When did the parties switch platforms?

[H. Ross Peron]

So, as we all know, the Democrats used to be the conservatives and the Republicans used to be the liberals.  So when did the parties switch? 

when Jesse Helms cummed in your mom's anus

[H. Ross Peron]

On an economic level, from ~1860 to ~1925 the two were roughly even, but after this the Democrats became markedly more economically liberal. On social issues, the switch happened on a presidential level from ~1964 to ~1984, but took some time to percolate down ballot. As a result, it would be accurate to say the GOP during much of the 19th and 20th centuries was the more “liberal” party. Nowadays, this is clearly not true.

As David Carlin pointed out in his 2006 book Can a Catholic Be a Democrat?, although the GOP was economically more conservative (in general) from 1896 onwards, the New Deal Democrats were always socially extremely conservative by today’s standards, and much more morally conservative than Northern and Pacific state Republicans.

As one illustration, it was the FDR administration that introduced the Hays Code for motion pictures, which was extremely restrictive compared to what could be filmed in Europe where the working classes were extremely anti-religion (especially Catholicism). As another, the New Deal saw the development of the “family wage” as an effort to hold and encourage permanent marriages, because it was felt that women working depressed wages, increased unemployment, and had been encouraged (if wholly tacitly) by the free-market GOP administrations in the 1920s.

However, the crises brought about by attempts to enforce facility integration in the 1950s and 1960s forcibly turned the Democratic Party away from ideals of the “natural family” and toward social engineering and acceptance of “alternative” lifestyles like homosexuality and cohabitation. As I said in my previous post, the “Revolution of 1954” in the Pacific States was the prelude to this change, and led to elimination of laws on abortion and homosexuality for the first time in US history in these states. In fact, this 1954 revolution was in my view an undoubted factor reversing historic party alignments in the rest of the nation.

Could you explain this "Revolution of 1954" that liberalized abortion and anti-gay laws in the Fifties? I'm from California but have minimal awareness of this particular event.