Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:05 pm
Appearing Friday on CNN’s New Day, resident Trump apologist Jeffrey Lord promoted the idea that the Democrats should apologize for slavery. In other words, Democrats should apologize for something Democrats who are no longer alive supported 150 years ago, Republicans who are alive today should be able to continue to promote the cause of the Confederacy (and its ugly legacy of slavery) without apology.
Watch Lord address Georgetown sociology professor Michael Eric Dyson:
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“I would certainly hope that Professor Dyson is going to lead a march on the Democratic National Committee at their convention and ask them to apologize for slavery. They have six platforms still standing in which they called for slavery in the United States. You never hear anything about that. I never hear anything about that. I would think that that would be pretty bad here. But apparently not.”
This, coming from a party that still tells us slavery wasn’t really so bad, and that blacks today are worse off under Democratic governance than they were as slaves. One wonders, if slavery wasn’t really all that bad, why it should be expected Democrats apologize for it. But nobody ever said Republican arguments have to make any sense. You’d think, from the rhetoric we hear almost daily, that the GOP would be patting Democrats on the back for once participating in the subjugation of a minority they would themselves like to see subjugated today.
Dyson, quite aware, if Lord is not, that the Democratic platform no longer promotes slavery, responded that his concern is the here and now:
I am against slavery wherever and whenever it exists, but what I’m against now, in the present day, is the refusal to acknowledge the humanity of so many other people and the inability, it seems, of the Trump campaign to do anything but amplify the worst sentiments, and worst racial and anti-Muslim and anti-Mexican sentiments that we have seen in a long time here, and to find discourse in the rhetoric of a person who is the presumptive Republican nominee is quite troubling.
Republicans, who have virtually nobody who will vote for them but white people because of their racist rhetoric and legislation, are very eager to cast Democrats as the bad guys, and to protray Democrats as the party who have a race problem. Back in March, Jeffrey Lord, who by the way refuses to disavow the very Republican KKK, wanted Hillary Clinton personally, to apologize for slavery:
“I’m still waiting for Mrs. Clinton or any Democrat to get the Democratic Party formally on record apologizing for slavery. I mean, we can start there and go on. So, you know, if they want to get into that, then we can get into that too.”
It is true that the Democratic Platform of 1856, for example, was very pro-slavery:
“That the Democratic party will resist all attempts at renewing, in Congress or out of it, the agitation of the slavery question under whatever shape or color the attempt may be made.”
However, that was then, and this is now: It is the Republican Party of today that promotes racism and the subjugation of blacks and other minorities, while the Democratic Party champions equality. As Van Jones explained to Lord in March, the KKK “The KKK “left the Democratic Party and they joined your party.” Black voters know this, and they overwhelmingly vote Democratic, a fact Lord is probably at a loss to explain.
It is significant that the GOP, which opposes revealing to public school students the unsightly grit of American history, loves to bring up American history. History is not on the side of the Republican Party. The Democrats of the antebellum south are the Republicans of today, and the Democratic Party, in striving to expand rather than restrict rights, more closely resembles the party of Lincoln.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
