By Stephen Smoot
The national Democratic Party, against the wise counsel of Senator John Fetterman and a few others in their ranks, has girded its loins and gone into battle to defend what for them has served as an ancient prerogative, at least as ancient as times get in the American Republic.
Since the years and months leading up to the election of the president to succeed George Washington, the party now known as the Democrats has incorporated the strategic recruitment of immigrants to expand their ranks.
At times, this process took an aboveboard and legal path. Most of the time, however, the Party, or officials supporting it, have provided incentives for newcomers to vote for their side. As President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans continue to dismantle this power structure, the fight has grown desperate.
Their goal lies in breaking Republican resistance to Medicaid health care for illegal aliens. Blue state Democrats created a slightly clever budgeting fig-leaf of a subterfuge (likely figured it would never be analyzed, much less challenged) to subvert the law preventing this.
The second ranked Democrat in the House of Representatives, Katherine Clark stated it clearly, “families are going to suffer . . . but it is one of the few leverage times we have.”
Using sleight-of-hand Medicaid and other carrots to entice immigration, illegal and otherwise, the Biden Administration allowed millions to cross and receive benefits.
Immigration as voter base growth started under the movement first regarded as the “Jeffersonians,” then “Democratic-Republicans,” then “Republicans (not those Republicans, though), and then, finally, during the era of Andrew Jackson and down to today, Democrats.
With George Washington’s presidency coming to a close, the election of 1796 served as a point seen as critical in history at the time. Who would succeed the Pater Patriae? More important, whose ideas would shape the future? Thomas Jefferson had one vision of what America should be. Washington and Alexander Hamilton, another. John Adams, in the same party as Washington (though the first President denied being in any party), seemed to occupy a moderate perch on most issues.
(For the purpose of avoiding confusion, the party eventually known as the Democrats will be referred to as such, even for times prior to it adopting that name.)
Democrats may not have planned for it originally, but certainly noted quickly that the European wars of the 1790s and other issues made the United States an attractive destination. By Washington’s second term, that included French Revolutionary radicals who fell from power and a number who fled death at the hands of former slaves in France’s Caribbean holdings. Others included the so-called “wild” Irish, particularly a large number who lost in a revolt against British rule.
Edmond Genet, sent by the Girondin Revolutionary government in France as Minister to the United States, aroused indignation and fear through his aggressive actions. He arranged for the outfitting of private warships to fight the British and also seemed to threaten to turn Americans against President Washington’s neutrality policy.
Washington demanded, and received the official recall of Genet, but in the meantime a worse sect, the Jacobins, seized power in France. When Washington heard that the Jacobins would certainly execute Genet upon return, he set aside his rage and offered asylum.
Both groups, Irish and French, as historian David McCullough stated “gladly joined ranks with the (Democrats)” because of their anti-British sentiment. This only increased as French actions and diplomatic duplicity pushed the US under President Adams into the Quasi Naval War with France.
By 1798 the Federalist Congress, with worries of both the impact of the conflict with France and the upcoming Federal election, passed the Alien Act. It also passed a Sedition Act that ran counter to both the spirit and the letter of the First Amendment of the Constitution. Adams did not favor the measures, but “I knew there was need enough of both, and therefore I consented to them.” He never invoked either.
Irish immigration continued to stream into the United States, mainly north of the Mason and Dixon Line. They sought to escape the bitter cup of living under British rule and establish themselves in a land of freedom.
Urban machines rose in many cities to capture and channel the energy of these peoples into their political systems. None matched the power and longevity of the original, Tammany Hall.
Raymond Chafin, the 20th century Democratic Party boss of Logan County, whose most significant “work” lay in helping the John F. Kennedy campaign cheat in the 1960 West Virginia primary, explained it simply. In his book “Just Good Politics,” co-authored by a Charleston Gazette figure, Chafin shared that his philosophy of democracy was helping the people who voted for you.
That excluded anyone who voted Republican or Democratic voters who did not support “the slate.”
Tammany Hall in New York City grew in the decades prior to the Civil War. Irish immigrants grafted models of organization and authority, some from themselves, some from British occupiers, into party organization and election campaigning.
One of its most powerful underbosses, State Senator George Washington Plunkett, provided the other side of the democracy coin described by Chafin. He wrote “Men ain’t in politics for nothin’. They want to get somethin’ out of it.”
And Tammany Hall understood that when the poor, disheveled, and bewildered immigrants found their way to New York City from Ireland, a few simple quid pro quos would make them Democratic voters for life.
Tammany Hall would help immigrants find a home, find a job, and take care of some other essentials. In return, the man of the house would understand that his, and his sons,’ support went to Tammany Democrats and no one else.
