Reparations are a fashionable political topic that has been employed extensively by the Democrats, feeding right into their identity politics and their intersectional victimhood scale of merit.

Putting the feel-good stuff and the virtue-signaling aside, the administration of such an idea is fraught with many problems and leaves sensible people — Republicans in particular — with only a fight-or-flight response.

I propose another approach.  Let's force the Democrats to pay reparations to every American citizen who is not a Democrat...or to somebody, anyway.

First the motive.  The Democrats are responsible for many bad things, but let's just focus on those things that no rational person of any political persuasion would label as good things:

• African slavery
• The American Civil War
• Jim Crow
• Ku Klux Klan
• Segregation

We could add other things, but those five are not going to be very controversial.  If we are to administer these reparations, the historical origins of guilt need to be irrefutable.  

So who is going to pay, and who is going to get paid?  We have to define these persons in a way that is simple enough to allow us to administer the process.  So who is a Democrat?  Remember, we need something we can legally prove.  

Where there is the practice of registering Democrats and Republicans, let's say that anybody who has been a registered Democrat for perhaps five years qualifies.  Then include anybody who makes a living working for the national or local Democratic Party.  We could also include everybody who has run on the Democratic ticket in any election, whether he won or lost.  Certainly, we can include any member of the House of Representatives or the Senate who has a record of voting with the Democratic caucus.  That leaves out a lot of Democrats, but at least this definition of Democrat is something that can be legally proven.  Let the rest of them skate.  It will be too much trouble to get them into the net.

So the above mentioned people will pay.  Whom do they pay?  We could argue that every citizen of the United States has been harmed by African slavery, the American Civil War, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and segregation, even though these wretched injustices are fading into the past.  If we did that, the Democrats would be paying everybody, including themselves.  That's not going to work.

It would be nice if the people who were directly wronged and the people who directly wronged them were still alive, and with my list we could actually still find some of each.  Contrast this with the shoddy reasoning of the Left, where all the taxpayers would be made to compensate certain citizens who have darker skin, or who could find some African characteristics in their DNA.  This really gets messy for the Democrats because many individuals have both African and Caucasian characteristics in their DNA.  Should these people pay themselves?  Should the taxpayers — a group of citizens of many races and skin colors — just pay anybody who is of African descent, related to slaves or not?  

It gets even messier when we consider that many of our citizens have ancestors who did not have slaves.  In fact, it really gets messy when we consider that in the antebellum South, there were blacks who owned black slaves, and there were many whites who did not own slaves.  Slaves were expensive.  On the fringe of this chaos of guilt assignment are the American Indians who also had slaves, both blacks and Indians from other tribes.  They even had white slaves.  In the end, the non-Indian population of the United States took almost all of the land the Indians occupied, and mostly gave them very little or nothing at all for it.  There is no mention today of reparations for Indians.  Even the Democrats can see that that would be too expensive. 

So let's go back to imposing the punishment of reparations on the Democrats, where we can prove that they are, in fact, Democrats.  Granted, it's a little slippery whom they should pay reparations to, but we can put together a better case than taxpayers paying blacks many generations removed from some slaves to whom they may or may not be related.

So I suggest that for the above mentioned moral crimes, the Democrats, or at least those we can prove are Democrats, be required to pay reparations to God, who is the only one who might be able sort this out.  

No checks.  Cash only.  

Jerry Powlas has been a naval officer, engineer, and publisher and is the author of Red State Rebellion (available through Amazon).  He lives in the burbs of Minneapolis with his wife Karen.   When not there, they can be found sailing somewhere on Lake Superior.

Image: Edward Kimmel via Flickr.