In 1801, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.” That sentiment was thematic in all of his writing about the role of government and political parties. So what happened to the Party of Jefferson, the once-great Democrat Party, which has now devolved into a propaganda machine fueled on division?

Jefferson, who authored our Declaration of Independence, became an ardent Anti-Federalist because he was convinced that those elected to lead our nation would forgo their higher calling to “support and defend the Constitution,” and become pawns for special interests, using those constituencies to perpetuate their office and further centralize national government power. He was correct.

Nowhere was he more concerned about this degradation of public integrity than in regard to the judiciary. Jefferson feared it would become the “despotic branch”, undermining and altering the proposed Constitution by judicial diktat rather than its prescribed method. In effect this would subordinate the Rule of Law to the rule of men.

James Madison, who believed the federalism principles outlined in our Constitution, which he authored, would endure: “Ambitious encroachments of the federal government, on the authority of the State governments … would be signals of general alarm… But what degree of madness could ever drive the federal government to such an extremity.” (Federalist No. 46)

By 1792, however, Madison himself had joined his fellow Virginian, Jefferson, in opposition to the Federalist Party, and they formed the Democratic Republican Party. In 1796, Jefferson was defeated in his bid for the presidency by John Adams, but won the presidency in 1800 running on a platform in opposition to new taxes levied by Adams.

Jefferson’s intellect and his insights into the nature of man were astounding, so much so that 170 years later another famous Democrat, John F. Kennedy, welcomed the 49 Nobel Prize recipients to the White House saying, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Jefferson’s concerns about the degraded integrity of public men were never more clear than in the 2008 presidential cycle. At no point in history has the differential in “Presidential Character” between the two leading candidates been more evident.

But 2008 and 2012 elections were much more than a referendum on the candidates; it was a referendum on the ability of a majority of Americans voters to discern between candidates who possesses the presidential character and integrity of a statesman, and Barack Hussein Obama, who does not.

The fact is, Obama could not even qualify for a basic security clearance if he was applying for a government job because of his close association with Marxist political mentors. These “useful idiots,” apologists for socialist political and economic agendas, used their radical celebrity to launch Barack Obama’s political career and are his mentors to this day.

Tragically, the American people have twice been lulled by Obama’s mantra of “hope and change,” though in fewer numbers in 2012. Consequentially, Obama’s “NeoComs” cadres have reinvented the Democrat Party into the New Democrat Party, with enormous implications for the future of Liberty and Rule of Law.

On that subject, Founder Patrick Henry said, “It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth - and listen to the song of that syren… For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it might cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.”

Of course, no issue was more pressing in the ‘12 election cycle than the one that concerned Jefferson most – that of the “Despotic Branch.” Obama’s re-election ensures that the Supreme Court will comport with leftist ideology, rather than abide by their oath to support and defend our Constitution.

Of course, the questions all Patriots must now ask is, if we are not a nation governed by a firm Constitution of laws, but a “Living Constitution,” which, as Jefferson noted, would be a “mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary which they may twist and shape into any form they please,” then by what authority does our national government act? By what authority does Obama and his Democrat Congress and Senate enact extraconstitutional legislation, and collect taxes to pay for such folly?

Conservatives and liberals can argue various policy points ad nauseam, but the real question is this: Are we a nation of laws or a nation of men? The terminus of nations that are governed by men rather than laws has, for the entirety of recorded history, been tyranny. In the last century alone, the plight of hundreds of millions under dictators such as Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam and, who would be next…

Jefferson understood this, as once did his Democrat Party.

The Patriot’s mission is to advocate for individual liberty and responsibility, the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and the promotion of free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values.

These principles used to be the centerpiece of the Democrat Party; they are now its antithesis.

Contemporary Democrats have turned the wisdom of their iconic sovereigns inside out.

Then: “My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.” –John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1961

Now: “Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you.”

Then: “I have a dream that my 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.” –Martin L. King, Address from the Lincoln Memorial, 1963

Now: “I have a dream that my children will one day be judged by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.”

This contortion is the result of what is now the Democrats’ political objective of fomenting division among Americans, dividing them up into protectorates according to race, creed, sex, sexual preference, religion, ethnicity, wealth, ad infinitum, and indoctrinating these separate constituencies with the pretense that they must depend on Democratic Socialism for their protection, if not outright salvation.

Racial and ethnic constituencies are key to the Democrats’ “divide and conquer” strategy, but will, in the words of historian and noted liberal Arthur Schlesinger, ultimately “disunite America.” Schlesinger’s liberal colleagues ostracized him when he first published his 1992 book, “The Disuniting of America,” and accused him of betraying his impeccable liberal credentials as a former senior advisor to JFK. But the premise of his book was, and remains, absolutely correct: The cult of ethnicity manifesting as subgroup ethnocentric identities completely undermines the patriotic devotion that has bonded previous generations of Americans.

But Democrats today desire to supplant patriotic devotion to America with a collective allegiance to their statist regime.

Their efforts to create division along religious lines is just as vigorous. Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner, proclaimed that the Republican Party “is made up of the Christian Coalition … It is made up of the right-to-lifers … It’s made up of the NRA … It is made up of the home schoolers … It’s made up of a whole coalition of people that have all sorts of differing views that I think most of us in this room would find threatening to what it means to be an American.”

A few decades ago, that list of folks would have been welcome in the Democrat Party, not “threatening to what it means to be an American.”

But today, that Party is fundamentally flawed in its platform, and it co-opts voter constituencies who, though they may be good people in general, are fundamentally disabled in their understanding of our nation’s founding principles and their civic roles and responsibilities.

The real question is not so much what has happened to the Party of Jefferson, but what has happened to “the people” who now call themselves Democrats?

Obama is not the problem, just its manifestation. The problem is that we are a nation with a collapsing foundation of broken families, where the faith of our founders has been replaced with the real “opiate of the masses,” the mass media, and where ignorance has been institutionalized through our “public education apparatchiks.” Perhaps we are a nation where a majority of the electorate now identifies more with the dysfunctional pathology of Obama than with the individual character and institutional principles that are the foundation of our Constitutional Republic.

We lost the ‘08 and '12 political battles, but we have, by no means, have we lost the war for American liberty. There are 60 million armed Patriots standing ready for the call to restore our Republic’s Constitution to its rightful authority.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, for posterity, “Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them.”

Today, tragically, his once-noble Democrat Party has embraced bondage and servitude.