After the recent Democrat National Convention, I am once again left wondering why anyone would be a Democrat.

I used to think the two political parties were like opposing teams, like the Bears and the Packers – each party had different views on how to govern, but primarily they were just two rival teams looking to score the most points for themselves.

That much hasn’t changed. But a new element has been added, the “true believers,” the people who are fanatic in their ideology. Fanaticism for their beliefs almost is more important than party politics, or patronage or graft.

That is enough to make Republicans like Richard Nixon and Len Small, and Democrats like Richard J. Daley and Lyndon Johnson, roll over in their graves.

Since I am on the conservative side, I can understand how conservatives think. It is how anyone can be a liberal Democrat that has me puzzled.

After watching some of the convention coverage (as much as I could stomach), I have come to a conclusion. There are only two reasons why anyone would be a liberal Democrat – they are either brainwashed fools, or they really want a socialist state where the government takes care of them, and where they don’t have to think for themselves.

There are plenty of people who are liberal Democrats due to brainwashing. Just look at the delegates who cheered the lies after lies told by Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and the others at the convention in Charlotte. And there are plenty more who will believe what they are told and who are not interested in hearing another side. These people are voluntarily brainwashed, but they are not smart enough to know it.

However, there is a third option why someone would be a Democrat, other than brainwashing or socialist ideology. It is greed, the very thing of which the Democrats accuse the Republicans.

Their greed is in the form of wanting everything they can get their hands on, and expecting someone else to provide if for them. For some, it is getting welfare checks, free food stamps, getting free health care, free condoms, free cell phones, free everything. It has been the purpose of the Democrat party, since Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, to create a dependent class of people who will vote for Democrats, so these people can keep getting (from the Democrat politicians) what they have become addicted to. And it has been working. The number of people on food stamps has quadrupled just under Obama’s watch. That was his goal.

For others, the greed is seen in certain groups selling their souls to the Democrat party. The Democrats have made an unholy pact with labor unions (particularly here in Illinois, which is why the state is almost solidly Democrat, and solidly bankrupt), trading bribes for votes – Democrat politicians granting unions exorbitant wages and obscene pensions in exchange for votes and financial support (which is squeezed from union members, not from union leaders).

The weapons the Democrats use to bring people into their big tent are envy, jealousy, hatred, and class warfare, where you are told to hate anyone else who has more than you have.

Democrats claim the tax system is unfair. They are right. Forty-seven per cent of Americans pay no income taxes. Five per cent of Americans (the rich) pay 70 per cent of the taxes in this country. That certainly is unfair.

Democrats say tax unfairness should be addressed by having the rich pay more (How much more? No matter, it is never enough). They accuse rich Republicans of not paying their share of taxes, of having offshore bank accounts, and other means of avoiding taxes. No matter that as many or more rich Democrats do the same thing. That is what makes Democrats hypocrites.

(Hypocrisy is the hallmark of being a Democrat. When Obama leaves office, he will, like Bill Clinton, go on the lecture circuit making speeches for upwards of a million dollar a pop, preaching about how much he hates rich people.)

The poor and the middle class do not pay more in taxes than the rich. A rich person pays more in taxes than a middle class worker earns.

The rich did not get rich at the expense of the poor. Wealth is not siphoned from one segment of society to another, wealth is created by new ideas and new businesses; this is new wealth, additional wealth.

Democrats think that if someone does not have enough, it is because someone else has too much. Democrats would have you believe wealth is finite, and in order to be fair it must be redistributed – that is, taken from those who earned it and given to those who did not. This is an extremely perverted definition of “fairness,” but it is what they believe.

I am not a rich person who defends rich people. I am far from that. I am a person who believes in fairness, and who thinks conservative individual freedom is preferable to exchanging freedom for security. I think free enterprise is preferable to an oppressive socialist society. I believe hard work and success should be rewarded instead of punished, and that laziness and failure should not be rewarded. I believe people should take responsibility for their own actions and for their own fate, not blame everyone else and go crying to Big Brother for relief.

Democrats have shied away from the word “liberal” and prefer “progressive” – which even in its heyday about a hundred years ago was not a progressive philosophy.

The real label for the Democrats should be “socialist.” A more accurate word would be “fascist.” Most people conjure up images of Mussolini and Hitler and death camps when they hear the word “fascist.” But in the true definition of the word, fascism is a system of strong centralized government control of society and business. It has been done by every dictator in the last hundred years from Mussolini to Castro to Hugo Chavez. Democrat party icons Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt strongly advocated it, and went a long way toward accomplishing it. Barack Obama did it with his bailout/takeover of the auto industry, and he said he wants to do it to the entire America economy.

There are plenty of Americans – brainwashed or whomever – who want socialism and fascism, even as they recoil from the words.

The late Tom Roeser said, early in Obama’s administration, that he thought Obama was our worst president ever. Jimmy Carter may have been more incompetent (barely), but at least Carter loved America. Obama bows before foreign kings and sheiks, he betrays our ally Israel, and he does not believe in American exceptionalism. He has said he wants America to be just another nation at the table of nations, that we are no better than anyone else.

Excuse me, Obama, but America IS better than other nations. We have led the world in every way imaginable. We have saved the world from dictatorships in many wars, with the blood of many Americans shed with nothing asked in return. Our ideas and inventions and manufacturing have made the world better for everybody. Our system of capitalism has made the world better everywhere it has been exported; compare the poverty of communist countries and Muslim countries to the prosperity of free western countries.

Obama admires European socialism and wants America to emulate it. The smartest people in Europe immigrated to America. They left the dumbest people behind (witness Europe the past two centuries). Europe has always flirted with socialism, fascism and repressive governments. That is why Europe was a place from which the smartest people couldn’t wait to leave. So why would their descendants in America want to be like that again?

Brainwashing, socialist ideology or greed – of the three, only greed is understandable, because greed is a very basic part of human nature, whether liberals admit it also is a part of themselves, or not.

As for brainwashing, I pity the fools. They are not smart enough to know the meaning of the words socialism or fascism, and are not smart enough to know that this is what they are advocating.

As for the dedicated socialist ideologues, we need to recognize they are an enemy of America, and they should not advance any farther than the ranks of community organizers.

As for the greedy, at least the rich people earned their own money; they didn’t get it by stealing it from the taxpayers. Democrats feel some greed is good, other greed is bad. Democrats attack the greedy rich people. Like the soviet politburo and elite communist leaders, it’s all right if they are rich. It’s not greed when THEY do it.

Politics seemed to work better when it was only about greed and graft. The infusion of fanatic ideology has made it worse, believe it or not.

And you didn’t think politics could get any worse.

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Jim Ridings is author of a number of book of Illinois history, including “Len Small: Governors & Gangsters,” and “Wild Kankakee.”