“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The Orwell quote captures the Party’s political philosophy and Orwell’s observation that control over historical memory is a form of political power. Orwell understood that the most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. If you control what people believe happened in the past, you can shape what they think is possible or legitimate in the future. Orwell writes, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered,” and concludes: “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Have you seen this meme?
Those who share this meme as an accurate representation of history are terribly misinformed. They fall for the Party’s historical revisionism. Who is the Party? In Orwell’s dystopia, it was Ingsoc, Newspeak for English Socialism. In contemporary America, it is the Democratic Party. Party members and those who vote for the Party suffer from motivated reasoning. They have been conditioned to resort to motivated reasoning. Their reasoning moves from a worldview they take for granted. This is why, when you challenge their understanding, they either walk away or resort to violence—when they aren’t already resorting to violence to entrench progressive ideology.
Part of the reason why Democrats are so terribly misinformed (and so fascistic) is that progressives dominate the academy and America’s sense-making institutions generally, and use their hegemony to promulgate false historical and political narratives, ones in which Democrats are portrayed as the party that did all the good things Republicans actually did—and Republicans are portrayed as the party that did all of the bad things Democrats actually did. For the most part, the meme is a camera obscura: it inverts the world. Even where it is accurate, it obscures the deeper truth of Big Government.
Like the Party in Orwell’s book, progressives understood at the start of the twentieth century that establishing the technocratic state and negating the free republic necessitated a long march through the institutions. The long march was imperative to transform popular consciousness to prepare the masses to accept their own subjection in the name of “social justice.” That progressives have been able to so thoroughly warp the historical narrative dramatically testifies to the project’s success. Democrats have enjoyed electoral success over the years because so many Americans work from a false worldview.
The truth exposes the meme as Big Brother propaganda. The Republican Party is actually the party of liberalism. As I have shown on this platform, the Party of Lincoln follows Hamiltonian nationalism in spirit. The Republican Party was a coalition of entrepreneurs and free labor that organized to oppose the slavocracy represented by the Democratic Party. The Hamiltonian paradigm is based on the principle of a strong national government capable of protecting the rights of all people regardless of the states in which they dwelled. The Democrats sought a confederacy based on states’ rights—the Articles of Confederation that the US Constitution replaced.
Democrats did not emancipate the slaves. Republicans did that. Why would Republicans be offended by something they accomplished? It is an absurd framing. True history records that the Democrats were the party of the slavocracy. They rebelled against the Union in a bid to keep their slaves. Republicans defeated them militarily and released all their slaves from bondage. Democrats neither granted black people citizenship nor the right of black men to vote. They vehemently opposed citizenship and enfranchisement for blacks. Republicans were the ones who granted blacks citizenship and the right of black men to vote. The Republican Party drafted and passed the Reconstruction Amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth.
Democrats did not grant women the right to vote. For the most part, Democrats opposed universal suffrage. Republicans championed the Nineteenth Amendment and secured for women the right to vote at the national level. This included black women who, if Democrats had had their way, could not have participated in the affairs of the nation. Why would Republicans be offended by championing women’s suffrage? They should be offended that Democrats are credited with the good deed.
Republicans also led the way against segregation. Democrats were the party of racial segregation. Democrats filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the Senate. A much larger percentage of Republicans voted for the legislation in both Houses of Congress. Why don’t you know this? The same is true with the Voting Rights Act. Far more Republicans (94 percent, to be exact) than Democrats supported voting rights.
Related to the struggle over civil rights, although this item is not on the list, Democrats opposed anti-lynching legislation. They filibustered anti-lynching legislation when it came through the Senate. In fact, Democrats successfully prevented any anti-lynching legislation from ever becoming law. Is this common knowledge? No, it’s not. I didn’t know this myself until I researched the matter in my mid-thirties in graduate school. I might never have known this fact if the dissertation I was writing had not necessitated clarifying the politics about lynching.
Democrats indeed pushed through a raft of social programs. Some of these programs have benefited Americans, especially elderly citizens. However, an ulterior motive lurked behind the New Deal and the Great Society: a scheme to enlarge the administrative state, establish technocratic control over the population, and entrench progressive ideology. We saw this in the ghettoization of black Americans and the destruction of the black family, which made black women dependent on the government instead of husbands, who were idled by capital migration and white flight and, later, globalization. Progressive Democrats engineered de facto segeregation.
This is why, after Republicans became the party of choice among Southerners (because Southerners desired limited government, and with the dismantling of segregation there was no need to align with Democrats any longer), hardcore Democratic families persisted in the South (especially in Tennessee). Many Southerners who lived through the Great Depression appreciated progressive intervention, such as rural electrification. This was how Democrats maintained the coalition between progressives and segregationists—until the 1964 Civil Rights Act removed the race question and Southerners were free to join the Republican Party en masse.
This is why racial segregation is so much more intense in the North and in urban areas run by progressives than it is in the rural South. Southern whites have always lived around blacks. Segregationist sentiment in the South quickly dissipated after the 1960s. Those of my generation (coming of age in the 1970s) will remember that our high schools were fully racially integrated. In blue cities, blacks are corralled in impoverished inner-city neighborhoods where they are managed by the government. This led black comedian Dick Gregory to quip in the early 1960s, “In the North, they don’t mind how big I get, as long as I don’t get too close.”
The meme’s trick is to distort popular consciousness by confusing labels. True history is very different. The Republican Party is the liberal party (except during the Bush dynasty, in which globalism and neoconservatism aligned with Democratic goals). The Democrats are historically the party of conservatism and progressivism, both of which are illiberal in spirit. Here we must distinguish between old-style conservatism (the feudalist mentality) and modern conservatism, which is really liberalism with traditional Christianity and pro-family sentiment more openly pronounced. Moreover, as I have shown on this platform, progressivism and liberalism are opposites. Progressives oppose the liberal principles of religious liberty, freedom of speech and publishing, and so forth. Modern conservatives embrace these principles.
Do you see the trick? By not telling you that Republicans did all the things that liberals did, the meme manufactures an assumption that liberals are Democrats and Republicans are conservatives. This is a false assumption.
They do this to make you forget or never know that the abolitionist Frederick Douglass was a Republican. Democrats want to claim Douglass as their own. Douglass was staunchly anti-Democratic Party (I documented this in a recent essay on Freedom and Reason). During the struggle against lynching, W.E.B. Du Bois was a Republican. His comrade, Ida B. Wells, was a Republican. Together they founded the NAACP. Democrats will claim all of these activists. At the time, Democrats might well have lynched them if they could have gotten their hand on them.
Black intellectuals have become Democrats because of a principle of colonial collaboration. This is where tribal elites benefit from aligning with the colonizers’ interests in controlling the subjugated population. This is the essence of identity politics. In black America, this involves making blacks dependent on progressives and keeping them confused about history. As a result, blacks overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, even though voting that way undermines their organic interests in having good jobs, good housing, and integral families. The situation has so corrupted black culture that black men are murdering one another at an astonishing rate.
Lawrence O’Donnell’s dialogue substitutes the word liberal for progressive. O’Donnell is not a liberal. He is a demagogue for the Party seeking to regain the reins of the federal government in November. If the Party succeeds, it will fully resume the project of historical revisionism. If allowed enough time, future generations will find it difficult to recover the truth about the American Republic, even if they know to be curious about it. They won’t remember a time when America was a free country. They may even think that slavery is freedom. And those who return to Plato’s cave to tell them about the reality of the world beyond it—their shapes and voices will be distorted into monstrous forms the prisoners must never believe.
freedom and reason 