Jesus Was a Democrat: The Moral Dichotomies of Republicanism and the Coming Democratic Revolution

By Dan DeFreest

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, conservatives have sought to impose an ideology upon the American people that has not intentionally, but inherently oppressed the middle class. As Newton proposed For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, while conservative political initiatives have uplifted the so called job creators, they have naturally stepped on the middle class in order to do so. Jesus Was a Democrat illustrates how American businesses have outsourced manufacturing jobs to third-world countries, and how the destruction of privatesector collective bargaining has forced middle-class workers to accept lower wages and loss of benefi ts, creating a buyers market for todays employers. Jesus Was a Democrat shows how Republicans ignorance of the past has led to economic, military and political failure today. Dan DeFreest has crafted a book that examines how Republicans have failed to understand their own moral dichotomies and connects the dots between their oppressive ideology and todays income and wealth disparity. Using a historical perspective, he shows how conservatives have stolen the future from our middle class and brought this country to the brink of political revolution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514428566

Dan DeFreest

Dan DeFreest is a writer who grew up in Lee, Massachusetts, in the heart of the Berkshire Hills and now resides in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to my editor, P. N. (Patti) Waldygo for giving my manuscript a great haircut.

This book would not have happened without the love and support of my family- Athena…willing to indulge my whims of being a writer and my sons Justice and Newell for their constant support and help.

To Mom and Dad who have both left this world, but have never leave me.

To God who never gave up on me…my existence proves that he has a sense of humor.

"You ain’t seen nothing yet!"

DD

JESUS WAS A

DEMOCRAT

The Moral Dichotomies of Republicanism

and the Coming Democratic Revolution

DAN DEFREEST

COPYRIGHT © 2015 BY DAN DEFREEST.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER:      2015919488

   ISBN:      HARDCOVER      978-1-5144-2855-9

         SOFTCOVER      978-1-5144-2857-3

         EBOOK      978-1-5144-2856-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 11/21/2015

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART 1

THE MANIFESTED DESTINY

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Roaring Twenties

Chapter 2: The New Deal

Chapter 3: I Like Ike!

Chapter 4: Camelot

Chapter 5: Vietnam

Chapter 6: Nixon

Chapter 7: Watergate

Chapter 8: Gerry

Chapter 9: Malaise

Chapter 10: The Gipper

Chapter 11: Bush 41

Chapter 12: Clinton

Chapter 13: W

Chapter 14: Obama

Chapter 15: History Repeats Itself

Chapter 16: The Housing Bubble and the Great Recession

Chapter 17: The Real Silent Majority

PART 2

THE MORAL DICHOTOMIES

Introduction

Chapter 18: Guns

Chapter 19: Abortion

Chapter 20: Immigration

Chapter 21: Global Warming

Chapter 22: Entitlements

Chapter 23: The Punch List

PART 3

THE THIRD ESTATE

Introduction

Chapter 24: American Bourgeoisie

Chapter 25: The Haves and the Have Not’s

Chapter 26: Outsourcing the Middle Class

Chapter 27: The Jobless Recovery

Chapter 28: Income Disparity

Chapter 29: Wealth Transfer

Chapter 30: The Minimum Wage

Chapter 31: Inner-City Blues

Chapter 32: Socioeconomic Repercussions

Chapter 33: What’s Ahead?

PART 4

CRITICAL MASS—THE COMING DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION

Introduction

Chapter 34: Our Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

Chapter 35: Demographics of the Electorate

Chapter 36: Aftershock

The Manifesto

My Final Thoughts

Introduction

Jesus Christ was a beggar. He did not own a home or a donkey, nor was he gainfully employed. He had no money or possessions to speak of and relied on the charity of others for the simple necessities of life. Yet no other person in human history has had a more profound effect or influence on the thinking of mankind than he has. The mere mention of his name inspires a multitude of human emotions, from awe to fear, respect to contempt, and love to hatred. Born of simple beginnings in a stable, he lived a life of virtual obscurity until the age of thirty. Yet in his three short years of public adult life that followed, this humble son of a carpenter changed the face of history.

Christ is the Greek interpretation of the Hebrew word for Messiah, which means anointed. So, in a sense, the word Christ is actually a title, rather than a name, which has over time simply become another name that we use for Jesus. Jesus the Christ or Christ Jesus became Jesus Christ. The term Christian literally means one who follows the teachings of Jesus Christ.

