How George McGovern transformed the Democratic Party and ruined America

Frontpage Mag
THE MYTH THAT REPUBLICANS ARE GROWING MORE EXTREME

Matthew Vadum is an award-winning investigative reporter and the author of the book, "Subversion, Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers."

Excerpts:

DEMOCRATS:

“McGovern helped lead the transformation of the Democratic Party into a coalition of leftists distinct from the previous generation of liberals in the Kennedy mold,” Arnold Ahlert has written. “As a result, the country has never been the same.”

REPUBLICANS:

Almost from the moment Reagan left the White House, the GOP establishment began undoing his work, moving the party leftward. The Republican Party was never naturally conservative; it has been pushed to the right from time to time. When the crisis subsides, it oozes back to the mushy middle. Until the 1970s, it could be argued that the Republican establishment and the Democratic establishment weren’t all that different in many ways.

ANTI-COMMUNISTS:

...here’s a shocker for modern progressives and conservatives alike: The first pursuers of American communists were Democrats Woodrow Wilson and his attorney general, Alexander Mitchell Palmer. For all his faults, Wilson understood the dangers of Bolshevism.

Wilson was followed by a long line of anti-communist Democrats who headed the Congressional committees that liberals have demonized, from the first to final chair of the House Committee on Un-American Activities: Rep. Martin Dies (D-TX), Rep. Francis Walter (D-PA), Rep. Richard Ichord (D-MO). In the Senate, James Eastland (D-Miss.) and Thomas Dodd were pillars on the Judiciary Committee and chair and vice chair of the Subcommittee on Internal Security, the latter of which did the best Senate work in pursuit of domestic communists loyal to the USSR. In sum, this is not your grandfather’s Democratic Party.

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