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[Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: HERE.]
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.”
George Washington vs. the French Revolution
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.
Now it was their turn, but George Washington stood in the way.
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.”
“All Europe will be Gallicized, Communized, and Jacobinized.”
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.
The Birth of the Democratic Party
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.
His real enemy was the Democratic Societies.
“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.
230 years later nothing has changed.
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.
If you took out Crats in the name Democrat and put in the letter N.S. you would have Demons
I call them DEMONcrats all the time.
My wife’s best friend is a dyed in the wool Dem, name Simona, I have renamed her Demona.
They are basically an evil underhanded and nefarious party that has devil and demon inside, NO DOUBT IN HELL ABOUT THAT!
The book does an excellent job of tracing the history of the left in USA. Actually made me feel more optimistic about the current situation.
Tracing it all back to the French Revolution is very helpful to me in unifying the historical trends. One example, an eyewitness who happened to be in France during the first year saw how the French mobs turned into wild beasts. Just like the George Floyd mobs turned into wild beasts. Same patterns repeating.
I’ve seen books before that traced our troubles back to the French Revolution, but Daniel’s book really makes it crystal clear and easy to understand.
It is Mr. Greenfield’s very rare and valuable gift. May God establish the work of his hands. Psalm 90:17.
Thanks KH!!!!!!
Absolutely true, that Thomas Jefferson was not the founder of the modern-day Democratic Party. First, the party of Jefferson and Madison was called Republican, Second, the early republicans subscribed to the concept of natural rights. They also were for central government operating within the strict confines of its enumerated, limited, constitutional duties. That which was not the responsibility of the central government should be the responsibility of the states and the people, they maintained. Third, another consideration, the name of the Jeffersonian-Madisonian Republican Party was changed to the Democratic-Republican Party artificially by certain scholars, mainly to differentiate it from the later Republican Party of Lincoln. Finally, after President James Monroe’s second term ended in 1825, that original Republican Party ceased. Party remnants then bifurcated into the Jacksonian popularist movement and the Whigs, the latter of which would become a basis for the Republican Party of Lincoln. Finally, today’s Democratic Party is a Progressive party (Wilson, FDR, LBJ, et. al.), advocating unbridled central power. Paraphrasing Wilson, “There is nowhere the central government cannot go.” That modern day Democratic Party therefore does not seem to subscribe to the central views of the Jeffersonian-Madisonian Republican Party in any way.
America’s political binary is Jefferson vs. Hamilton – small government states’ rights vs. central government statism.
The Democrats became the progressive party as they were subsumed by former Whigs. Lincoln was a former Whig, and the GOP are the heirs to the Hamiltonian Whig tradition.
Thank you, The Federalist and the Republican Parties (the later the party of Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, et. al.) arose during the period historians call the First Party System. The Federalist Party (Hamilton, John Adams, et. al.) dissolved in the early 1800s. Yes, part of the defunct Federalist Party became the Whigs, as did some of the Republican Party after 1825, as mentioned. Today’s parties are really amalgamations of several parties and special interests, although they seem to be coalescing into two political blocs, one essentially for unbridled central government and wealth redistribution (e.g. equality of outcome), and the other for smaller central government, more states rights, and greater individual liberty (e.g. equality of opportunity), the latter provided one does his/her neighbor no harm.
“[T]he name of the Jeffersonian-Madisonian Republican Party was changed to the Democratic-Republican Party artificially by certain scholars, mainly to differentiate it from the later Republican Party of Lincoln.”
Not so.
Andrew Jackson and his supporters changed the name of the (Jeffersonian) Republican Party during the election of 1824 which they lost. They came back in 1828 with a crushing victory over the National Republicans of John Quincy Adams.
Thomas Jefferson was the champion of the yeoman class, small farmers, i.e., the majority of the nation by that time, but he still believed in the constitutional Republic of his understudy, James Madison.
Andrew Jackson used the party of Jefferson and the word, “democratic” to achieve power, but he had no use for the Republic or the Constitution. He was, in effect, the first democratic dictator. He famously said, “Here, the people rule.” And he believed that rule was absolute in him.
So all the time we’ve traced the progressives only back to Woodrow Wilson, which I’ve never quite fully understood. Wilson was an antisemitic tyrant, but he only got into power because Teddy Roosevelt wanted run one more time for president which split the Republican vote. That was an anomaly corrected by Calvin Coolidge (with a short intermission by Warren Harding) who restored the economy wrecked by the war.
The next opportunity for the left came with Franklin Roosevelt enabled by a wave of new voters via the 19th Amendment. The Roosevelt administration was promptly saturated by Stalin’s agents.
So now, 230 years after the beginning, American is now nearly completely “communized” and the left stands at the precipice of final victory.
We can’t say they’re not persistent.
However, Washington fell into some of the same traps and caved somewhat to the left. As a president, he arced towards central planning and statism. He also indulged Hamilton (the REAL root of the American left), to the country’s eternal detriment.
Throughout human history every society ever existed have been ruled by very small, mostly self serving , power hungry, tyrannical clique of people.. The USA is the first society that defied history, and declare the sovereignty of the individual over not only his/her life, but over the governing ruling class. Which is an anathema to the ruling clique. That’s the reason that the collectivist left despises American form of governance.. The question still remains. Will the American experiment of self governance survives the test of time or not. As Ben Franklin said “it is a Republic if you can’ keep it’.
Interesting history but it appears to me the “party” distinction is of little consequence at this time in our nation. With the exception of a very few, we have fallen to the old trope of voting ourselves money from the public treasury even if we have to create it out of thin air. I can’t see where much of an argument can be made for differing standards of the two parties when our representatives ignore the “guidelines” laid out for them in the Constitution. When it comes to consolidating power at the federal level it’s hard to tell the Dems from the Reps. History has become a past time from which we learn nothing anymore.
So the left has been FOR communism from the get go and has no qualms about hauling people out to the guillotines! They do it today with corrupt DA’s and “judges”!