When did the parties switch platforms?
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  When did the parties switch platforms?
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Skill and Chance
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« Reply #75 on: March 02, 2018, 09:29:55 PM »

The one bug I have in your analysis is the omission of the Pacific Northwest (at least that area west of the Cascades). This region has been the most socially liberal of the nation since long before party vote correlations reversed at a state level in the 1960s. Washington, Oregon and California (also Hawaii which was far from statehood at this stage) were single-party Republican bastions between the Panic of 1893 and the New Deal. However, these states turned overwhelmingly to FDR in 1932 and 1936 (Landon was a terrible fit for these states even vis-à-vis most of the rest of the nation) but until a major Democratic revolution in 1954 remained strongly Republican at the state level. Especially in Washington, the GOP was frequently threatened by leftist third party movements, up to William Hope Harvey in 1932 reaching 20 percent in Thurston County. Big-government New Deal Democrats were – despite their social conservatism and Catholic influence – a better fit than a free-market GOP.

Well I have since refined some of my knowledge and have read "The Emerging Republican Majority" by Kevin Phillips.

Oregon was the most stable of the states and the most pro-Republican, conservative in a Burkean sense, it resisted a lot of the populist surges and radical impulses, that swept over Washington and California. The reason for this was that it was largely dominated by Protestant Yankees in the Portland area, and while the eastern part had a large number of Southerners move in, it was not enough to fundamentally erode that power bastion. At least not until the New Deal Era, especially the 1950's.

Northern California was impact by this same trend, but Southern California was exploding in Population and So-cal was basically an extension of the sunbelt. Half of Iowa basically picked up and moved to Orange county in the mid 20th century, as well as large number from all of the Midwestern states. The industries, demographics and ethos meant that these counties were solidly Republican and fast growing. So even if the Republicans lost ground in Norcal, they would replace it in Socal, which is what enabled them win CA from 1952 until 1988 with the exception of 1964.

California from 1888-1988 is really fascinating.  It was consistently R+2ish for 40 years, then it had a massive crush on FDR and voted more for him than the nation every time, then right back to R+2 for another 40 years as soon as FDR is off the ballot.  And it stayed that stable while experiencing a massive influx of people!

A lot of Yankee Republican bastions saw shifts towards the Democrats and away from the Republicans in the 1950's midterms. Conservatives found themselves being replaced by liberals or by Democrats in Vermont and UES New York (though in migration and other demographic changes were always a factor as well). In the 1960's, many of the remaining Representatives of these "Yankee" districts, raced to left to try and catch up to their electorates. They supported Rockefeller over Nixon and their voting records in Congress surged to the left as well. This was a Quixotic and doomed strategy because the GOP basically broke away from its Yankee base by 1964 to become a Southern, German and Irish middle class party, with a declining but still solid contingent of Yankee whites. This was the case in 1968, which is when the book was written about. All they accomplished was to alienate themselves from the new base and lead to formation of the concept of "Liberal or RINO Republicanism".

Wasn't this primarily where the GOP congressional votes for various New Deal measures were already coming from, though?  I mean, Dewey and Willkie were part of this crowd and they emphatically declined to run on New Deal repeal.  1958 was really when the last GOP urban machines fell (Philadelphia, the Italian vote in NYC, urban NorCal, etc.), but I don't know that they ever had much of an ideology beyond patronage for GOP-voting groups.  On a different note, it's surprising that we think of the 1950's as a particularly conservative time today.

In essence the Republicans changed bases rather than change ideologically. As a part of this process though, it is unavoidable that the party would evolve to match its new demographics. So a shift from Old Right Taft to Neoconservatism on defense for instance. An embrace of free trade instead of protectionism, which no longer swayed workers post Depression anyway. An ever growing view of hostility towards government since Southerners hate the federal gov't, Irish hate the establishment and the Germans hated communism and were distasteful of WW1 and even WW2 to some extent.

This was a combination of 2 things: 1. Recognition that they simply couldn't compete for working class votes with the New Deal at stake 2. Outreach to the growing managerial class as protectionism became associated with organized labor.

But generally this is what is mistaken for the "platform switch". The platforms didn't switch, the Democrat's old base became alienated by the New Deal, Civil Rights and Foreign Policy and gravitated towards the Republicans, who had a minority coalition to begin with. This gave the Republicans a large minority coalition, but their original base found their new bed fellows unsavory and slowly gravitated towards the Democrats. The evolution of the Party system typically is started by the liberal or left party and the right then reacts to it.

