Democrats channel their Civil War predecessors

America is built on the idea of universalism; all people no matter what their race, gender, or religion are equally valuable.

Prior to the Civil War Democrats who were defending slavery argued that that wasn't true; that the Founders intended that rights only belonged to white men.  This is eerily similar to the racial identity politics that Democrats are pushing today.

Recently a left wing academic, Jill Lepore, has had the courage to point it out. In an interview she said:

"Making political claims that are based on identity is what white supremacy is. To the degree that we can find that in the early decades of the country, it’s the position taken by, say, John C. Calhoun or Stephen Douglas arguing against Abraham Lincoln. The whole Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858 comes down to Douglas saying, Our forefathers founded this country for white men and their posterity forever. And Lincoln, following on the writings of black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and David Walker and Maria Stewart, says, No, that’s just not true! Lincoln read in the founding documents a universal claim of political equality and natural rights, the universality of the sovereignty of the people, not the particularity. Anyone who makes an identity-based claim for a political position has to reckon with the unfortunate fact that Stephen Douglas is their forebear, not Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass."

It's one thing to argue that all people should be treated equally but it's quite another to follow the current left wing approach of demanding special preferential treatment of some people based solely on their race.

We could make an argument that any child forced to attend the failed inner city Chicago public schools should be subject to affirmative action on the basis that if a child who attends a Democrat run inner city school scores say 1300 on the SAT that's really on par with someone who attends a well run suburban school getting a 1500 on the SAT without being racist.

But we can't argue that only Black children, not white Ukzaninian immigrants, who attend those failing schools should get affirmative action without being racists.

Conservatives have always been advocating prosecuting specific discrimination and correcting problems that make it harder for anyone in the US to succeed while Democrats have concentrated on balkanizing the country by pitting different groups against each other often on the basis of race.

It's time to call out the Democrats for their racist policies.