These past couple of weeks have been some of the saddest I’ve seen in my lifetime as an African-American. It began with the tragic, needless, death of George Floyd, but then quickly escalated into some of the most vicious, violent rioting our country has seen in decades.

The Democratic Party, true to form, never lets a crisis go to waste. It has seized on what should be a time of healing and instead made the conversation more divisive by lecturing us all about how systemic racism is supposedly rampant in the United States. The great irony here is that yes, there’s plenty of systemic racism in our country; it’s all wrapped up in the history of the Democratic Party.

The rot goes deep, back to the post-Civil War era. Former slaves and their children were forced for decades to endure the cruel, wretched Jim Crow laws that kept them from advancing in the South. And who was all too happy to keep those laws in place? The Democrats.

The Republican Party had planks in its party platforms addressing the rights of African-Americans in the early 20th century. The Democrats, meanwhile, used the KKK as their stormtroopers, lynching and terrorizing blacks in the South beginning just after the Civil War and continued this practice for a century.

As early as 1888, the Republican platform included a plank affirming the “sovereign right of every lawful citizen, rich or poor, native or foreign born, white or black, to cast one free ballot in public elections, and to have that ballot duly counted.”

In 1892, the Republican platform specifically condemned the “inhuman outrages perpetrated upon American citizens for political reasons in certain Southern States of the Union.” The Democrats, those paragons of virtue, refused to include anti-lynching planks or planks addressing racial rights in their platform for all of the early 20th century.

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The crisis of the coronavirus-induced economic lockdown and now the violent protests in the streets have unleashed a depression-level financial crisis and unprecedented human suffering — especially in our inner cities. These events have also exposed a Grand Canyon-sized chasm that now separates how the Left and the Right see America today. To wit:

1) The Right believes that stay-at-home orders and social distancing requirements are counterproductive and should be repealed safely and immediately. The Left believes that those orders must stay in place but should apply to those on the Right, not to liberal protesters.

2) The Right engages in nonviolence. The Left shows tacit support for mob violence.

3) The Right believes that the best way to revive the economy is to incentivize a dormant workforce to get back on the job. The Left believes that the best way to revive the economy is to pay people more money not to work than to work.

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