All of the information that we have about the life of Jesus Christ comes from the New Testament, the second part of the Christian Holy Bible. Although the New Testament is generally referred to as one book, it is actually a collection of twenty-seven books, written by the Apostles, Christ’s appointed followers. Essentially, it’s a biographical account of the life of Jesus Christ and his teachings. The New Testament begins with the Book of Matthew describing the genealogy and birth of Jesus and ends with the book of Revelation, an apocalyptic book filled with symbolism that describes Jesus ultimately conquering Satan and the material world. Throughout the New Testament, Jesus continues to warn us about the dangers of forsaking our love and responsibility to one another in exchange for materialism and lust for financial gain. One can argue that this is the central theme of his teachings.

Yet in today’s United States, it is not the unfortunate, downtrodden of society who claim kinship with Jesus, it’s the Republicans, those predominately male, wealthy, conservative upper-middle-class Americans who seem to feel that they, and only they, really understand the will of God and therefore have been selected to receive his abundant blessings in all of their chosen pursuits. Interestingly, a strange contradiction or dichotomy has evolved, in which those who view themselves as Christians also seem to have developed contempt for people in our society who cannot or will not rise above their station in life, because of either circumstances, cultural ignorance, or societal repression. To this end, they have also taken upon themselves the mantle of dominion over those not powerful enough, financially or otherwise, to defend themselves against this socioeconomic hypocrisy.

These self-proclaimed followers of Christ are unable to accept or grasp the meaning of Jesus’s admonition that what you do to the least of his brothers, you do to him. They choose instead to believe that good works, attending services, and making tax-deductible contributions to their faith of choice will put them on the fast track to eternal redemption.

These same individuals who seem ignorant of the true meaning of Christ’s teachings claim to understand how Christian ideals influenced and tempered the thinking of the framers of the Constitution. Although there does not seem to be any direct or implied connection between the teachings of the Bible, either the Old or the New Testament, and the founding of this country, Republicans have chosen to indulge in a bit of historical revisionism, because they see the actions of the founders of this country and their Christian beliefs to be directly related to their own views of geopolitical and economical idealism.

Beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and continuing through the end of the twentieth century and into the new millennium, conservatives have sought to rewrite the basic history of this country by establishing that the constitutional guarantees of freedoms extend to the development and protection of the free enterprise system. To this end, both greed and war are not seen as sins against God, but rather as justifiable means that result from protecting those additional freedoms.

It is true that the original pilgrims settled here in search of a new land where they would be free to practice their religious beliefs, instead of their religion being imposed on them by the Church of England. However, they were not searching for a promised land, as much as a land that held the promise that they would be free to express themselves without having to kowtow to a state doctrine or theology. In this sense, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are the absolute guarantees of these desires. Their ultimate goal was human expression without repression, rather than simply religious freedom.

This ideological arrogance has caused Republicans to be shameless about passing judgment on fellow Americans whom they deem to be socioeconomically, morally, or culturally inferior. In the book of James in the New Testament, we are admonished not to judge our fellow man; it goes on to say that only the giver of the law has the right to judge it. It’s human nature to judge one another; we do this because we seek to feel better by measuring ourselves against the conduct of those whom we know and know of.

However, Republicans have taken moral duplicity to a new level. During the Clinton impeachment hearings in the late 1990s, for example, Senator Dan Burton called President Clinton a scumbag for his affair with Monica Lewinsky but was then forced to admit his own indiscretion and that he had fathered a child out of wedlock as a result of it. Henry Hyde, who chaired the impeachment committee, was also exposed for having an extramarital affair that lasted more than seven years, and, recently, Newt Gingrich, who was speaker of the House of Representatives at the time, has admitted to an adulterous affair while pushing for the impeachment of President Clinton. Apparently, these men were unfamiliar with the golden rule.

Jesus Was a Democrat

The purpose of this book is to offer a historical perspective on how the middle class climbed from the depths of the Great Depression to a level of relative comfort in the 1970s and then watched as Republican policies have slowly eroded the foundations that supported their version of the American dream. From the breaking of labor unions to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, to suppression of the minimum wage, conservative initiatives have focused on elevating those who benefit most from the free enterprise system at the expense of people who suffer the most from these efforts. To this end, the embracing of Christian ideals and wrapping them around conservative Republican initiatives have ultimately held down the very people whom Jesus admonished us to lift up.

Those initiatives, which I call moral dichotomies, are the relevant social issues facing middle-class Americans that conservative lawmakers have been hacking away at and redefining, while claiming, at the same time, to empathetically understand the pain being endured by the victims of their efforts. Later in this book, we’ll see how this double-minded morality will eventually have dire consequences for the conservatives in future elections, when various demographic elements of the electorate are forced back to the election booths during both off-year and general election years to voice their displeasure.