The Democrats were already a liberal party when this began, and it was their traditional base of poor Southern farmers and big city ethnics that pulled them so, even though these had been the foundation blocks of the Democratic party going back to the Jeffersonian era. This process began with William Jennings Bryan, who energized "the traditional Democratic base", but around a "new populist-left" platform. This was not just happening in the US, but in Britain as well where the Liberal Party, a party of similar demographics and viewpoints to the Democrats, went through a similar transformation in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

This same base elected Wilson and it is from Wilson that you get FDR. Over this same period, Irish and Germans stopped being disadvantaged immigrants and became middle class people who wanted their cut of power more than they wanted Gov't expansion. So they still hated the establishment, but now it was the New Deal Establishment running things.

I think this is the key.  The broad demographic shifts of 1945-1995 really look like the GOP version of the "emerging Democratic majority" idea.  Basically, the GOP base in the suburbs grows continuously after WWII until they finally have enough people distributed widely enough to run the show.  It isn't really traceable to one exceptionally potent economic or social event like the Depression, Panic of 1893, or Civil War.  People got notably more libertarian as 19th century fears of deprivation faded away.


The closest thing to a platform switch occurred in the late 19th century, when the Democrats (and Liberals) began to use gov't as tool to uplift the poor as opposed to regarding government as tool for elites to preserve their power. Previously both the Democrats and Liberals had opposed such bastions of power over the preceding 100 years, and both had opposed the policy of protectionism while the American Whigs/Republicans and Tories were protectionist and elitist oriented.

IMO the story behind the changes we are seeing on trade is that wages really have stagnated since 2000 in some industries and since 2008 for most workers even as prices for certain vital goods have kept rising.  With large swaths of the country gradually dropping out of the middle class, Trump realized that the right needs something to offer again to prop up working class wages.  The alternative was a 20 year majority for the left.  If you watch Obama's 2012 campaign speeches, he got this on a personal level, and economically speaking, he won when he wasn't supposed to win.  Clinton simply didn't get it and lost when she should never have lost.

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TheLeftwardTide
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« Reply #76 on: March 02, 2018, 09:36:41 PM »

Party switches - a favorite discussion topic of Atlas (and myself, too).

Did the parties "switch platforms"? I mean, sort of; Karl Marx was a Republican, and there were plenty of left-anarchists in the GOP during the Civil War. Conversely, almost all of the outspoken racists left in America; the alt-right, the KKK, etc. now support the Republican party.

Democrats were once the party of classical liberalism and social conservatism. They were in favor of small-government values and free trade. The Bourbon Democrats, which ruled the party from post-Civil War to the late 1890s, are almost universally defined to be center-right.

But the Atlas RINOs have a point, and a damn good one. The Democrats have almost always had a more working-class, ethnic base, and they have always championed themselves as the savior of the common man. The Republicans have almost always basically been the party of big business.

Set the stage in the late 1890s. There are two major parties, which are both center-right and are basically in total agreement in terms of economic policy (with the exception of trade). The first truly left-wing political movement - the Greenback Party - tried to take hold in the 1880s. Due to the way that the political system was (and still is) set up, this third party could never actually take hold as a major political party. So - Plan B - integrate the ideas of the political movement into the major parties.

On the national level, the Democratic Party was the better selection at the time. Before the Civil War, it's populist platform was, in many respects, similar to that of the Greenback party; both Jefferson and Jackson, despite not being fond of each other at all, both believed very strongly in the fundamental principle of preventing the concentration of power in the hands of the few. The Panic of 1893 completely shook up the political landscape; the Republicans had the largest gain in the House of Representatives in American history, and the Bourbon Democrats lost nearly all of their political influence in the party. This culminated in the 1896 nomination of William Jennings Bryan, who integrated the Greenback/Populist party platform and used the idea of Jacksonian Democracy to justify it.

At the same time, there were several Populist-Republican coalitions going on in the South. These were eventually crushed by the elite, planter-class, conservative Democrats, who enacted voter disenfranchisement laws that not only kept blacks, but poor whites as well, away from the polls.

But only about a decade later (so ~1910s), many race-baiting populist Democrats, who were not economically conservative, use the votes of poor whites to get elected. The best examples of this are James K. Vardaman (D-MS) and Benjamin Tillman (D-SC).

Only a decade after that (so ~1920s-1930s), added to the mix of Southern Democrats were a handful of racially moderate populist Democrats. Prominent examples include Gov. Charles Hillman Brough (D-AR) who publicly supported anti-lynching laws and was even cross-endorsed by the GOP, Sen. Oscar Underwood (D-AL) who fought tooth-and-nail to curb KKK influence in Alabama and even served as Senate Minority Leader during the early 20s, and of course Huey Long (D-LA).

