The Democratic Party has completely adopted the extreme left’s ideological image of America.
Democrats released their 2024 platform this week during the Democratic National Convention. It was a sloppy mess in many places, with frequent references to President Joe Biden’s “second term” — 21 references by my count.
However, as I have written before, nothing like this is likely to happen with Vice President Harris in the White House anyway. After all, the presidency becomes the ceremonial head of a vast, unaccountable bureaucratic leviathan.
The sloppiness of the Democratic platform and the DNC as a whole is certainly notable. But much more important is the party’s ideological tendency.
If you don’t know what the Democratic Party is most passionate about, the very first thing in their platform was “recognition of the country.”
A land acknowledgement is a performative ceremony conducted by institutions under the full influence of the Church of Enlightenment that essentially lists the various Native American tribes believed to have passed through the land the group is currently on.
It has become a replacement for the Pledge of Allegiance for the left. The concept is, frankly, absurd. It is as pointless as going into your newly purchased house and listing the names of all the previous owners, tenants, visitors and squatters.
The assumption of land recognition is that the tribes disappeared because of the mean, greedy United States. However, the real story is usually much more complicated.
For example, the Black Hills in South Dakota were inhabited by countless tribes, and not just the Lakota. The Lakota “stole” the land from the Cheyanne just a few decades before the United States took over the region. And there are countless other tribes that could also lay claim to living in the Black Hills.
The left wants to reduce the whole thing to a morality play about the supposed moral superiority of the tribes and the greed of the United States.
What land acknowledgements represent is not so much a simple recitation of history as a statement of faith that the United States, the original Constitution, and everything this country was built upon are illegitimate. It is a consequence of the left’s war on history.
The left would have you believe that America was built on oppression. It was built on slavery and land dispossession. In their eyes, the ill-gotten fruits of these injustices will be righted when, first, the country abandons its past and, second, resources are allocated to the victims.
If the typical, virtuous Democrat wants to give his/her country to this tribe or that tribe, that’s perfectly fine. Of course, nothing is accomplished in any of these cases. But that’s not the point here. What they want to do is show that America’s collective sins must be resolved in a collective way.
So they will not give up anything personally. Instead, Americans must now collectively do their part to help the groups affected.
To escape this form of social retribution, one must fit into several camps. Either one must be a member of one of the oppressed groups – a very broad category these days – or one must be a loyal, tireless ally of the cause.
In this sense, land recognition forms the philosophical basis of a certain kind of identity-based socialism.
If you are among the chosen and the disadvantaged, then anything you do to right historical injustices is seen as a positive thing. For those on the wrong side of history, the left recognizes no right it must respect. They long ago dismissed the idea of natural, God-given rights as evil “Christian nationalism.”
You are guilty, plain and simple, and you will remain guilty forever until the outcomes of all the different identity groups are equalized.
For this reason, the left paradoxically believes on the one hand that an ethnic group inherits the land through blood and soil (in the case of land acknowledgements), and on the other hand it insists that millions of people be granted the right to enter the United States illegally and enjoy all the rights of citizenship and more.
Both ideas represent a form of retaliation against the United States, which they see as the driving force behind all the evils of Western civilization – unless, of course, Western civilization can be fundamentally changed.
In many ways, this is the core of our culture war and what has divided the country since the Cultural Revolution of 1968. We are in a more advanced and, in some sense, deadly and nihilistic form of liberalism that has metastasized in 2020.
The Democratic Party’s platform begins with the recognition of land rights. From this flows the rest of the party’s agenda, which is about strengthening the power of the federal government and giving the state the means to shape society based on its ideas of justice.
The Left’s seemingly meaningless virtue-mongering is in reality the prelude to a ruthless authoritarian state that would overthrow the American way of life in the pursuit of social justice.
