next time, Part 2 of “They’ve Become Demsheviks, Not Democrats” (the metamorphosis)
Sellers is a South Park Republican who lives in incorporated Oro Valley. His background is federal tech-transfer commercialization.