How the Democratic Party Really Got Its Name-Exclusive excerpt from Daniel Greenfield's acclaimed new book, 'Domestic Enemies'

Editor’s note: Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield has written a powerful new book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against The Left. Highly original and urgently relevant, Domestic Enemies unveils the hypocrisies and destructive schemes of the Left, revealing that it has been trying to destroy America from its very founding – using many of the same tactics that it employs today.

Democrats claim Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were the fathers of their party. The truth is that their party started out as a radical leftist movement set up by supporters of the French Revolution to seize power in America.

Learn why George Washington accused them of “the most diabolical attempts to destroy the best fabric of human government.”

Below is an exclusive excerpt from Daniel Greenfield’s “Domestic Enemies,” which historian and bestselling author Victor Davis Hanson calls “a concise and lucid account of the little-known, but extremely important history of today’s American Left – and why it was and is so dangerous.”

In Lower Manhattan, near the ports, a mob was shouting, “Down with King Washington” and singing the French national anthem. Others shouted, “Vive Genet.”

It was the summer of 1793 and a “whirling mob of fanatics” was parading up and down the street and cheering the French Revolution. Before long such rallies would turn into violent fistfights with American Patriots who opposed the rise of the radical globalist Left.

Some in the mob dressed like the radical sans-culotte mobs ravaging Paris while others in the streets of Philadelphia had deployed mock guillotines.

At the peak of his popularity, Genet would challenge George Washington for the allegiance of the American people and help create what would become the Democratic Party.

Citizen Edmond Genet, as French revolutionaries were styled, had arrived as the emissary of his regime, not to Washington, but to the American Left. The rotund radical with a balding hairline had already been expelled from Russia and was working on a revolution in America.

American leftists had watched enviously as French radicals imprisoned and killed anyone who stood in the way of their cause, as heads rolled from the bloody maw of “Madame Guillotine” and churches were replaced with “Temples of Reason.” At the Festival of Unity and Indivisibility, one of the holidays of the new Cult of the Supreme Being, a giant papier-mache statue of the Goddess of Nature, modeled on the Egyptian goddess Isis, had been erected.

In the National Gazette, associated with the faction that would become the Democrats, cartoons showed Washington being led to the guillotine while another entry, “A Funeral Dirge for George Washington,” put the image into words.

John Adams described how leftist riots stirred up by Genet, the envoy of the French revolutionary regime, had sent “ten thousand People in the Streets of Philadelphia, day after day, threatened to drag Washington out of his House, and effect a Revolution in the Government, or compell it to declare War in favour of the French Revolution.”

Jacques Pierre Brissot, who had appointed Genet and was in charge of foreign policy, preached that “France has been called to lead a gigantic revolution and worldwide uprising to liberate the oppressed peoples of the world.”

Brissot, whom Marx would credit with coining the concept that property is theft for stating that “exclusive property is a theft against nature,” envisioned a grand transformation of humanity.

America would also have to be “Communized” and “Jacobinized” through the Democratic Societies that would pursue the radical and globalist agenda of the French Revolution.

Five years away from death, George Washington rode out to battle as, for the first and last time in American history, a sitting president led the troops in the field.

“We are ready for a state of revolution and the guillotine of France,” the leader of the Mingo Creek Democratic Society had threatened during the “Whiskey Rebellion.”

Washington rode out to fight because he feared America was about to follow France’s example. He described the violence as “the first formidable fruit of the Democratic Societies; brought forth I believe too prematurely for their own views, which may contribute to the annihilation of them.”

But while the Whiskey Rebellion was put down, the power of the radicals was growing.

The Democratic Societies that so troubled Washington had taken their name from Genet. While the founders of the Philadelphia club had wanted to name it after the Sons of Liberty, as a tribute to the revolutionary past, Genet had proposed calling them Democratic Societies.

The one issue, more than any other, that led to the emergence of the Democrats was the French Revolution.

Theodore Roosevelt later described them as “Democratic societies on the models of the Jacobin Clubs of France” and their influence as “noxious” and “distinctly evil.”

“We are lovers of the French nation,” the Democratic Society of New York had declared. “We esteem their cause as our own.”

A toast at the Democratic Society of Philadelphia envisioned “the San Culottes of France,” creating a “temple of liberty” that will “have the whole earth for its area, and the arch of heaven for its dome,” envisioning the French Revolution spreading across the world to America.

Historian Charles Downer Hazen noted, “The Democratic clubs … also played an important part in introducing French levelling principles in revolutionary vernacular. It was through them that the word ‘democrat’ was ushered into our politics.”

“These societies were instituted by the artful & designing members (many of their body I have no doubt mean well, but know little of the real plan),” Washington had warned, “instituted by their father, Genet,” and behind them, “under popular and fascinating guises, the most diabolical attempts to destroy the best fabric of human government.”

