OPINION:
If John F. Kennedy were alive today, it is extremely unlikely that he would vote for the Democratic Party he once represented as president.
In the closing lines of their summary of JFK’s presidency, historians Morison, Commager and Leuchtenburg write, in “The Growth of the American Republic”: “No legacy of John F. Kennedy is more important than his championing of reason against anarchy of Right and Left and his understanding that liberty is possible only in an ordered society.”
Although 60 years separate Kennedy’s presidency from Joe Biden’s, both men took the same oath of office. Both pledged to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution. The first obligation of that oath is to the sovereignty of the U.S. Kennedy rightly saw communist imperialism as a threat to the U.S. and he did not compromise its security. Yet the modern Democratic Party’s policy of open borders and the immersion of U.S. sovereignty into a North American hemisphere is an outright violation of the oath of office.
Whereas Kennedy endorsed traditions and heritage, President Biden is promoting the Marxist-inspired critical race theory, which seeks to subvert heritage and traditions and replace them with a culturally barren, godless dystopia.
The Democratic Party has abandoned Kennedy’s precepts of an ordered society and embraced instead the division and extremism of ’cancel culture’ while defunding the police and condoning the anarchy of Black Lives Matter and antifa insurgents.
Whereas there was never any question about threats to the First and Second amendments under Kennedy, the Democratic Party today actively supports the censoring of free speech by Big Tech and is progressively eroding the rights of Americans to bear arms.
The constitutional separation of powers was a respected reality in American politics until 2021 when, for purely ideological reasons, the Democratic Party passed legislation to increase the number of Supreme Court justices by four so as to have a leftist majority. At the same time, they want to give state status to the District of Columbia so as to increase Democratic control of the Senate.
Kennedy’s Democratic Party represented the blue-collar workers and the trade unions. Mr. Biden’s Democratic Party has callously thrown 14,000 workers on the Keystone Pipeline out of work, along with hundreds of others who were building the wall along the southern border. Mr. Biden has also cancelled gas-and-oil contracts and instructed banks not to provide financial services to the coal industry. All of ths has jeopardized tens of thousands of jobs.
At the recent G-7 summit, Mr. Biden endorsed a “global minimum tax agreement” of 21%, which is a blatant surrender of U.S. sovereignty to global control and a direct violation of his oath of office.
If JFK were alive today, he would find that the Republican Party better reflected his core principles and outlook.
DUNCAN DU BOIS
Durban, South Africa
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