In 1860, with the election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S. president, the newly-formed Republican Party controlled the U.S. House, Senate, and presidency. As was the case with most every state in what would become the Confederacy, my home state of Georgia cited slavery, Tepublicans, and the election of Lincoln as its reasons for seceding:

A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the federal government has been committed [the Republicans] will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia [who voted to secede]. The party of Lincoln, called the Republican Party under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. . . . The prohibition of slavery in the territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers. . . . [T]he abolitionists and their allies in the northern states have been engaged in constant efforts to subvert our institutions.

The Confederate States of America was formed at the Montgomery Convention in February 1861. For the southern states—and anyone else in the world paying attention—the agenda of the newly formed (and electorally victorious) Republican Party agenda was clear. Every party platform since the creation of the Republican Party had forcefully denounced slavery. After the infamous Dred Scott ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857, the subsequent Republican platform strongly condemned the ruling and reaffirmed the right of Congress to ban slavery in the territories. On the other hand, the corresponding Democrat platforms praised the Dred Scott ruling and condemned all efforts to end slavery in the U.S.

With its recent unashamed embrace of socialism—they used to avoid such talk—along with its decades-long devotion to killing children in the womb, the modern Democrat Party is again aligning itself with ideologies and institutions that have little to no regard for vast swaths of humanity. Since the dawn of the twentieth century, socialism—the economic system of communist countries—and abortion are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of human beings.

As Breitbart reported late last year, with nearly 42 million killed in their mothers’ wombs, abortion was the leading cause of death worldwide in 2018. Since the infamous Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, the abortion holocaust has claimed the lives of over 60 million American children. Given such horrific numbers, with unborn children being the most innocent and helpless among us, and given that a mother’s womb should be one of the safest places in the universe, the plight of the unborn is the greatest civil rights battle of all time.

Yet the modern Democrat Party has never been more hostile to unborn children. As soon as they took control of the U.S. House this year, sex-worshipping democrats wasted little time in revealing their wicked and perverse priorities. In an attempt to end the partial government shutdown, Democrats’ initial legislative funding proposal sent to the Republican-controlled Senate repealed the pro-life “Mexico-City policy” and provided $37.5 million for the pro-abortion United Nations Population Fund.

Days later, Democrats in New York stood and cheered after Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law legislation that allows for the killing of children in the womb right up to the moment of birth. In other words, the culture and ideology that gave us the gruesome Kermit Gosnell passed legislation that will only create more infanticidal fools.

Not to be outdone in their efforts to kill the most innocent and helpless among us, soon after the New York infanticide bill was signed into law, Virginia Democrats proposed their version of an after-birth abortion bill. Distracting from his blackface scandal, Virginia’s governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, infamously defended the legislation. Republican senator Ben Sasse put it well when he noted,

In just a few years pro-abortion zealots went from ‘safe, legal, and rare’ to ‘keep the newborns comfortable while the doctor debates infanticide.’

That Democrats are now debating infanticide shouldn’t be very surprising, as no less than Barack Obama himself helped push them along this evil path. Hoping to follow Mr. Obama as the next Democrat president, virtually every Democratic candidate for U.S. president supports what could only be described as infanticide. Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, Alveda King, was exactly right when she asked and answered:

“How can the ‘Dream’ survive if we murder the children? Every aborted baby is like a slave in the womb of his or her mother. The mother decides his or her fate.”

As the Nazis did with the Jews, and as pro-slavery Americans did with black Africans, modern abortion apologists have dehumanized those they find undesirable or those whose lives they want complete control over. On Fox News’ The Story, author and commentator Rachel Campos-Duffy compared abortion to slavery:

Our country has been divided since [1973] when Roe vs. Wade was passed, and I believe that in my lifetime, the only way this is going to be resolved is Roe v. Wade [being] overturned. It’s going to go back to the states because this issue is as fundamental as an issue was back in the middle of the 1800s called slavery. This is an issue about who gets to decide who is human enough so they can do whatever they want with that person, or the person they’re saying is not a person. This is such a fundamental human rights issue. 

Like abortion, socialism is a “fundamental human rights issue.” In the last 125 years, only socialism rivals abortion in the slaughter of human beings, and like abortion, socialism is a form of slavery. In 1884, in his seminal work The Man Versus the State, philosopher and political theorist Herbert Spencer warned of “The Coming Slavery.” He wrote:

All socialism involves slavery…The degree of his slavery varies according to the ratio between that which he is forced to yield up and that which he is allowed to retain; and it matters not whether his master is a single person or a society. If, without option, he has to labour for the society, and receives from the general stock such portion as the society awards him, he becomes a slave to the society. Socialistic arrangements necessitate an enslavement of this kind…There seems no getting people to accept the truth…that the welfare of a society and the justice of its arrangements are at bottom dependent on the characters of its members; and that improvement in neither can take place without that improvement in character which results from carrying on peaceful industry under the restraints imposed by an orderly social life. The belief, not only of the socialists but also of those so-called Liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them, is that by due skill an ill-working humanity may be framed into well-working institutions. It is a delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts. [Emphasis mine.]

One hundred and thirty-five years ago, Spencer—one of the most widely read philosophers of his time and “the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century”—warned the world of what socialists would bring and who was “diligently preparing the way for them.”

Nevertheless, thanks mostly to socialist regimes, the twentieth century was the world’s bloodiest. From China’s Zedong and the Soviet Union’s Stalin to Cuba’s Castro, the twentieth century is littered with godless socialists who attempted to enslave and murder their way to Utopia. Tens of millions died in the forced-labor camps that socialism requires. Tens of millions more died in the poverty and starvation that socialism inevitably produces.

Many leading Democrats today unashamedly embrace socialism, including some running for president. Those Democrats who have yet to stoop to praising socialism openly have many policy proposals that are indistinguishable from what one would find in a socialist state. Yet modern American Democrats insist their version of state control of most every facet of our lives will be different.

Tragically, as has been the case with abortion, many Americans seem to have bought into the Democrats’ socialist propaganda. According to a recent Gallup poll, a growing number of Americans have embraced at least some form of socialism. This is mostly due to the increasing number of Democrats who view socialism favorably. As the same Gallup poll also notes, since 2010, a majority of Democrats have had a favorable view of socialism. A similar Gallup poll last year revealed that a significantly larger number of Democrats (57% to 47%) now prefer (“have a positive view of”) socialism over capitalism.

All the information we now have at our fingertips—including the nasty scenes from Venezuela—and it seems the lure of spending other people’s money—like the lure of (supposed) sex without consequences—still proves too much for too many. It took a civil war to rid the U.S. of the institution of slavery. Let us hope and pray that, in spite of what some are forecasting, it doesn’t get to that with abortion or socialism.

Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com