Of course, all the while, there were truly fiscally and socially conservative Democrats in the South, largely due to the one-party nature of the region at the time.

The issue of party-switching really comes with the question of race. Some modern Democratic social liberals want to separate themselves, and their party, from the Dixiecrat racists as much as possible, and so they say that the parties "completely switched" in the 1960s. Opportunist partisan Republican Trumptards want to argue how the Democrats are the real racists. Both groups are wrong.

The GOP was, at its inception, extremely popular with African-Americans. The decline of support for African-Americans had really begun during the 1870s, when Rutherford B. Hayes brokered a deal to withdraw federal troops from the South. The GOP, at the time, had felt as if they had done enough for the African-Americans, and gave up on them as a constituency; though African-Americans were still staunchly Republican (for obvious reasons). After that, a strategy called the Lily-White Movement was slowly taking hold, in which the Republican Party would attempt to appeal to white conservatives instead of African-Americans for their vote. It became their main electoral strategy in the South in the early 20th century.

By the 1920s, there were prominent racists in both parties. The Second KKK was not exclusive to the South; at one point, 15% of the American population was a part of the KKK. Denver had elected a Republican KKK mayor during this time. The final nail in the coffin for African-American support for the Republican Party was the election of 1928, and Herbert Hoover. Al Smith, being an urban Catholic who was against Prohibition, was very unpopular in the South for a Democrat at the time, and so Hoover went after Southern white votes hard. In conjunction with this (and arguably more importantly) were economic troubles; his mishandling of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 which left the African-American populated Delta economically devastated, and the whole Great Depression thing.

The New Deal had disproportionately benefited poor and working-class voters, and so they formed the new Democratic base. African-Americans were disproportionately poor at the time, and were able to get jobs in the WPA. Around the same time, a prominent liberal Northern Democratic wing was taking hold, one which was in favor of both Civil Rights and the New Deal. So, African-Americans in the North chose to vote for the Northern Democrats, despite being buddy-buddy with the Dixiecrats, over the Republicans who would cut the government spending that was keeping them afloat.

So, you can see how the parties did not necessarily switch, but through the process of gradual realignments, ended up with different positions on the issues, and different party base demographics. Often the 1960s dominate the conversation, but the early 20th century was just as important in this gradual realignment of the two major parties.
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darklordoftech
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« Reply #77 on: March 03, 2018, 06:55:11 PM »
« Edited: March 03, 2018, 07:35:02 PM by darklordoftech »

When did the Republicans become the party of free trade?

When was the first time that Republicans preached "fiscal responsibility"?
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mianfei
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« Reply #78 on: March 04, 2018, 08:35:04 PM »

When did the Republicans become the party of free trade?

When was the first time that Republicans preached "fiscal responsibility"?
By and large, these changes came with Warren Harding in the 1920s after the crisis of World War I. The “Depression of 1920” cited by the radical right as proof that smaller government will cure depressions, was the most decisive event.
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TheLeftwardTide
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« Reply #79 on: March 04, 2018, 09:26:02 PM »

When did the Republicans become the party of free trade?

When was the first time that Republicans preached "fiscal responsibility"?

By and large, these changes came with Warren Harding in the 1920s after the crisis of World War I. The “Depression of 1920” cited by the radical right as proof that smaller government will cure depressions, was the most decisive event.

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Jesus Christ, you would think that the corporate billionaire donors funding the Mises Institute would be able to come up with better propaganda...

These people actually believe that the Great Depression would have ended 7 years earlier without the New Deal...yes, an economy that was bleeding jobs in 1933 would have magically repaired itself instantly!

Similarly, they also think that why Hoover was so unsuccessful with the economy during the Depression was because he was too much of an interventionist (which really makes no sense because by that logic, FDR would have had an even more stagnant economy than Hoover). They think that the Smoot-Hawley tariff explains literally everything about the 1930s economy.

Smoot-Hawley was passed under the Hoover administration and definitely exacerbated the Great Depression to a certain extent. However, Democrats campaigned on lowering tariffs in 1932, and FDR largely did so while in office.

So, I would set the cut-off point for when the parties "switched" on trade to sometime after World War II. Probably in the 1950s is when the GOP adopted the position of free trade, due to the emergence of large multinational corporations who could manufacture overseas thanks to faster transportation, as well as the middle-class suburbia which formed the new GOP base. Around the same time (1950s), the Democrats adopted the position of fair trade due to the political power of blue-collar labor unions in the manufacturing belt of America.

