Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Barr: Covid-19 lockdowns the 'greatest intrusion on civil liberties' in US history since slavery" video.
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Kushner has let it be known that based on his understanding of American history, the Republican party platform should be drastically reduced from 58 convoluted pages in 2016 to “a mission statement” that can fit on a wallet-sized card, along the lines of the platform of 1856."
Jared, who is the de facto campaign manager, and now a self-designated expert in American history, is attempting to echo the party’s first platform. It is an effort to smooth over Trump's offensive and lethal incompetence, and to justify it all by reference to the origins of the Republican party. Jarrd is abusing the past to distort the present.
If there is any resemblance of the Trump mutation of the Republican party to any actual party in the election of 1856 it is not to the Republicans. Nor is it to the Democrats. Rather, it is to the third party in that campaign, the American Party, also known as the Know Nothings, who also had a concise platform.
The original American Party sought to protect the purity of white native-born Protestants from the first great wave of immigration to the US, which consisted mostly of the Irish and Germans, and to stigmatize the Catholic religion.
"Americans must rule America,” its platform proclaimed. Only native-born citizens should be allowed to hold any public office, federal, state or municipal." The Know Nothings emerged from the breakup of the Whig party over the issue of the extension of slavery in the territories.
Abraham Lincoln, a lifelong Whig, forged the Illinois Repub party in 1856 out of a mixture of contending factions, including radical abolitionists, Whigs, dissident antislavery Democrats and liberal German immigrants. Lincoln despised Know Nothingism, which is identical to Trumpism today.
In 1855, Lincoln wrote that if the movement ever won power it would rewrite the Declaration of Independence: “When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
The 1856 Republican platform may provide another piece of symmetry to the modern day. Its longest plank listed the trampling of constitutional rights of the antislavery forces in the Kansas territory, including voter suppression, attacks on freedom of the press, instigation of violence, and violence by armed militias.
The Republicans promised to restore the rule of law after the election by bringing members of the current administration before the bar of justice for their crimes: “That all these things have been done with the knowledge, sanction, and procurement of the present National Administration; and that for this high crime against the Constitution, the Union, and humanity, we arraign that Administration, the President, his advisers, agents, supporters, apologists, and accessories, either before or after the fact, before the country and before the world; and that it is our fixed purpose to bring the actual perpetrators of these atrocious outrages and their accomplices to a sure and condign punishment thereafter.”
But the Republicans lost the election of 1856. There were no prosecutions. The early platform stood as a warning of greater danger to come. After Lincoln’s election in 1860, many of those identified in the first Republican platform as the enemies of democracy, presidential advisers among them, would not accept the result and helped precipitate the civil war.
If Trump loses the election of 2020, will “his advisers, agents, supporters, apologists, and accomplices, including, first and foremost, Kushner, Barr, Chad Wolf and others – accept the result and its consequences?
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