These groups, consisting of women, minorities, the elderly, and disenfranchised lower-middle-class whites, make up a large portion of the real silent majority and are each, as well as collectively, growing. Their voices were heard above the crowd during the last two presidential elections and are becoming louder, even as conservative ideologies have sought to quiet them with redistricting and voter identification laws. Historically, it is these voters who decide who our eventual commander in chief will be.

Since the loss of innocence that began with the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 and carried forward through the Vietnam War and culminated with the resignation of Richard Nixon, the American electorate that has decided the presidency since Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976 is a vast, silent crowd of voters that flows between the two parties and votes its pocketbook. The same voters who elected Jimmy Carter elected Ronald Reagan and are the same group who then voted for Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Each time they chose an outsider over a Beltway veteran; in 1976, they turned their backs on the Washington insider Gerald Ford, in favor of the peanut farmer from Georgia; in 1980, they turned away from Carter, the incumbent, to Reagan, the conservative maverick from California. In 1992, they shunned the current president Bush for Clinton, the liberal governor of Arkansas, and then rejected Vice President Al Gore for the cowboy from Texas George W. Bush; finally, they chose the activist from Chicago, Obama, over Senator John McCain, who has been a member of Congress for more than twenty-five years.

For the most part, although Republicans rarely vote against the party line, Democrats have no such ideological attachments. According to a Gallop poll taken before the 2012 elections, approximately 20 percent of Americans considered themselves liberals, while twice as many considered themselves conservatives. That leaves 40 percent who would consider themselves to be neither conservative nor liberal and who vote independently. This group would tend to lean Democratic, seems to vote for likability and competency over party affiliation, and would not have a problem crossing party lines to elect its candidate.

Republicans, conversely, have opted to cling to their party’s platform by pledging their allegiance to a conservative doctrine that upholds the glorification of capitalism and condemns any attempt by the lower socioeconomic classes to try to obtain or retain economic parity. By wrapping themselves in a cloak of Christian morality, they have claimed the high ground for themselves by asserting that they are simply doing what pleases God by maximizing their wealth without regard for the financial or moral welfare of those citizens whom they are exploiting, both economically and politically, in their quest to obtain their chosen ideals.

Attempting to rationalize the injustice of this repression leads to a frustrating exchange that sends conservatives running back to their core beliefs of God, greed, and guns. In the end, the simple answer that has become a self-fulfilling prophecy for conservatives is that they are right because they are on the Right, and because they are on the Right, they are right. No other facts or evidence is necessary to support their positions.

Therefore, trying to reason with an unreasonable ideologue is a fool’s game; however, as we will see and as Abraham Lincoln noted, You can fool some of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Conservatives have succeeded in the first two of Lincoln’s admonitions but have not grasped the third. The United States used to belong to the working class; now it belongs to the wealthy. The American middle class is tired of being fooled; the loss of wages, benefits, job security, and hope of achieving the American dream is slowly driving the masses back to the voting booth. As conservative philosophies began to dominate the middle class, they have sucked the material and ideological equity out of us at the same time. As has often been said, What goes around comes around, and the backlash from Republican idealism will yield effects that may change the face of our country forever.

Jesus Was a Democrat is structured in four parts:

Part 1, "The Manifested Destiny," is a walk through the historic events that shaped this country and the middle class. From the Great Depression and the New Deal to the rise of labor unions and the creation of the middle class, the blue-collar working American was a vital building block in the greatness of this county. The election of Ronald Reagan signified the beginning of the end to middle-class progression.

Part 2, "The Moral Dichotomies," looks at the sociopolitical issues that middle-class Americans care most about and that the Republican Party has worked tirelessly to modify, reverse, and reshape to fit its vision of a perfect conservative society.

In Part 3, "The Third Estate," we will examine how the conservative policies of the Republican Party during the last thirty years have beaten down the middle class by systematically destroying organized labor, thus forcing blue-collar workers into a position of servitude, while seeking to return the economy to pre-Depression days, when employees were underpaid and overworked, had no benefits, and had little or no hope of retiring comfortably.

And finally, in Part 4, "Critical Mass," I project the America of the future, a society where the various demographic groups of the electorate rise up against an aristocratic repression that seeks to exclude everyone but those in the top echelons of wealth from the abundant blessings that our democracy offers and our Constitution protects.

