It’s not easy being a Democrat. It began a century and a half ago when they got caught on the wrong side of history.

Democrats supported the enslavement of human beings. Many of them actually owned enslaved human beings. They fought the bloodiest war in U.S. history to retain their right to enslave human beings.

Suffice to say that this right to enslave human beings was not one of the God-given ones mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration does not speak solemnly of the right to “life, liberty, happiness and enslaving humans.”

History sided with the Declaration and against the Democrats, for a while.  

But, alas, history these days is written not by the winners but by the Democrats – specifically the Democrats who rule the Humanities Departments at major U.S. universities. These Democrat humanist historians saw that slavery was bad for the Democrat brand. So, they buried it.

As a result, most people today – especially young people – think it was the Republicans who were the Southern slave owners and they think (I’m not making this up) that Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat.

Blame this on the Democrats in higher education, but blame it also on the Democrats in lower education. Teachers tend to be Democrats. When it comes to teaching the role of Democrats in slavery and the Civil War, they don’t.

Their past safely buried, the Democrats succeeded in rebranding themselves as civil libertarians who wanted equal civil rights for everyone. In short, they rebranded themselves as Republicans.

But they kept the name “Democrat,” mostly.

But not entirely. Many Democrats decided to candidly call themselves “socialists.” I give them credit for being honest enough to call themselves what they were, but I give them discredit for being what they were. Socialism is a proven failure.

As time went on, people came to recognize the failure of socialism. It sounded great in those university humanities departments, but invariably failed every time it was tried in the real world – from the Soviet Union to China to Eastern Europe to Latin America to Cuba to everywhere else. It succeeded in exactly zero places.

And so, the growing socialist wing of the Democratic party re-branded itself. They became “liberals.”

It was a shameless theft of the word “liberal,” which had always meant small-government and individual rights. In fact, in Great Britain, the word liberal still retains its old meaning. If you want to start a fight, introduce a GB liberal to an American one. (Don’t worry, they won’t break anything.)

That worked for a while for the Democrats. But the people eventually caught on. They came to recognize that “liberal” did not mean liberal in the classic sense. It instead meant something roughly the opposite – it meant socialism. And so “liberal” became a bad brand.

The Democrats wondered, what do we do now? Starting another civil war seemed imprudent, given that they didn’t have many guns.

They decided to simply re-brand again. It worked before, sort of, so it would work again. They started calling themselves “woke.” As if non-Democrats are all busy sleeping.

You know what happened to “woke.” It became a four-letter word. The reason is that people began to associate woke with – you know what’s coming – socialism (and worse).  

And then came “progressive.” As if anyone not a Democrat is regressive. This progressive moniker ironically harkens back over a century to the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson who was an avowed white supremacist until a stroke involuntarily relieved him of his power in favor of his wife who was an avowed white supremacist and eugenicist.

As for the success of the current “progressive” brand . . . meh.

The problem is that Democrats are simply too burdened by the brand “Democrat.” They can call themselves whatever, but people still know that Democrats are the people who wanted to replace merit with skin color, who wanted boys in the girls’ locker rooms, who have been predicting the incineration of the world for two generations, and who wanted – and did – abolish the nation’s borders.  

And so, in the most brazen re-branding yet, the Democrats have taken to calling themselves non-Democrats. Specifically, they are starting to call themselves “Independents.”

Yep, in a number of upcoming races, lifelong hard-left Democrats are calling themselves “Independents” in an apparent bid to distance themselves from any accountability for their Party’s craziness – a craziness that they endorsed up until, oh, about yesterday.

It reminds me of one particular craziness by the Democrats. For years, they maintained that a man could change into a woman by announcing that he had simply changed his mind about his man/woman thing.

I submit that Democrats are likely to be about as successful in “changing” into Independents as men are successful in “changing” into women. But we’ll see.