Genet, the French radical, would later marry the daughter of George Clinton – the second Democratic-Republican vice president of the United States. Genet’s Democratic Societies were no longer just a radical movement, they were the ruling party of the country.

The most diabolical attempts to destroy the best fabric of human government became a movement, a party, and then another party that we know today as the Democratic Party.

In 1794, George Washington was describing how the Left still operates today, disguising its intentions, using front groups and operating through a veil of secret societies.

We are still fighting George Washington’s fight against the Left. It’s a war for truth, faith and liberty that has gone on for a quarter of a millennium.

Unfortunately, it isn’t true.

The Declaration of Independence states in grievance #10:

“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance”

Oh, well see there you have it. King George III was a progressive!

...

No. Just no. Can we please stop the insanity? This fudging of history is bad enough when progressives do it, it’s terrible when anybody against progressives (from our side), Daniel Greenfield or anybody else, does the same.

Progressivism starts in the 20th century. The machinery that was setup by Wilson, setup by the Roosevelts, setup by LBJ, and many others. None of it existed in the 1870s. None of it existed in the 1880s, and even into most of the 1890s.

We have a full two decades minimum there that couldn’t be more clear.

We do not need a “living and breathing” history. If that’s the case, then there is no George Washington.

SJackson: "In fairness, they were referred to as Democratic-Republican societies, not to be confused with the Democratic-Republican party of the same name.
The Whig Party emerging from the “Republican” side.
The Democrat Party emerged from the left over stub of the Democratic-Republican Party under Jackson."

This is one of my favorite subjects and the author here -- Daniel Greenfield -- is singing my song!
Yes, the roots of the Democrat Party go all the way back to almost Day One of our 1787 Constitutional republic.
That's because:

Jeffersonian Democrats were, first and foremost, anti-Federalists, named as such by those "Federalists" who supported ratification of their new Constitution in 1788.
Of course, to a man, 1788 anti-Federalists were not French style social revolutionaries, but Jefferson himself was:
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
It is its natural manure...
...god forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion...
what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms."
Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith on November 13, 1787 -- in reference to the 1786-7 Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts
Unlike Founders Washington, Adams, Hamilton and Madison -- who responded to Shay's Rebellion in 1786 with a new Constitution to replace the ineffective Old Articles of Confederation -- Jefferson thought the French Revolution was a good idea and did not endorse the proposed new US Constitution in 1788.
After ratification in 1788 and Washington's election as President, Jefferson created the Anti-Administration Faction (1790), which, when joined by James Madison and others became Jeffersonian republicans (1792).
"Republican" was Jefferson's term for himself, but Federalists like Washington & Hamilton noticed Jefferson's fondness for the French Revolution's "democrats" and so Federalists labeled Jefferson's party "Democratic Republicans", the "Democratic" referring to the French Revolution.
Jeffersonians had no problem with the term "Democratic Republicans" and rather quickly dropped the "republican" part -- just calling themselves the "Democratic Party".

cowboyusa #14: "The Democratic- Republicans, and the Democrats were the small government working class party.
The Federalists and Whigs were the big government party."

SJackson #23: "But the idea that the Democrat Party, defender of slavery, is was an extension of the ideals of the French Revolution, rabid abolitionists banning slavery the same year as the Whiskey Rebellion, is absurd.
There are similarities between the two nihilist movements today, not in the early 19th century."

Not to belabor the obvious, but Thomas Jefferson was a... ah... "complicated" man, arguably the greatest genius to ever occupy the office of President.
He could and did hold to seemingly contradictory views, on slavery, for example.

However, in all fairness, what Jefferson's defenders might call "complicated", less sympathetic observers might just as accurately call "lying out of both sides of his mouth".

I am much more sympathetic, however we can still notice that:

Pres. Jefferson's Gallitin Plan for Internal Improvements:

While Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans claimed to be small government and strict-construction when they were out of power, after winning control of Federal government in the 1800 election, they soon enough did everything they'd accused the Old Federalists of wanting, and much more.
Democrats double-standard began with Jefferson.
In that they were identical to today's Democrats who insist that Republicans follow constitutional law to the letter, but just define whatever Democrats themselves want to do as "constitutional".
Yes, Jefferson's Democratics were a "working class party", who championed extending voting privileges to every man who was "free, white and 21".
As such, Jefferson's alliance with Big City immigrant bosses (i.e., NYC's Tammany Hall) is how he defeated John Adams in the 1800 election -- and how Democrats kept their majorities until 1861, and since 1932, to today.
However, "free, white and 21" now excluded many who could previously vote, notably property owners who were women or freed-blacks.
How "democratic" was that?
Finally, in all of American history there were no more aristocratic presidents than Democratic Republicans -- Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and John Quincy Adams.

Yes, Democratic Andrew Jackson is a much different story, but still, as our French friends and allies like to say:

“plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.