2024 Democrat Party doesn't represent longtime supporters, values     

Today's Democrat Party is dramatically different from recent decades' incarnations on major issues that once were dear to classical liberals. 

It doesn't matter whether longtime Democrat lever-pullers continue to support that party out of nostalgia, uncritical emotion, delusion, or misplaced loyalty. 2024's progressive Democrat Party simply doesn't share veteran backers' values or ideals. 

During his 1963 radio and television address on civil rights, President John F. Kennedy was blunt. "[R]ace has no place in American life or law...This is one country."

Contemporary Democrats abhor such notions. In their 2020 national platform they pledged to appoint "U.S. Supreme Court justices and federal judges who look like America..." 

As candidate for president, Joe Biden promised to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court. He did, and Democrats cheered his discrimination.

The same year as Kennedy's appearance, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and gave his famous I Have a Dream address. His phrasing of noble principle is widely known: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

But in 2017, progressive students at the University of Oregon proposed sand-blasting that King quote off a campus building. They complained that the historic civil rights leader had not been sufficiently "inclusive."

An activist hailed by today's progressive Democrats is Ibram X. Kendi. He encapsulated current Democrat Party philosophy in his 2019 book How To Be An Antiracist: "The only remedy to past racism is present racism. The only remedy to present racism is future racism."

That terrible philosophy is diametrically opposed to King's own. But it is Kendi's bigotry, and not King's advocacy of brotherhood, that today's Democrat Party champions.

The 2024 Democrat Party emphasizes differences far more than commonality. It divides citizens from one another, maintaining separate voter classes, congressional caucuses, and initiatives. 

The 2020 platform also endorsed "equity." That should not be confused with 'equality,' a very different and legitimate proposition, Achieving numerical sameness would necessitate racial discrimination against which liberals once remonstrated.

Do longtime Democrat voters support those sharp diversions from their past beliefs?

In their 1976 platform, Democrats promised they would push for implementation of Title IX and eliminate "discrimination against women in all federal programs."

But during her 2023 senate confirmation hearing, Biden Supreme Court nominee (now sitting justice) Ketanji Brown-Jackson could not even define "woman." Her claimed inability surely stemmed from progressive ideology and is widely shared by Democrats obsessed with placating the transgender lobby.

Title IX protected girls' rights to participate in federally funded scholastic sports. But in this era of Democrat Party progressivism, Title IX has been warped to grant inherently dissimilar biological males access to female competitions. 

As a result, girl athletes who trained all their lives suffer injuries and lose events, scholarships, Olympic opportunities, and ensuant commercial benefits.

1970s feminists were correct in condemning "sexual objectification" - the notion that women could be reduced to mere genitalia. But that erroneous and demeaning concept is exactly the one supporting transgenderism. Democrats in 2024 argue that surgical refashioning of one's exterior is all that's needed to establish womanhood.

Do longtime Democrat voters support those sharp diversions from their past beliefs?

Lastly, Democrats were once the party of free speech. The racial justice and womens-rights movements benefited enormously from First Amendment guarantee to untrammeled expression. 

Classical liberals of previous days championed controversial books, magazines, films, and speakers. With Warren Burger as chief justice, the supreme court issued rulings affirming citizens' related rights. 

Social satirist Lenny Bruce and authors Edgar Rice Burroughs, Maurice Sendak, and even Anne Frank suffered 1960s censorial attempts. Theirs and many other voices were rightly defended by liberals of that era.

In 1973, ACLU free speech absolutists even protected morally repugnant Nazis' First Amendment right to march in Skokie, Illinois. 

(Of course, that action was intended to be provocative and attention-getting, as Skokie was home to many Holocaust survivors. ACLU attorneys understood that, but correctly believed an important principle was at stake.) 

Now, Democrats oppose free speech, particularly for contrary political perspectives - including mainstream ones. From municipalities to state legislatures to the national level, unpopular statements are repressed under "hate speech" statutes and regulations. Even thoughts are criminalized as "hate crimes."

College campuses were once hotbeds of related activism. Berkley's 1960s Free Speech Movement defended critics of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Across the nation, students printed alternative newspapers and posted flyers advertising actions and causes.

Those same campuses now teem with naive soon-to-be Democrat progressives who shout down speakers (violently attacking woman athlete Riley Gaines), agitate for oppressive speech codes, pressure administrations to 'deplatform' conservative student groups, obstruct counter-protesters exercising their Constitutional rights, and attempt to block cameras from documenting their bullyboy tactics. 

Only last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled against the Biden Administration in Missouri v. Biden, having found that government agencies pressured social media companies to monitor and suppress citizen speech. 

As this essay was being prepared proof emerged of another Democrat attempt to squelch citizen speech, as well as our liberty to read what we please: Government officials eemailed and met with Amazon representatives in hopes of banning books on that online-order site. 

Racial unity, women's rights, free speech - on these and other crucial issues, such as American pride, support for Jews, and the staunch anti-communism advocated by Kennedy and partisan fellows, the 2024 Democrat Party bears no likeness to its previous self. Why voters who then endorsed it continue to do so defies sensible explanation.

DC Larson is an Iowa author and blogger. He counts Daily Caller, American Thinker, and Western Journal among freelance credits.