Political Discourse 2020

Travails of the Democratic Party  The Democratic Party, formed in the Jacksonian revolution of the 1830s, combined an explosive democratic impulse among white working and middle classes with the most egregious racism embodied in this nation’s history. This tension remained a pervasive feature of the Party’s political culture through the mid-20 th century.   This racist impetus intensified with the heating up of the sectional conflict with such Democratic stalwarts like Mississippi Senator, Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, Governor of Georgia, serving as President and Vice-President of the breakaway Confederacy. Fighting Radical Reconstruction, after the Civil War, tooth and nail, the Democratic Party in the South sought to destroy any vestige of an interracial democracy, which the Radical Reconstructionist Congress and its abolitionist allies sought to perpetuate. Led by the likes of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner and the preeminent Black abolitionist, Frederick Douglas

  Revolutionary notables such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and James Madison sought to resolve a crisis of major proportions in the evident flaws within the first U.S. Constitutional government, the short-lived Articles of Confederation.   The major weakness was the incapacity of the Articles to provide an effective structure for governance. Specifically, the Articles did not contain an independent executive or judicial branch of government. It lacked the very rudiments of a sufficiently complex, three-branch structure upon which the states were based, which served as a working model for the second Constitutional founders when a notable group of 55 gathered in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 for a second reinvention of the government of the recently formed Republic. Of concern also was the fear of a spreading, demagogic impulse which threatened the governing order of the new nation. James Madison referred to a “tyranny of the majority” based on what he perceived a