In the early 1990s, this alignment was still present - most of the congressional opposition to NAFTA came from the Democrats, and more Republicans had a favorable opinion of NAFTA than Democrats at the time. But because it was a Democratic president - Bill Clinton - eventually pushed through NAFTA, the parties largely "de-polarized" on the issue of trade, with there being free-trade and protectionist wings in both parties.
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Joe McCarthy Was Right
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« Reply #80 on: March 04, 2018, 11:40:28 PM »
« Edited: March 05, 2018, 12:36:37 AM by Joe McCarthy Was Right »

When did the Republicans become the party of free trade?

When was the first time that Republicans preached "fiscal responsibility"?
Republicans slowly became less protectionist every year from 1936 to 1960 because they saw opening up trade as a way to build alliances with other countries to stop the spread of communism. By 1960, there was no difference between the parties on trade. Then by the 90's, unions persuaded some congressional Democrats to oppose NAFTA. Romney ran a more protectionist platform than Obama did though, so somewhat of a reversal of that evolution started in 2012. Trade is not a left/right issue, or even a regional issue, it just depends on the politician.
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #81 on: March 09, 2018, 10:58:56 PM »

When did the Republicans become the party of free trade?

When was the first time that Republicans preached "fiscal responsibility"?
Republicans slowly became less protectionist every year from 1936 to 1960 because they saw opening up trade as a way to build alliances with other countries to stop the spread of communism. By 1960, there was no difference between the parties on trade. Then by the 90's, unions persuaded some congressional Democrats to oppose NAFTA. Romney ran a more protectionist platform than Obama did though, so somewhat of a reversal of that evolution started in 2012. Trade is not a left/right issue, or even a regional issue, it just depends on the politician.

It also depends on economic conditions and particularly the economic conditions and context facing your parties base demographics.

Democrats were certainly the vanguard party for free trade from 1828 until 1970. Republicans were indeed becoming less and less protectionist but were easily still the more protectionist party even after WWII. Beginning in the 1970's, US manufactures began to lose ground on the global markets, so unions who had almost always been for free trade (to expand exports of dominant US goods) became more protectionist. At the same time the GOP was making its move towards the sunbelt and the rise of interest groups and donors, as well as sunbelt politicians within the GOP meant that it became the most free trade party.
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #82 on: March 09, 2018, 11:17:36 PM »

Party switches - a favorite discussion topic of Atlas (and myself, too).

Did the parties "switch platforms"? I mean, sort of; Karl Marx was a Republican, and there were plenty of left-anarchists in the GOP during the Civil War. Conversely, almost all of the outspoken racists left in America; the alt-right, the KKK, etc. now support the Republican party.


Yes, the GOP was massive and broad during its inception but this dynamic was also similar to one occurring in Britain. In both countries the Classically liberal party was dominant, in the US the Republicans united a coalition in opposition to slavery that spanned from NE business elites to Marxists and radicals). In Britain, Disraeli had several dalliances with the radical member before they ultimately joined with the Whigs to form the Liberal Party. The concept of an elitist "nationalist" Conservative-Radical alliance against the classical liberals was not an alien concept in the 19th century. European Conservatives, had no problem with bigger government and at various points made economic concessions as a sop for keeping their heads firmly attached and not severed by the angry masses. Bismarck was perhaps the ultimate example of this and that was 30 years later.


Democrats were once the party of classical liberalism and social conservatism. They were in favor of small-government values and free trade. The Bourbon Democrats, which ruled the party from post-Civil War to the late 1890s, are almost universally defined to be center-right.


It depends on what you mean by "social conservatism". The Democrats were almost always the more egalitarian party while the Republicans (and Whigs before them) were more elitist in orientation). Therefore if you mean social conservatism in terms of race, certainly though both parties were racist in their own ways, if you mean in more broad terms it can cut the other way. The social issues of the time were different and the areas in which the Republicans were reformist was motivated by a paternalistic and even racist viewpoint of forcing protestant civilization and religion on inferior people's. This applied to the Whigs as well, which motivated their support for public school, so they could "educate" catholics out of being catholic and blacks out of being African.


But the Atlas RINOs have a point, and a damn good one. The Democrats have almost always had a more working-class, ethnic base, and they have always championed themselves as the savior of the common man. The Republicans have almost always basically been the party of big business.

Am I now included in this group? Tongue

Set the stage in the late 1890s. There are two major parties, which are both center-right and are basically in total agreement in terms of economic policy (with the exception of trade). The first truly left-wing political movement - the Greenback Party - tried to take hold in the 1880s. Due to the way that the political system was (and still is) set up, this third party could never actually take hold as a major political party. So - Plan B - integrate the ideas of the political movement into the major parties.

