Democrat and Republican switch!

[minionofmidas]

How come the Democratic Party switched to the party of the poor and the Republican party switched to the party of the rich? 

While ever since the days of WJ Bryan you could, with too much simplification, claim that the Democrats are the party of the poor, there never was a time when it could be claimed that the Republican party was the party of the poor.

[minionofmidas]

How come the Democratic Party switched to the party of the poor and the Republican party switched to the party of the rich?

While ever since the days of WJ Bryan you could, with too much simplification, claim that the Democrats are the party of the poor, there never was a time when it could be claimed that the Republican party was the party of the poor.

ok.  but wouldn't being against slavery being for the poor?

Only a portion of the Republican Party opposed slavery as such.

The remainder were merely against the expansion of slavery - a position that favored the rural white poor of the West and South (though the Southern poor Whites were not voting for it), arguably at the expense of the Blacks. Given that the distinction between Black and White is essentially the primary American class division, this is arguably an anti-poor (and anti-rich. Pro-lower-middle-class) position.

The Homestead Act gave land to the landless, the Morrill Act provided for the creation and support of agricultural and technical schools that taught practical subjects for the benefit of the masses, and a number of other progessive measures that the Repubicans were able to enact in the 1860's once the southern conservative Democrats were gone from Congress after secession.

In the 1860's and 1870's the Republicans were the party of economic intervention by government and the Democrats were not.  This divison wasn't based on class lines, and if the tilt into class based politics had happened then instead of later, by which time the intervention the Republicans favored was done largely only on behalf of business, I can easily see the Republicans becoming the leftist party and the Democrats the rightist party.

True. I would view that as a qualification of my position though, not a contradiction.

[minionofmidas]

But would W J Bryan be the first Democrat to be a little more liberal than Democrats before him?  or was Cleveland a liberal?  What was W J Bryan and Cleveland's position on Civil Rights? 

The term "liberal" in its modern US definition is not applicable to politics of that era.
Bryan certainly was what you'd today call an economic liberal (while Cleveland was what I, coming from Europe, would call one. )
Both were anti-imperialist - indeed on that issue Cleveland would be about as far left as FreedomBurns.
On the issue of Black's Civil Rights, the Democratic Party of the era was utterly horrible. The Jim Crow segregation laws to be dismantled in the 60s were mostly passed during this era and into the 1920s.
Parts of the Bryan wing of the Democratic Party, and the Populists of 1892, supported Civil Rights positions on issues such as candidate selection (the primary was an invention of the era), votes for women, the death penalty, though - although, in the west, such support was also found among some Republicans.

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No. In fact, it's safe to say he was less conservative than any of the 1881-1901 Republican presidents, in this respect as in others. Less conservative than the next two Republican presidents after him, as well.

[minionofmidas]

Lewis, saying that the Republicans were against slavery, to a greater or smaller degree, is a true statement, given the fact that the Democrats were in favour of it,  to a greater or smaller degree.

And just because the Democrats are in favour of a capitalist economy (as they are, more or less) makes the Republicans communists?

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The Democrats aren't against free trade.

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He wasn't "isolationist". Look him up on Hawaii. He was a true internationalist - not what markets itself as such, which is something totally different.

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I'm not so sure... actually it's difficult to tell whom Bryan would have voted for in 2004, though Kerry is more probable. Kerry certainly had no appeal whatsoever to Bryan's core constituency.

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"Ignoring" race issues, in the political climate of that era, translates as accepting every kind of evil racist bill imaginable, and getting passed by the states at the time, without saying a word against it.

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Many, not most. (Look at the map - it's not as if the Republicans weren't winning any EVs out west.) And frequently only at the federal level. The Western Republican state parties, and their liberal wings, were alive and well and powerful throughout the era, into the "Progressive" 1910s, and right down to the Post-New Deal realignments.