Historical continuity of Democrats and Republicans

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Round and round and round we go, where this will ever end, god only knows.

Henry, from the time of Daniel Shays onward, right-left or conservative-liberal cleavage formed between two factions that had supported the American Revolution and it definitively had cut along class lines with the merchants and cosmopolitan faction forming the Conservative one to protect their precious money from the Plebs I am quoted as referencing in Truman's signature. "OMG the plebs are coming to kill us". 

This is precisely because America did not have an aristocracy or a monarchy. The closest thing to that was the New England Merchants (later industrialists), and of course the Southern Planters.

It is hard to demonstrate this in written words, but America's political development was a divide between two "liberal Pro-Revolution groups" with the small holder agrarian one taking the more radical side, favoring egalitarianism and justifying the French Revolution. The more cosmopolitan, urban and commercially oriented group took the more "conservative side" reacting in horror to the radicalism, mob rule and other examples of chaos in their day. The latter group mirrors closely the political evolution of Edmund Burke who likewise had been a "Whiggish" politician but ended up staking out a "New 1790s" Conservatism that embraced some aspects of Whig cause while rejecting the more radical elements.

Where we keep losing you Henry is that you keep trying to:
1. Foist this 17th Century dynamic into a later time period
2. Failure to account for how foreign examples would end up translating into a country whose political culture is to the left of that of the mother country and how a new divide would break down along class lines.

You insist in one breath that the Republicans are the heirs of the Whigs when it is convenient then reject that when it is not, for example. If Republicans are the heirs of the Whigs, then they are the heirs also of this conservative reaction manifested first through the Federalist Party and then through the Whigs in horror to the "radicalism" manifested via Jefferson and then via Jackson.

You also fail to acknowledge that their can be any kind of "conservatism" other than that extolled by Charles I and some extremist writers, or that you can have a "conservatism" built around preserving the gains of the previous generations "liberalism" from the current  generation of liberalism's "extremism". William McKinley has to be a liberal because he doesn't support divine right Kingship and all the other same old horsesh@%t.  This means that wealthy New England blue bloods and merchants, who through the Federalist Party showed just how "committed" (sarcasm) to cause of egalitarianism they were through all the means Truman and I discussed do not exist because they are 1. Yankee, 2. Northern and 3. Just disappear from the face of the earth once 1850 hits or they all move South.

When you have a cultural ethos, that completely rejects a previous dynamic, a new dynamic and divide will replace it and no amount of No True Scotsmen from writers lamenting their irrelevance while clinging to the old dynamic will change this fact.

Here is the simple fact and it is the one born out from history record

the Northeastern Business establishment represented a conservative force in American Politics from 1787 onward and through the 1840s and again from the 1930s onward were in an alliance with the Southern right. Yes, they stuck with the Northern Whigs and yes they rejected the Abolitionists, radicals and early Republicans, but they folded into the Republican Party under Abraham Lincoln and slowly came to take it over during the 1870s, turning it into the very thing you firmly declared a few posts before (The successor to the Whigs). But not the Whigs that existed in the fanciful delusions of naive writers and propagandists but the Whigs that existed in reality to service the interest of class consideration and opposition to radical and egalitarian politics.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

So we've gone from "bad history" to "actually, religious bigotry isn’t that bad"

Ever notice how identitarian revisionism always invokes the " actually x isn't that bad", trope?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I imagine I will be diving into this more either tonight or tomorrow I got to pace myself in terms of my intake of this thread.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

This is exactly the sort of elite, upper crust WASP Republican that RINO Tom and NC Yankee love to describe as "conservative"; and here he is publishing a collection of his speeches in defense of liberalism. How interesting.

Generally Speaking the upper crust does not long remain the upper crust by abandoning the principles held by the majority of the country, on the contrary realism would dictate they would seek to both "lead the charge" and "define it on their terms". But of course again, this is as we have stressed innumerable times, "one man's interpretation" and with that comes any number of necessary contexts that need to be considered.

What concerns me is that their credibility is never questioned by someone who is well a Democrat avatar, especially in those very instances where the many fights for economic and social equality of immigrants, laborers and the like pitted said upper crust on the side of the opposition to said "progressive reforms", simply because the foot soldiers in that "progressive effort" happen to be Catholic or Southern.

Likewise going back, there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the contributions of the Puritans. However, putting a group on such an august pedestle without even acknowledging their own oppression of religious dissent, not to mention treatment towards native Americans and dare I say "Papists".

Atun Shei Films did a really good video on the whole Plymouth versus Jamestown dynamic that you adore so much and I tend to agree with the point he made at the end of the video. Its over-generalized and over wrought piece of at narrative that came about largely in the Victorian Era, which was want to romanticize and idealize many unsavory things. The story and history of America is much too complex to be strained through a reductionist lens of Roundheads vs. Cavaliers.

While it is right to study, appreciate and understand sources, it is vital to put them all into context, just like we would be wrong to presume that Jefferson Davis spoke for all Americans when he mouthed off about Slavery being a civilizing force, we should regard all such figures with enough skepticism to put them into context and at least appreciate the people who suffered under their watch and not belittle their misery and pain, so one can revel in louding Puritans as the originators of "liberalism", even as they stoned and hanged people for disagreeing with them.

Here, Butler observes that since the abolition of slavery and the end of Reconstruction, the two parties no longer disagree on anything besides the tariff, and even on that issue are barely different. I hate to toot my own horn here, but I have observed basically the same thing:

After 1876, when the Republicans abandoned Reconstruction and the Democrats largely repudiated their Civil War era politics, both parties were less ideologically coherent and more identity-based, with only a couple signature policies like the tariff and free trade distinguishing them.