On the national level, the Democratic Party was the better selection at the time. Before the Civil War, it's populist platform was, in many respects, similar to that of the Greenback party; both Jefferson and Jackson, despite not being fond of each other at all, both believed very strongly in the fundamental principle of preventing the concentration of power in the hands of the few. The Panic of 1893 completely shook up the political landscape; the Republicans had the largest gain in the House of Representatives in American history, and the Bourbon Democrats lost nearly all of their political influence in the party. This culminated in the 1896 nomination of William Jennings Bryan, who integrated the Greenback/Populist party platform and used the idea of Jacksonian Democracy to justify it.

This is a key point that is often lost or forgotten. It was by and large the same Jacksonian base, just motivated by a different, more modern and more pro-gov't agenda.

At the same time, there were several Populist-Republican coalitions going on in the South. These were eventually crushed by the elite, planter-class, conservative Democrats, who enacted voter disenfranchisement laws that not only kept blacks, but poor whites as well, away from the polls.

The extent to which this was effective is never emphasized. There are counties listed in Kevin Phillip's book that had 30,000 white and 45,000 black citizens of voting age, but only had like 8,000 mostly all white voters. There would almost certainly be a heavy class skew on top of the race skew in these countries and they almost universally favored Thurmond in 1948, Goldwater in 64, but interestingly enough preferred Nixon over Wallace. Class dynamics at play once again.
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #83 on: March 09, 2018, 11:21:05 PM »

When did the Republicans become the party of free trade?

1980, is when they definitively became the party that was most in favor of free trade.

When was the first time that Republicans preached "fiscal responsibility"?

1896 arguably, but certainly by 1920.
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darklordoftech
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« Reply #84 on: March 10, 2018, 09:14:22 PM »
« Edited: March 10, 2018, 10:25:09 PM by darklordoftech »

The social issues of the time were different and the areas in which the Republicans were reformist was motivated by a paternalistic and even racist viewpoint of forcing protestant civilization and religion on inferior people's. This applied to the Whigs as well, which motivated their support for public school, so they could "educate" catholics out of being catholic and blacks out of being African.
And today Democrats support public schools in order to "educate" people about how guns, cigarettes, alcohol, wearing hats to school, and girls showing skin are the worst things to ever happen to humanity and to "educate" blacks about the evils of rap music and "gang clothing" while Republicans say that public schools are "liberal indoctrination". Nonetheless, the idea that compulsory education (along with many other beliefs about people under 18/21) are anti-Catholic in origin is interesting.

It's also interesting that it was the Whigs who pushed for New England states to abolish the death penalty, yet the 1988 election had the Democrats opposing the death penalty and the Republicans supporting it. The most vocal supporter of the death penalty was Lee Atwater, who started out working for Strom Thurmomd, a former Democrat.
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #85 on: March 10, 2018, 11:27:45 PM »

The social issues of the time were different and the areas in which the Republicans were reformist was motivated by a paternalistic and even racist viewpoint of forcing protestant civilization and religion on inferior people's. This applied to the Whigs as well, which motivated their support for public school, so they could "educate" catholics out of being catholic and blacks out of being African.
And today Democrats support public schools in order to "educate" people about how guns, cigarettes, alcohol, wearing hats to school, and girls showing skin are the worst things to ever happen to humanity and to "educate" blacks about the evils of rap music and "gang clothing" while Republicans say that public schools are "liberal indoctrination". Nonetheless, the idea that compulsory education (along with many other beliefs about people under 18/21) are anti-Catholic in origin is interesting.

It's also interesting that it was the Whigs who pushed for New England states to abolish the death penalty, yet the 1988 election had the Democrats opposing the death penalty and the Republicans supporting it. The most vocal supporter of the death penalty was Lee Atwater, who started out working for Strom Thurmomd, a former Democrat.

That is regional influence at work. The Southern and Western states have long been more pro-capital punishment, while the Northern states and especially Michigan opposed it because they associated capitol punishment with the British empire just across the border in Canada.
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darklordoftech
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« Reply #86 on: March 18, 2018, 04:12:28 AM »

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2018/03/17/pub-refuses-serve-irish-people/433503002/
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« Reply #87 on: March 19, 2018, 04:02:05 PM »

It depends on the platform itself. On some platforms they never switched, but on most of them they did switch in a more gradual way.
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« Reply #88 on: March 19, 2018, 06:43:41 PM »
« Edited: March 19, 2018, 06:47:58 PM by The Mikado »

Could people stop with this insane idea that the Republicans were ever a "liberal" party in the American sense? They have been the party of big business and Wall Street from the 1870s to present. Hell, they weren't even "liberal" in the European sense in the 19th century: they were arch-protectionists and major supporters of high tariffs (both for protecting American business and for revenue purposes).

