There is a story modern Democrats love to tell about themselves: that they are the party of civil rights, that the racism in America somehow lives over on the other side, and that the past was washed clean by some unspecified moment of conversion. None of it is true.
The receipts go back further than the Republican Party even existed.
The Democratic Party was founded in 1828 by Andrew Jackson, who signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and forced 16,000 Cherokee onto the Trail of Tears (Library of Congress).
The 1860 Democratic platform endorsed slavery. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 specifically to stop slavery's expansion. The Confederacy was Democratic, top to bottom.
After the Civil War, six Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee. Every one of them was a Democrat. Their explicit mission was m*rdering newly enfranchised Black Republicans. KKK violence during Reconstruction k!lled thousands of Black Americans and their white Republican allies (Equal Justice Initiative, Resoncstruction in America).
In 1898, an armed Democratic mob overthrew the elected biracial Republican government of Wilmington, North Carolina, k!lling as many as 250 Black residents. It remains the only successful coup d'état in American history. Every perpetrator was a Democrat.
In 1913, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson resegregated the federal government, which had been integrated under Republicans since Reconstruction. He hosted a private White House screening of Birth of a Nation, the silent film glorifying the KKK (Smithsonian Magazine).
Every prominent segregationist governor was a Democrat.
George Wallace: Segragation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. Lester Maddox of Georgia, who chased Black customers from his restaurant with axe handles. Orval Faubus of Arkansas, who used the National Guard to block the Little Rock Nine. Bull Connor of Birmingham, who turned fire hoses and police dogs on schoolchildren.
On the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the vote breakdown was 80% of Republicans in favor versus 63% of Democrats. In the Senate: Republicans 27-6 in favor, Democrats 46-21 (Office of the Historian, U.S. House). The bill could not have passed without Republicans overriding the Democratic filibuster led by Senator Robert Byrd.
That same Robert Byrd was a former Exalted Cyclops of the KKK. In 1944 he wrote: I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours degragraded by race mongrels (Byrd letter, 1944).
He served as Senate Democratic Majority Leader. He died a Democratic Senator in 2010. Hillary Clinton called him my mentor. Joe Biden eulogized him.
Joe Biden in 1977 warned the Senate that integration would turn his children's generation into a racial jungle (Congressional Record).
Biden in 2003 eulogized segregationist Strom Thurmond as a man who took an oath to defend his country and never wavered.
Biden in 2007 on Barack Obama: the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.
Biden in 2019, in Iowa, on tape: Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.
Biden in 2020 to Charlamagne tha God: If you have a problem figuring out wheather you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black (The Breakfast Club).
Biden in 2020 on Latinos: Unlike the African-American community, whith notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community." An explicit claim that Black Americans are monolithic in a way Latinos are not (NPR).
When a Black American does not vote Democrat, the entire ideological apparatus of American liberalism turns on them in language no Republican would dare use.
Justice Clarence Thomas, the second Black Justice in Supreme Court history, has been called Uncle Tom, house slave, and race traitor by mainstream Democratic commentators for thirty years running.
The Los Angeles Times in August 2021 published a column calling Larry Elder the Black face of white supremacy because he ran for governor of California as a Republican (LA Times, Erika D. Smith).
Joy Behar, on Tim Scott's 2023 presidential announcement: What he is doing, in my opinion, id doing the bidding of the white supremacists (The View).
When Tim Scott delivered the Republican response to Biden in 2021, Uncle Tom trended on Twitter for hours. The platform declined to remove it.
When Kanye West wore a MAGA hat in 2018, every major outlet questioned his sanity. When Winsome Sears was elected the first Black woman Lieutenant Governor of Virginia in 2021, network coverage was a fraction of what greeted Stacey Abrams losing her race.
In July 2020 the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture published a chart titled Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness in the United States listing under white culture: rational thinking, the nuclear family, the Protestant work ethic, hard work, self-reliance, objective, rational linear thinking, planning for the future, and being on time (Smithsonian, removed after backlash).
The implicit argument: Black Americans cannot be expected to do these things.
The same year, the Oregon Department of Education promoted a teaching guide claiming that asking math students to show their work is white supremacy culture (Oregon DOE, a Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction).
The argument that voter ID is racist rests on the explicit assumption that Black Americans are uniquely incapable of obtaining a driver's license. 80% of Black Americans support voter ID (Gallup, 2022).
In 2023 the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that Harvard had been illegally discriminating against Asian-American applicants by giving them systematically lower "personal scores" - rating them as less likable, less courageous, and less kind despite higher test scores and grades (SCOTUS, 2023).
This was the policy of the most progressive university in America, defended by every Democratic justice on the court.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio attempted to dismantle the entrance exams for elite specialized high schools — explicitly because too many Asian students were getting in. The same equity logic has gutted gifted-and-talented programs in San Francisco, Boston, and Fairfax County, Virginia.
And then there is Hung Cao.
A Vietnamese refugee. A combat-deployed Naval Academy graduate. A bomb-disposal officer. A surface warfare commander. The man who led the team that recovered John F. Kennedy Jr.'s aircraft from the Atlantic Ocean. The first Vietnamese-American to lead the United States Navy.
The Democratic Party's official institutional account looked at all of that and decided his height was the funny part.
The pattern is consistent across two centuries.
The Democratic Party is comfortable with Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans who agree with it. The instant they do not, the language gets ugly fast.
A Black conservative becomes an Uncle Tom, a house slave, a race traitor, a white supremacist. A Latina Republican is not really Latina. An Asian-American with high test scores is a threat to equity who must be docked points on personal grounds. An Asian-American refugee Navy Captain who runs the entire Navy is a punchline about being short.
This is the same instinct that horsewhipped abolitionist Republicans in the 1850s, lynched Black voters in the 1890s, fire-hosed schoolchildren in the 1960s, called a sitting Black senator a white supremacist in the 2020s, and mocked a 5'8" Vietnamese-American war veteran from the official party account in 2026.
The methods evolved. The instinct never did.
The party that founded the KKK did not change its soul. It changed its vocabulary.
Step out of line and they will show you who they have always been.