If you live in my native western Kentucky and tell a stranger you’re a Democrat, you might get a frown and the reply, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party — the Democratic Party left me.”
The defectors might not know it. But they’re parroting Ronald Reagan, the liberal, union-card-carrying, New Deal Democrat turned reactionary, union-busting, race-baiting Republican. He coined or popularized the slam when he switched to the GOP in 1962.
More recently, discredited New York Mayor Eric Adams leveled the same charge. So did nutjob Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose liberal Democratic father must be spinning in his grave.
I guess the party-switchers figure Democrats who hear their complaint should respond with tea and sympathy. So I asked a longtime party activist to suggest an appropriate reply. “They can kick rocks,” he said.
Reagan famously said, “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” He called it the “11th Commandment.”
I’m not of the my-party-right-or-wrong persuasion. There was much to speak ill of in my party’s distant past. I’m ashamed of what it meant to be a Democrat before the Civil War and for many decades afterwards. So is my friend Kenny Fogle, the Kentucky Democratic Party’s former deputy political director.
“To say all Democrats were pure of heart would be a tremendous lie, and to say that the early history of the Democratic Party was defensible under any standards is also beyond reason,” Kenny wrote in his book, History of the Democratic Party: Two Centuries of Slow Progress to Progressive.
This historian can’t think of a more apt title.
Before the Civil War, the Democrats, rooted in the South, were the party of slavery and “states’ rights,” meaning Uncle Sam had no right to abolish slavery in the slave states, including Kentucky.
In 1860-1861, Southern Democrats championed disunion. In 1861-1865, they were gung ho for a treasonous armed rebellion against the federal government led by freely-elected Republican President Abraham Lincoln. President Jefferson Davis and most other Confederate leaders had been Democrats.
After the Civil War, the Democrats, still under the sway of their powerful Southern wing, remained the party of white supremacy, The Ku Klux Klan and similar vigilante groups served as the terrorist wing of the party in the former slave states.
Sadly, the party of “Lincoln and Liberty” is long gone. Thankfully, the Democratic Party of slavery, the Confederacy, the Klan, and Jim Crow is, too.
“Today’s Democratic Party, while not perfect, has progressed in both humanity and inclusion,” Kenny also wrote. I’ll add a Presbyterian “amen” to that.
The exodus of “the-party-left-me” white Southern Democrats — the progenitors of today’s neo-Confederate, white nationalist Dixie GOP — began in the 1960s when the national Democrats became what the Republican Party had been in its formative years: the party of decisive federal civil rights activism.
At the same time, the Republicans became what the Democrats were: the party of “states’ rights,” which were also the old code words for Jim Crow. The white South turned Republican Red, though it took border states like Kentucky a few decades longer.
The GOP wiped out the old white Democratic “Solid South” with a “Southern Strategy” that featured race-based dog whistle politics which appealed to white Southerners who hated to see Jim Crow go. (Most Blacks, heretofore loyal to the party of Lincoln, became Democrats.)
Ultimately, the Republican race-baiting went national, especially on President Reagan’s watch. The pace of Democratic desertions to the GOP quickened under Reagan and shifted into warp drive under Trump. The 45th and 47th president then traded in the dog whistle for “a foghorn,” said Murray State University historian Brian Clardy.
When Trump said he aimed to “Make America Great Again,” he meant “Make America White Again.” Wrote Stephanie Gadlin in the Chicago Crusader: “The president’s defiant promise to reclaim America’s greatness is deeply rooted in the country’s troubled past and cemented in the blood and stench of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, U.S. chattel slavery, colonization, political repression, and war.”
Trump’s election to a second term signals that “the Confederacy lives on in all but name and so does its racism and intolerance,” wrote Henry McLeish in The Scotsman, published in Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital.
Kenny could have been talking about the-party-left-me folks when he wrote that after times got better for them, thanks to Democratic-initiated federal programs from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to President “Union Joe” Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, many people “conveniently forgot who was there to help them in dire circumstances and slowly abandoned the Party in favor of denying this help to others still in need of assistance. [Italics mine].”
Anway, Democrats unsure how to respond to the “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party — the Democratic Party left me” line might consider putting a Kentucky spin on former Arkansas Democratic Party Chair Vince Insalaco’s farewell statement to Democratic state Rep. Mike Holcomb when Holcomb jumped ship to the GOP nearly 10 years ago: “If standing against women’s health care including Pap smears, breast cancer screenings, STD testing and treatment, pregnancy testing, prenatal checkups, or the equality of all Arkansans is important to Rep. Holcomb, then he’s found a good home in the Republican Party of Arkansas.” Just change “Rep. Holcomb” to whomever and you’re good to go.
Writing in the Arkansas Times, David Ramsey suggested that Holcomb was “joining the party where he’s a better fit due to his opposition to gay rights and abortion. This is the inevitable re-sorting process as the political landscape shifts. Once upon a time it made sense for pseudo-Republicans to identify as Democrats in Arkansas because Democrats were dominant. That is … no longer so.” ( In the Bluegrass State. too.)
“Pseudo-Republican” seems like a good handle for a “the Democrats left me” alibier. As tempting as it would be, I wouldn’t tell one to “kick rocks.” The party activist really wouldn’t either. But turncoats also won’t get a drop of tea or a scintilla of sympathy from us.
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