The New and Improved Sam Spade Good Post Gallery.

[White Trash]

I haven't been posting here long, but I've popped in now-and-then for probably close to a decade to get a read on what people are saying on certain issues (this sub-forum has always been one of my favorites, as studying demographic trends is a personal hobby of mine).  It seems like every few months this same question is asked.  Of course, understandably so- the fact that electoral maps now look like mirror images of the past is one of the interesting things about US political history.

RINO Tom's post is a good start, and so is NC Yankee's.  That being said, this is a complex question that doesn't have a neat and easy answer.  To say that the parties "flipped" is not only overly simplistic, as a blanket statement, it's just wrong.  On the other hand, to suggest that the parties haven't changed positions on anything either.. well, that would be equally wrong.  There are certainly issues that the parties have "flipped" their positions on.

One of the big problems people have in analyzing the parties over time is attempting to apply a modern perspective on historical issues.  For example, what would've been considered "conservative" or "liberal" changes over time, and in fact, the use of those words themselves with their current meaning is a relatively recent phenomenon.

A good example of this might be the tariff.  Is this a "conservative" or "liberal" position?  Well, in the current era, protectionism tends to be advocated by the left, since large American businesses are mostly now multi-national corporations that generally benefit from free trade.  However, that was not the case through the 1800s and even through the early 1900s, when the tariff had its strongest support from the GOP.  Did that mean that the GOP was the "liberal" party?  Well, again, not so simple- until the late 1800s or so, US industry, mostly prevalent in the North, was significantly less developed than Britain and had difficulty competing with cheaper British imports in stuff like textiles, iron, and other consumer goods.  Global trade was quite a bit less sophisticated at this time, but to the extent it existed, the UK was king.  There were also start up costs to consider- procuring textile manufacturing machinery was not exactly an easy task.  By the late 1800s, US steel exports had caught up with the UK, but the GOP still advocated the tariff until the Great Depression.

In contrast, Southern Democrats tended to oppose tariffs and promoted free trade, so were they the more "conservative" party?  Well, the South was not very reliant on manufacturing at the time, and their industry was based almost entirely on agricultural export, so cheap British imports were not a concern.  On one hand, they were less concerned about Northern US manufacturing interests (so maybe they were less "pro-business?"), but on the other hand, they promoted business, just a different kind of business than the North; the South was still based on an economy rooted in old-style feudalism and generating income from large landholdings.  In that sense, maybe the South was more 'conservative,' since the South was the only place where you could find people that actually had lineage going back to real English nobility.  Areas in particularly Virginia and Maryland had large estates modeled precisely on British aristocratic fiefdoms in places like Yorkshire.  Contrast this to the North, which was settled mainly by groups like the Quakers (PA), or Puritans (MA).. these people tended to be middle-class; merchants, tradesmen, teachers, etc., who were commoners and had no relation to aristocracy back in England.

So, long story short, the point is- it's a heck of a lot more complicated than you might think.  Another one of the big problems people have in analyzing parties over time is assuming demographics are stable and population groups don't migrate.  The people that live in the South now are not the people that lived there in the mid 1900s, and especially not the 1800s.  Going back to my example of VA- at the time of the Revolution, the people living there were a combination of rich British aristocrats, slaves, and some poor British that worked the estates.  Compare that to today, where the state has little to do with agriculture and has a multicultural society with an economy rooted mostly in supporting the federal bureaucracy.

Another good example of this is the North, whose demographics now are completely different than they might've been in the 1800s or even mid 1900s.  RINO Tom does a good job discussing the WASP demographic- this is a demographic that is simply not as prevalent in the North as it might have been.  For example, in Westchester NY, or Fairfield CT, you had a lot of towns that were very WASP-ish, e.g., Rye, or Darien, and so on.  These towns have seen, over the past 50 years, a large influx of Irish, Italians, Jews, and so on, a lot of them relatively recently wealthy "new money."  So the character of a lot of places have changed.

In a similar way, the South has changed too.  It's too simplistic to just say the Dixiecrats all started voting Republican.  For starters, how many of these people are even alive, that might've voted for Thurmond in 1948?  There are perhaps more that would've voted for Wallace in '68.  What happened to these voters?  Did some switch to voting R after the Dems pushed the Civil Rights Act?  Well, some probably did, sure.  Others didn't- it's important to remember that Dems were competitive down-ballot throughout the South up through the 90s.  What about the Dixiecrats' progeny?  Well, one thing we can say for them, is they are probably more conservative.  One reason for this could be that the South has significantly changed in the past 50-60 years, transforming from an agrarian society to an industrialized one with a much larger "big business" presence.  For example, in the "New South," someone is much more likely today to be a white-collar worker at a large corporation in a place like Houston or Atlanta, than one would've been before the 1960s.

At the same time, the South has also seen a significant amount of migration from people from the North, coming down to large Sunbelt metros, such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Charlotte, and so on.

One final point, one thing that people get confused sometimes is thinking the South was always more "conservative" because it tended to be more hard-line on segregation.  But that doesn't mean the region was more "conservative" overall necessarily.  It was more segregationist perhaps, but a few things on that.  First, the North was actually quite segregationist too, just a little more subtle about it (I gave the example of Darien CT above.. a lot of towns like this practiced racially discriminatory housing practices well into the 1960s or later).  Second, the North could be quite conservative on other issues.  For example, for a long time, New England was associated pretty strongly with some of the original colonists- very religious puritans that had a "sticking my nose in my neighbor's business" attitude about a lot of things.  Consider that the temperance movement had its roots in the North and there was a definite teetotaler streak there.  Was this a "conservative" issue?  Well, people today might consider it somewhat conservative.  At the time it was certainly associated with the upper classes- the working classes were the group most opposed to prohibition.


Anyways, long post, I know.  And I doubt anyone will actually read the whole thing.. but the long and short of it is- the North didn't just vote GOP once because the GOP was the "liberal" party.  Similarly, the North didn't stop voting GOP because it was once "conservative" and now is "liberal."  It's a heck of lot more complicated than either of those two generalizations.

Maybe the best "generalization" one can make, is that the groups of people that tend to support the GOP were once heavily located in New England, but are not any longer; and that the issues that the GOP stands for change over time, and what is considered "conservative" or "liberal" also changes over time.  Maybe that's the best way to summarize this all.

[White Trash]

Yeah, I don't have the attention span for that, lol.

It addresses the "party switch" myth pretty well. Worth the read.