The big shift isn't in the party platforms so much as who made up the party. The mass defection of African-Americans from the GOP to the Dems from 1930s-1960s ended up making the Northern Democrats the party of civil rights (can't get elected in NY or IL or etc without the black vote), which alienated white conservative Southern Democrats and gradually pushed them into the GOP in the 1970s-2000s. It's inaccurate to say the parties "switched platforms" generally, though. The main groups that made up the GOP in the 1920s (big business, highly-paid professionals, Midwestern farmers) are still all mostly Republican groups, while the main groups behind Northern Democrats (recent immigrants, labor unionists, religious minorities, the poor) are mainly still Democratic voting blocs.
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RINO Tom
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« Reply #89 on: March 20, 2018, 02:01:16 PM »

Could people stop with this insane idea that the Republicans were ever a "liberal" party in the American sense? They have been the party of big business and Wall Street from the 1870s to present. Hell, they weren't even "liberal" in the European sense in the 19th century: they were arch-protectionists and major supporters of high tariffs (both for protecting American business and for revenue purposes).

The big shift isn't in the party platforms so much as who made up the party. The mass defection of African-Americans from the GOP to the Dems from 1930s-1960s ended up making the Northern Democrats the party of civil rights (can't get elected in NY or IL or etc without the black vote), which alienated white conservative Southern Democrats and gradually pushed them into the GOP in the 1970s-2000s. It's inaccurate to say the parties "switched platforms" generally, though. The main groups that made up the GOP in the 1920s (big business, highly-paid professionals, Midwestern farmers) are still all mostly Republican groups, while the main groups behind Northern Democrats (recent immigrants, labor unionists, religious minorities, the poor) are mainly still Democratic voting blocs.

Most people can't see past "racist Alabama redneck voted Democrat in 1890, racist Alabama redneck voted Republican in 2016; conclusion: parties are opposite now."
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The Mikado
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« Reply #90 on: March 20, 2018, 09:53:04 PM »

Could people stop with this insane idea that the Republicans were ever a "liberal" party in the American sense? They have been the party of big business and Wall Street from the 1870s to present. Hell, they weren't even "liberal" in the European sense in the 19th century: they were arch-protectionists and major supporters of high tariffs (both for protecting American business and for revenue purposes).

The big shift isn't in the party platforms so much as who made up the party. The mass defection of African-Americans from the GOP to the Dems from 1930s-1960s ended up making the Northern Democrats the party of civil rights (can't get elected in NY or IL or etc without the black vote), which alienated white conservative Southern Democrats and gradually pushed them into the GOP in the 1970s-2000s. It's inaccurate to say the parties "switched platforms" generally, though. The main groups that made up the GOP in the 1920s (big business, highly-paid professionals, Midwestern farmers) are still all mostly Republican groups, while the main groups behind Northern Democrats (recent immigrants, labor unionists, religious minorities, the poor) are mainly still Democratic voting blocs.

Most people can't see past "racist Alabama redneck voted Democrat in 1890, racist Alabama redneck voted Republican in 2016; conclusion: parties are opposite now."

LOL exactly.

One sentence argument: There has literally never been a time from the GOP's founding in the 1850s to present at which the Republican Party wasn't the party of Wall Street and Big Business.
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« Reply #91 on: March 20, 2018, 10:09:34 PM »

Could people stop with this insane idea that the Republicans were ever a "liberal" party in the American sense? They have been the party of big business and Wall Street from the 1870s to present. Hell, they weren't even "liberal" in the European sense in the 19th century: they were arch-protectionists and major supporters of high tariffs (both for protecting American business and for revenue purposes).

The big shift isn't in the party platforms so much as who made up the party. The mass defection of African-Americans from the GOP to the Dems from 1930s-1960s ended up making the Northern Democrats the party of civil rights (can't get elected in NY or IL or etc without the black vote), which alienated white conservative Southern Democrats and gradually pushed them into the GOP in the 1970s-2000s. It's inaccurate to say the parties "switched platforms" generally, though. The main groups that made up the GOP in the 1920s (big business, highly-paid professionals, Midwestern farmers) are still all mostly Republican groups, while the main groups behind Northern Democrats (recent immigrants, labor unionists, religious minorities, the poor) are mainly still Democratic voting blocs.

