ARE YOU AN AMERICAN OR A DEMOCRAT

These two terms are antonyms. You can no longer be an American and a Democrat. America was founded on the principles of individualism or where the rights and liberties of the individual are sacred. Individualism is a strong adherent to the principles of self-responsibility and self-dependency. The Democrats have become collectivists or the belief that the individual is only a part of the collective and must subjugate all individual wants and desires for the good of the collective. Collectivism denounces self-responsibility and declares that all must be responsible to and dependent upon the collective for the good of all. Collectivism is the core belief behind Marxism, communism, socialism, and the core of the progressive doctrine. Democrats have become dedicated collectivists.
I am a believer that we can learn from the observations of wise people who have come before us. If history teaches us anything it is that although methods and speeds of communication and transportation change, the basic nature of man does not. Individualists existed from the beginning; however, the United States was the first nation to be founded on the explicit principles of individualism.
I would strongly recommend that if you do not know who Alexis de Tocqueville was, you do some research. It will give you a better perspective of his observations. Here he is defining what it is to be an American.
Tocqueville was the man who discovered American individualism—he described it somewhat negatively as “a mature and calm feeling which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellow-creatures, and to draw apart with his family and friends.” Yet he talked approvingly about self-help, a hallmark of American individualism. For example: “The citizen of the United States is taught from infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon the social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he claims its assistance only when he is unable to do without it.”
Tocqueville explained what people everywhere came to recognize as the American dream: “There is no man who cannot reasonably expect to attain the amenities of life, for each knows that, given love of work, his future is certain. . .. No one is fully contented with his present fortune, all are perpetually striving, in a thousand ways, to improve it. Consider one of them at any period of his life and he will be found engaged with some new project for the purpose of increasing what he has.”
Tocqueville commended the peaceful influence of free enterprise. “I know of nothing more opposite to revolutionary attitudes than commercial ones. Commerce is naturally adverse to all the violent passions; it loves to temporize, takes delight in compromise, and studiously avoids irritation. It is patient, insinuating, flexible, and never has recourse to extreme measures until obliged by the most absolute necessity. Commerce renders men independent of one another, gives them a lofty notion of their personal importance, leads them to seek to conduct their own affairs, and teaches how to conduct them well; it therefore prepares men for freedom, but preserves them from revolutions.”
Tocqueville observed how liberty and the need for social cooperation give people incentives to be virtuous. “I have often seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare; and I have noticed a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to one another. The free institutions which the inhabitants of the United States possess, and the political rights of which they make so much use, remind every citizen, and in a thousand ways, that he lives in society. They every instant impress upon his mind the notion that it is the duty as well as the interest of men to make themselves useful to their fellow creatures; and as he sees no particular ground of animosity to them, since he is never either their master or their slave, his heart readily leans to the side of kindness.”
Tocqueville defines Democrat.
With phenomenal foresight, Tocqueville predicted that the welfare state would become a curse. For example: “Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood; it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees, and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances; what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?”
“Our contemporaries,” he continued, “combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians.”
Do be an American is to be an individualist. To be a Democrat is to be a collectivist. You can not be both. Each person must choose and our nation must choose.