The Democratic Party has fully embraced the far-left’s ideological framework of America.
Democrats released their 2024 party platform this week during the Democratic National Convention. It was a sloppy mess in many places with frequent references to President Joe Biden’s “second term”—21 references by my count.
Though as I’ve written previously, we are probably headed for more of the same with Vice President Harris in the White House anyway. The presidency is becoming the ceremonial head of a vast, unaccountable bureaucratic leviathan, after all.
The sloppiness of the Democrat platform and the DNC as a whole is certainly noteworthy. But much more important is the ideological drift of the party.
In case you didn’t know what the Democratic Party most fervently stands for, the very first thing in its platform was a “land acknowledgment.”
A land acknowledgment is a performative ceremony used by institutions under the full sway of the church of wokeness. It essentially lists the various Indian tribes that assumedly passed through the land the group is standing on at the time.
It has become the Left’s substitution for the Pledge of Allegiance. The concept is, frankly, absurd. It’s as pointless as walking into your newly purchased home and listing off the names of all the previous owners, renters, visitors, and squatters.
The land acknowledgment assumption is that the tribes are gone because of the mean, rapacious United States. Though the actual history is typically far more complicated.
For instance, the Black Hills in South Dakota have been occupied by countless tribes, and not just the Lakota. The Lakota “stole” the land from the Cheyanne just a few decades before the United States acquired the region. And there are countless other tribes that could claim time in the Black Hills, too.
The Left wants to reduce this all to a morality play about the assumed moral superiority of the tribes and the greediness of the United States.
What land acknowledgments represent is less a simple recitation of history and more a statement of faith that you believe the United States, the original Constitution, and all this country was built on are illegitimate. It’s a corollary to the Left’s war on history.
The Left wants you to believe that America was built on oppression. It was built on slavery and dispossessing land. In their minds, the ill-gotten fruits of these injustices will be rectified when the country first renounces its past, and second, when resources are allocated to victims.
If your typical virtue-signaling Democrat wants to give his/her/zer land to this tribe or that tribe, that’s just fine. Of course, in none of these cases is anything accomplished. But that’s not what this is about. What they want is to demonstrate America’s collective sins to be resolved in a collective fashion.
So, they won’t personally give up anything. Instead, Americans must now collectively pay up to aggrieved groups.
To escape this form of retributive social justice, you must fall into several camps. Either you must be a member of one of the oppressed groups—a highly expansive set of categories these days—or you must be a faithful, relentless ally for the cause.
In this sense, land acknowledgments are at the philosophical foundation of a specific brand of identity-based socialism.
If you are among the elect and the aggrieved, then anything you do to level historic injustices is seen as a positive good. For those on the wrong side of history, the Left recognizes no right they are bound to respect. They’ve long ago waved away the idea of natural, God-given rights as evil “Christian nationalism.”
You are simply guilty and will forever be guilty until the outcomes of all the various identity groups are equalized.
That’s why the Left paradoxically believes on one hand that one racial group inherits land by blood and by soil—in the case of land acknowledgments—and on the other hand, insists on millions of people being granted the right to illegally cross into the United States and gain all the benefits of citizens and more.
Both of these ideas are a form of retribution against the United States, which they see as the driving force of all the evils of Western civilization—unless, of course, Western civilization can be fundamentally transformed.
In many ways, that’s at the heart of our culture war and what has divided the country since the cultural revolution in 1968. We are at a more advanced, and in some sense, terminal and nihilistic, form of liberalism that metastasized in 2020.
The Democratic Party’s platform begins with land acknowledgments, and what flows from that is the rest of the party’s agenda, which is about increasing the power of the federal government and giving the total state the tools to engineer society based on their ideas of equity.
The Left’s seemingly meaningless virtue-signaling is in fact a prelude to a merciless authoritarian state that would overturn the American way of life in the pursuit of social justice.