In his own publication, “Plunkett of Tammany Hall,” assembled from his own newspaper columns, Plunkett coldly shared that “Now I want to tell you why political traitors, in New York City especially, are punished quick. It’s because the Irish are in a majority. The Irish, above all people in the world, hates a traitor. You can’t hold them back when a traitor of any kind is in sight and, rememberin’ old Ireland, they take particular delight in doin’ up a political traitor.”
He also added mention of the lifeblood of the system, jobs for the loyal, explaining “The question has been asked: Is a politician ever justified in going’ back on his district leader? I answer: ‘No; as long as the leader hustles around and gets all the jobs possible for his constituents.’ When the voters elect a man leader, they make a sort of a contract with him. They say, although it ain’t written out: ‘We’ve put you here to look out for our Interests. You want to see that this district gets all the jobs that’s comm’ to it. Be faithful to us, and we’ll be faithful to you.’”
Irish immigrants and their children quickly populated the police and fire services of cities that depended on their political support and offered their favor in exchange.
Republicans followed the model somewhat. German immigrants helped to build a Republican machine in Wheeling that scandalized the Old Dominion by marching eagerly in support of Abraham Lincoln. Matthew Quay, Pennsylvania GOP boss, did not use immigration, but the levers of political power to keep hold of Philadelphia, as Lincoln Steffens illustrates in “The Shame of Our Cities.” The Taft machine held Ohio for decades, but, again, used other means of influence than immigrant votes.
Many political machines used majority rule democracy to establish as much authoritarian control as they could get away with. Mayors like James Curley of Boston and Richard Daley of Chicago ruled as dictatorial as they dared. An intricate system of favors, punishments, incentives, and payouts ossified into the foundation of government.
Legendary Chicago journalist Mike Royko once stated that if one could magically remove all the corruption in the Second City all at once, the municipal government would collapse. Steffens had earlier questioned if residents of corrupt cities even wanted to end the crimes of their leaders.
As the Obama Administration fades into history, one thing emerges clearly. Barack Obama labored to nationalize the urban political machine model. Federal grants increasingly funded non profit organizations, some recently formed and without staff, with hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Too much of that found its way back into Democratic campaigns. That included massive grants bound for remote foreign nations, but, again, did not always benefit intended recipients.
The Clinton Foundation alone served as a massive slush fund where the global elite could purchase influence. It is also possible that some members of the Biden family have engaged in, at the very least, unethical practices that benefited them.
Especially under President Biden, the dynamic ratcheted up another level. Communications about expanding incentives went into Latin America and drew lengthy trains of migrants toward the southern border. Some came to find a better life. Others came to establish lucrative organized crime organizations to sneak over the border everything from humans to drugs to oil. No one until 2025 at the federal level seemed interested in separating those whose only crime was crossing from those bringing murder, drugs, and forced prostitution into US cities.
Even worse, the illegal immigration of thousands of Somalians through a massive organized system of marriage fraud scandal that may involve a sitting US Member of Congress has established a Somalian version of Tammany Hall in Minneapolis. Somalians with little experience with, or understanding of, the United States, now exercise significant political authority in one of America’s major cities.
And almost all of them came into the US illegally.
Democrats in Congress, with a few exceptions, have set themselves on continuing the shutdown in a last ditch effort to save what has formed as a cornerstone of their expected political fortunes.
Another worrisome issue is that with and after Obama, machine style politics adopted a Leftist tinge. Political machines before him worried mainly about keeping the vote safe for them, which usually meant catering as much as possible to at least some needs. It also meant keeping basic services running well and maintaining law and order. It worked precisely as Chafin described.
Now the embrace of Leftist ideology means that the very things political machines used to provide now have fallen by the wayside. Police became the enemy, criminals have run amok, and cities that sustained themselves or even thrived 30 years ago now find themselves on the verge of collapse, the people unsafe in any neighborhood not gated shut. Basic services and infrastructure decline because activists who now get the plum jobs are usually very bad at actually getting real work accomplished.
Catering to immigrant Islamic radicals has quickly transformed cities once among the safest in the world for Jewish people into places where Jews get regularly accosted and threatened on the streets and on college campuses.
The Democratic Party needs to go back to the future. Seek the counsel of leaders like Joe Manchin, whom Fetterman wisely seems to see as a model, or Kristen Sinema. Before they gave up on the Democrats, they had a vision based on the patriotic and practical liberalism of Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan that did not lack for solid ideas and policies. For example, though the Republican majority has maintained it well, Governor Manchin used a budget surplus to pay down pension debt and put the Mountain State in a better position there than almost any other.
Cobbling a coalition of Leftists, radical immigrants, and mercenary former neo-conservatives and welding it with a narrative of hate Trump does not help them and it does not help America, especially when their national Party has set a course directly toward the waterfall.