So, what has happened since 1980 to turn the conservatives in this country into a group of ideological zealots? Why are they working tirelessly to take away the gains that the middle class has worked so hard for the last seventy years to achieve? Just why are Republicans so intimidated by the progress of women in the workplace? And why, in a country that was founded and built by immigrants, is the Right trying to keep them out and stop those here legally from participating in our democracy? We will look at how Republican politicians have engaged in a political shell game of legislative antagonism, followed by campaign appeasement, leading disenfranchised voters to validate Lenin’s prediction that the capitalist will sell us the rope that we will hang them with.

Part 1

The Manifested Destiny

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

—George Santayana

Introduction

John Maynard Keynes was a British economist who developed contrarian economic theories during the 1930s that both influenced and paralleled the concepts that were the cornerstone of Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression. Specifically, Keynes theorized that a government intervention was needed to modulate the economy during economic downturns. Up to that time, current economic thinking held that essentially, markets would right themselves during down cycles in the economy, as long as the employment forces were flexible and willing to compromise; then goods and services would increase, which would force prices down and that would, in turn, create demand. Republicans have embraced this concept as the foundation for supply-side economics and trickle-down economics. Specifically, modern Republican economic policies have prescribed deregulation, plus a tax cut, to help stimulate the economy by putting more capital in the hands of the job creators. This new twist on the classic economic formula became known as Reaganomics.

Keynes decided that government spending, as well as government activism in the financial markets, was vital to either stimulate a down economy or slow it down when it was overheating. We saw these concepts at work during the New Deal of the Great Depression and also again during the Great Recession of 2008, where the government provided a stimulus package of spending initiatives to bail out American banks and businesses, improve infrastructure, and aid consumers, very much as it had eighty years earlier. The debate between Democrats and Republicans about which of these economic theories is more effective goes on; however, my thoughts in the coming pages should make a good argument for the Keynesian policies. One can also say that the tax relief constantly put forward by Republicans is just the kind of government intervention that Keynes advocated.

Chapter 1

The Roaring Twenties

The Roaring Twenties were a time of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, speakeasies, and flappers. Despite Prohibition, Republican economic policies had cooked the country into a euphoric state of prosperity. The agriculture industry was one of the few industries not enjoying the sudden wealth. During World War I, most of Western Europe was at war, and that war was being fought on farmland. The American agriculture industry ramped up to provide agricultural products to Europe, and during this time, U.S. farmers produced record harvests and enjoyed record profits.

Unfortunately, after the war, as the European agricultural industry rebounded, farmers in this country continued to produce at the same levels, which resulted in massive surpluses that forced prices down. As farmers attempted to offset their loss of high profits with quantity sales, they only further exacerbated the problem. Consequently, the agricultural industry in this country did not enjoy the economic boom of the 1920s and was sitting in a very vulnerable position.

Yet for the rest of the country, the second industrial revolution was in full swing, because industries had switched from steam power to electric in the early twentieth century. World War I had transformed the United States into an international economic power, and almost every industry was growing dramatically. In 1913, Henry Ford had perfected his first assembly line, and by the 1920s, automobiles, which had been luxuries, were now affordable for the average citizen. Unemployment for most of the decade stayed below 5 percent, and workers shared in the newfound prosperity. Investing in the stock market had traditionally been a rich man’s game until the 1920s, but as the decade wore on, average citizens clamored to get into the market. Many of these new investors were buying stock on margin or simply borrowing money from banks and using the stock as collateral. Banks, unencumbered by regulations and themselves interested in making an easy profit, also invested depositors’ money in the stock market.

On October 24, 1929, the party ended. The stock market suffered a catastrophic loss, followed by several aftershocks, and the country’s economy subsequently imploded. Banks failed, businesses closed, and farmers who were heavily leveraged, having borrowed extensively to offset their previous losses, went under. Added to all of this, a massive drought that affected most of the Midwestern part of the country during the 1930s turned it into a dust bowl.

Republican president Herbert Hoover’s initial response to the financial crisis was to leave things alone and allow the markets to right themselves, assuming that the economy would follow. Hoover’s anti-socialistic views of the government’s role caused him to underestimate the seriousness of the situation, which only served to intensify the coming depression. Clinging to the conservative belief that the economy could fix itself, Hoover was predicting that the worst was over in early 1930; unfortunately, he was wrong. Not only was the worst yet to come, but the intensity and depth of the coming depression would be so severe that ultimately it would take another world war to end it.

By 1932, 25 percent of American workers were out of work, and, eventually, more than