Most people can't see past "racist Alabama redneck voted Democrat in 1890, racist Alabama redneck voted Republican in 2016; conclusion: parties are opposite now."

LOL exactly.

One sentence argument: There has literally never been a time from the GOP's founding in the 1850s to present at which the Republican Party wasn't the party of Wall Street and Big Business.
Progressive Era.
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« Reply #92 on: March 20, 2018, 10:12:45 PM »

Could people stop with this insane idea that the Republicans were ever a "liberal" party in the American sense? They have been the party of big business and Wall Street from the 1870s to present. Hell, they weren't even "liberal" in the European sense in the 19th century: they were arch-protectionists and major supporters of high tariffs (both for protecting American business and for revenue purposes).

The big shift isn't in the party platforms so much as who made up the party. The mass defection of African-Americans from the GOP to the Dems from 1930s-1960s ended up making the Northern Democrats the party of civil rights (can't get elected in NY or IL or etc without the black vote), which alienated white conservative Southern Democrats and gradually pushed them into the GOP in the 1970s-2000s. It's inaccurate to say the parties "switched platforms" generally, though. The main groups that made up the GOP in the 1920s (big business, highly-paid professionals, Midwestern farmers) are still all mostly Republican groups, while the main groups behind Northern Democrats (recent immigrants, labor unionists, religious minorities, the poor) are mainly still Democratic voting blocs.

Most people can't see past "racist Alabama redneck voted Democrat in 1890, racist Alabama redneck voted Republican in 2016; conclusion: parties are opposite now."

LOL exactly.

One sentence argument: There has literally never been a time from the GOP's founding in the 1850s to present at which the Republican Party wasn't the party of Wall Street and Big Business.
Progressive Era.


and the GOP basically drove Teddy out of the party


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darklordoftech
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« Reply #93 on: March 21, 2018, 02:27:08 AM »

Amazing how some people manage to convince themselves of things like, "Obama would have been a Klansman", "Lincoln and Reagan would agree on everything," etc.
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #94 on: March 21, 2018, 04:39:12 AM »

Amazing how some people manage to convince themselves of things like, "Obama would have been a Klansman", "Lincoln and Reagan would agree on everything," etc.

Parties inherently exist and operate as they do, firmly grounded within the existing context and realities. Whenever a party fails to keep in touch with such is typically when it goes through a period of being in the minority until it can adjust to the new reality.

To approach a past political context by inserting modern personalities into it, creates a fallacy by rejecting the very context that produced said parties in the first place. 

There is also a degree of a desire to achieve some kind of ancestral legitimacy almost akin to that of the Tudors, by way of latching onto a set of ancestors that is not theirs and then going a step further by white washing said appropriated ancestor's record of sin. Both parties engage in this, but it should taken as the propaganda that it is.

Both parties in their present form are the product of multiple interwoven strains of thought, peoples and movements.

I have long held paid far more attention to the evolution of the ideologies themselves and then gleamed whether or not a party should be considered ideologically as something within the context of what that would have meant at the time, not what conservatism or liberalism mean now.

When asking whether one party was committed to preserving the existing social hierarchy, while another was desiring to promote more egalitarian principles (taken as a given that society at the time was racist, sexist etc by modern standards, so such would occur within those boundaries), one party comes down squarely on each side. When asking whether or not one party was dedicated to the advancing of the majority religious view and making policy based off of and seeking to perfect society in the image of said religious thought, while another was committed religious tolerance. When asking whether or not one party was dedicated to the preservation of established monied interest, while another was opposed to said interests. When asking all of these questions, you get a clear answer as these were the principle dividing lines between 19th century Conservatives and Liberals and they were present in other countries as well.
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RINO Tom
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« Reply #95 on: March 21, 2018, 10:17:11 AM »

Could people stop with this insane idea that the Republicans were ever a "liberal" party in the American sense? They have been the party of big business and Wall Street from the 1870s to present. Hell, they weren't even "liberal" in the European sense in the 19th century: they were arch-protectionists and major supporters of high tariffs (both for protecting American business and for revenue purposes).

The big shift isn't in the party platforms so much as who made up the party. The mass defection of African-Americans from the GOP to the Dems from 1930s-1960s ended up making the Northern Democrats the party of civil rights (can't get elected in NY or IL or etc without the black vote), which alienated white conservative Southern Democrats and gradually pushed them into the GOP in the 1970s-2000s. It's inaccurate to say the parties "switched platforms" generally, though. The main groups that made up the GOP in the 1920s (big business, highly-paid professionals, Midwestern farmers) are still all mostly Republican groups, while the main groups behind Northern Democrats (recent immigrants, labor unionists, religious minorities, the poor) are mainly still Democratic voting blocs.

