GOP chair: Cancel culture should apply to Democrats

On a day when a monument to Christopher Columbus came down in Hartford at the direction of a Democratic mayor, Connecticut’s state Republican chair called on the Democratic Party to change its name in recognition of its own human rights failings.

The GOP’s state central committee intends to adopt a resolution condemning the history of the Democratic Party, which sprang to life in the slave-holding South and amassed a long record protecting segregation before embracing labor and civil rights — and ceding white southern voters to Republicans.

“We demand that the party change its name,” said J.R. Romano, the state GOP chair. “For me, I believe it is vital that every citizen know the truth about the so-called party of inclusion and acceptance. If we are to hold Christopher Columbus

accountable for over 500 years after the fact, it is our duty and moral obligation to hold the Democratic Party accountable.”

The resolution and Romano’s call echoes the approach of President Donald J. Trump, whose first instinct is to go on the attack, as he has with demonstrators who have demanded the removal of statues of Confederate generals.

Over the weekend, Trump retweeted a video of a supporter chanting “white power,” and he expressed support for the prosecution of men arrested for defacing a statute of President Andrew Jackson.

Connecticut is one of the many states where Democrats renamed annual Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinners, evidence of what the Democratic state chair, Nancy DiNardo, says is a willingness to evolve and confront a history of protecting agrarian big business, which made the party antilabor as well as pro-slavery and pro-segregation.

“Democrats recognized the error of their ways nearly 100 years ago and since then have supported the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, gay rights, gay marriage, choice, health care for all, racial justice and demilitarization of police, just to name a few important milestones, many of which Republicans have worked to defeat,” DiNardo said.