Butler's solution to this ideological incoherence, which I didn't include in the quoted passage, is a new party system in which "the overwhelming majority of Republicans and the overwhelming majority of Democrats [...] form a Democrat-Republican Party (to revive a name that was in use in this country a century ago) which would represent the predominant liberalism of our people. Over against such a progressive liberal party would be a distinctly radical party, to which should go all those who now call themselves Democrats or Republicans, but are in reality neither."

The problem with using this line of thinking is, we know what happens next? The New Deal realignment and we know which Party became its champion and that was precisely because of how the Democratic Party was positioned and had been positioned demographically as the party favored by the majority of small farmers, the immigrants and the laboring classes relative to the Republicans.

We have gone over numerous times, how Republicans have defaulted to a pro-business stance, as happened in the 1870s, the 1890s and then the 1910s-1920s, with its proto-Progressive (as Truman refers to Benjamin Harrison) and Progressive elements losing out, if not immediately than over the short to medium term time frame. You cannot take Butler at face value when the reality of what was happening during the Progressive era and the natural sorting that was taking place with the Democrats in the advantageous situation is all on display and plain to be seen.

As for "Democratic-Republican" as Truman has also repeatedly pointed out, this name was an anachronism misappropriated after the fact to refer to the Jeffersonian Republican Party to avoid confusion and misinterpretation. The term was actually only properly used to refer to Andrew Jackson and the early Democratic Party and to contrast with the "National" Republicans. Somehow I don't think he is trying to claim Andrew Jackson though it is hilarious to think about the implications of that term and how it has been misinterpreted and misused throughout history.

But to return to the quoted passage, I love Butler's line about how "one cannot maintain with a straight face a party division" based upon slight tariff differences - one can only wonder if NC Yankee is in fact unable to keep a straight face when he makes such arguments. Once again, I have expressed a similar sentiment before:

While I have fought back against your dismissal of the importance of economic and tariff policy in this period in favor of high minded ideological fluff that disregards the real day to day impact, I have never conceded to the point that the only division during this period was "just tariffs" either.

With that caveat in place, I have also repeatedly said for YEARS how from 1900 to 1930, the realization was quickly arriving that protectionism was a hindrance not a help and I have even stated why. The US surpassed or was surpassing Britain as the largest industrial power and so it came to need markets more than protection from now inferior British manufacturing. I have also explained how the politics did not keep how, how tariffs remained a critical lynch pin as the "tax cuts of their day" acting as the "One unifying policy" and such and thus dictated its maintenance long after its utility was gone, not to mention dictated the Smoot-Hawley situation and that of course was the death knell and the destruction of this political economic mindset.

Yes it is impossible to maintain such a division, because the historical record and the economic situation on the ground tells us so with regards to the failure of Smoot-Hawley and the ascendence of the New Deal afterwards based on free trade and wealth redistribution.

I included this passage because it is indicative of the tenor of many of Butler's speeches. Again and again he preaches on the subject of liberty and decries the intrusions of the federal government into state and local matters. This gives the lie to NC Yankee's claim that the Republicans were a "big govt conservative party"; or else why would a "small govt liberal" like Butler have felt so at home there? Butler clearly viewed the Republicans as the party of his form of liberalism since their founding, as exemplified by Abraham Lincoln. If one is to call Grover Cleveland a "classical liberal" instead of a conservative, one must do the same for Calvin Coolidge.

You are jumping around again. I said they were a big government conservative party and then slowly evolved into a small government conservative party over the period between the 1890s and the Depression, mirroring the same transition that occurred in the desired policy agenda of Business over that time period in reaction the economic changing from one of American business going from emergent to globally dominant and thus desiring less help and more of "get the barriers out of the way".

As for Calvin Coolidge, you are embracing the Coolidge fawned over by teenage libertarians ten years ago as opposed to the complex figure that actually existed. The one who presided over sky high tariffs, signed one of the most restrictive immigration laws in the country's history and of course presided over the enforcement of Prohibition. A good bit of Coolidge's small government reputation is down to the fact that he accomplished little because he had a bad relationship with many people in Congress, not so much out of principle. Coolidge is right in line with where the Conservatism of the 1920s was at and especially so with regards to its influence on the Republican Party.

Now as for Butler's views on Prohibition and why you are asking me "why he would feel at home there", I cannot answer that question. Because from the 1870s to the 1920s, there is one party that was at the vanguard of Prohibition and that was the Republicans. When Democrats played Me Too on it under Wilson, it helped to demolish them politically in 1920 and hence why that ended up being a short term deviation. The reason for this situation is because the Republicans were the party of the dominant demographic group in the North, meanwhile the Democrats were the Party of the emerging Immigrant demographic, this means that demographic tribalism would dictate that Republicans favor prohibition because it overlapped with the immigration issue.

As for comparing Prohibition to slavery, that is a novel approach since support for Prohibition channeled many of the same reformist puritanical mindset that supported abolition and that is well documented, not to mention the support for prohibition among women for obvious reasons.

If anything this illustrates the point we said all along. Butler may have been influential but he is obviously not the whole of the Republican Party, otherwise the Republican Party's record in power would be different from the one that the historical record shows. Perhaps you can explain why we should place everything this man says on a high when we have such easily noticed.

There is a dividing line between, studying and appreciating the opinions of Butler while noting the areas where he was out of step of a minority of views, and going all in on Butler to ridiculous degrees and rejecting all other opinions.