Most people can't see past "racist Alabama redneck voted Democrat in 1890, racist Alabama redneck voted Republican in 2016; conclusion: parties are opposite now."

LOL exactly.

One sentence argument: There has literally never been a time from the GOP's founding in the 1850s to present at which the Republican Party wasn't the party of Wall Street and Big Business.
Progressive Era.

The Republicans were still the party of industry and big business during that era when compared to the Democrats.

Roosevelt was in many ways as idiosyncratic a nominee as Trump*, whereas W. Wilson was in line with many Democrats (as he was of course a compromise nominee in 1912) and the party had thrice nominated W. J. Bryan. By contrast, McKinley, Taft, Hughes, Speaker Cannon, J. Sherman – basically every major national player but Roosevelt and LaFollette – supported policies designed to promote business and capitalism, and even Roosevelt framed many of his arguments as in the interest of fair capitalism rather than pro-worker reform. Additionally, the Republican SCOTUS nominees during that era (even Roosevelt's) were some of the most activist judges the country has ever seen, all in the name of big business.

*(I highly recommend interested students of history read Roosevelt's speeches from the era. He sounds a lot like Trump.)

Forgive my inability to cite my source, but I remember hearing on a History Channel documentary one time that a friend wrote a letter to someone at the RNC urging them not to let Teddy Roosevelt be McKinley's VP pick because he was "a Democrat in disguise."  I believe many Democrats in the era accused Roosevelt (and Taft) of opportunistically "stealing their issue" when it came to trust busting.  I think at the end of the day, it remains somewhat obvious that 1) Roosevelt was not representative of the GOP's ideology toward business and 2) was less "liberal" on that issue than most Democrats, even still.
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« Reply #96 on: March 23, 2018, 07:39:30 PM »

In every election from the birth of the GOP to 1952, the GOP vote by state is better correlated to the current democratic vote. The parties did, evidently, somewhat reverse.
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« Reply #97 on: March 24, 2018, 04:51:54 AM »

When did the Republicans become the party of free trade?

When was the first time that Republicans preached "fiscal responsibility"?

By and large, these changes came with Warren Harding in the 1920s after the crisis of World War I. The “Depression of 1920” cited by the radical right as proof that smaller government will cure depressions, was the most decisive event.

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Jesus Christ, you would think that the corporate billionaire donors funding the Mises Institute would be able to come up with better propaganda...

These people actually believe that the Great Depression would have ended 7 years earlier without the New Deal...yes, an economy that was bleeding jobs in 1933 would have magically repaired itself instantly!

Yes, with better government action the Great Depression would have ended far earlier. Most economists agree that the impact of the New Deal was mildly positive, but not in curing the Depression. As a means for greater equality and social welfare, it was good, but it failed to do anything significant about the Depression. The aim was in redistribution, not necessarily in expansion. Also, remember the fact that Roosevelt balanced the ing budget halfway in to the Depression. FDR made the massive mistake of not borrowing for the programme, as he (or at least the policy writers) thought that debt financed spending was worse than the depression it was going to solve. The New Deal was nowhere near enough (or really even aiming) to lead a fiscal-stimulus recovery, so the policies were far too small to lead economic recovery in any way. A lot of the other actions even harmed recovery (see encouraging anti-competitive ess by linking collusive practices to higher wage payments (ending these anti-competitive policies massively contributed to strong recovery in the 40s http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/421169?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents), and arbitrary agricultural price fixing). There is an argument in the fact that stimulus from reducing the size of the Government could have been better than the clusterf**k of inaction and bad actions that we actually got.

Its impact was completely negligible compared to the massive positives of FDR taking the U.S. off the Gold Standard (to stop the deflationary spiral), and WW2 (a massive expansionary factor; 100% economic growth two years in a row). The Great Recession could have easily turned into another Great Depression, but a major deciding factor in was the action of the Bush/Obama administrations (and of course Lord Ben Bernanke actually having the courage to act compared to the sh**tty 1930s Fed).
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RINO Tom
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« Reply #98 on: March 24, 2018, 08:51:35 AM »

In every election from the birth of the GOP to 1952, the GOP vote by state is better correlated to the current democratic vote. The parties did, evidently, somewhat reverse.

People would so easily believe two parties completely switched their ideals before they’d believe some states changed over decades, too??  Lol.
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« Reply #99 on: March 24, 2018, 10:37:41 AM »

1908.
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