The British Party Switch

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Celticempire has been a rather blunt instrument in the war on "The Parties Flipped" narrative for several years, I am surprised that certain people fell for this.

Britain is actually free of this for the most part, partially because for a long time their parties shared the name of their ideology (and still do for one of them), which serves to emphasize the point that ideologies are not static applications of contemporary understanding but evolutionary organisms that adapt to match the wants and needs of their historically favored interest groups and supporters.

In American politics there is a desire to take one's ideology and stretch it back to time immemorial as if it has always existed in that form. It wouldn't exist it if didn't have some degree of value or salience to a specific group and hence why it keeps popping up in mainstream media and many sources with either lazy journalism, poor historical background/context or just pure political bias.

For this group it is beneficial to pretend that prior to a certain date, "their people were Republican, because Republican's were liberal", however the presumption that "their people" were always liberal is taken as a given for this assumption to work. Since that is impossible, the whole thought process collapses. To their credit, the far left typically sees this for it is and thus why it is mostly dead on this site. You rarely see Marxists giving this the time of day and for good reason, why should they assist in covering up a long sea of bourgeoisie abuses to facilitate them fitting in better within the Democrats.

In the UK, at least until now, their was a much stronger class divide and far less of a regional politically rivalry (no recent regionally based Civil Wars) thing at work and thus this had not become much of an issue. When the Conservatives did win back control after New Labor, it wasn't (at least initially) by splitting off ancestrally Labor voters. For comparison this would be if Bush 43 had won by winning back the moderate suburban voters instead of going all in on Evangelicals.