Historical continuity of Democrats and Republicans
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darklordoftech
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« Reply #175 on: August 18, 2020, 10:51:25 AM »
« edited: October 05, 2020, 11:24:03 PM by darklordoftech »

They often chastised abolitionists as being anti-science, preferring a fluffy fantasy of racial equality where everyone got along, whereas they were an educated and enlightened elite who "got it."  
Today it’s Republicans who say, “People shouldn’t be allowed to have political opinions until their brain is sufficiently developed.”
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darklordoftech
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« Reply #176 on: September 04, 2020, 04:14:37 PM »

Did disillusionment with Eisenhower and the 83rd Congress lead William F. Buckley, Jr. to start the National Review?
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Brother Jonathan
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« Reply #177 on: September 06, 2020, 08:48:41 AM »

Did disillusionment with Eisenhower and the 83rd Congress lead William F. Buckley, Jr. to start the National Review?

I mean, to some extent. My understanding is that it was more a general feeling that American conservatism had atrophied and surrendered, so while Eisenhower embodied in many ways that surrender of the GOP to the "liberal consensus" that Buckley and others saw as dominant, he was by no means the only or even the major factor. National Review did endorse Eisenhower in 1956, but did not endorse in 1960, so I do think there was frustration with the Eisenhower administration, but I think the desire to create a publication like National Review preceded the Eisenhower administration and had much more fundamental and deep seated origins.
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H. Ross Peron
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« Reply #178 on: October 05, 2020, 10:39:48 PM »

This is a great thread and very educational to read. NC Yankee and others have made a strong case for the ideological continuity of the Republican and Democratic Parties from its founding to the present. However, I would note that the most radical elements from Europe-the German '48ers and even Karl Marx himself (who I would argue were far more egalitarian and democratic than almost any native American political figure)-strongly favoured the Republican Party as the instrument with which to destroy slave power. The influence of Forty-Eighters such as Franz Siegel and Carl Schurz on the early Republican Party is well known. Friedrich Hecker has a famous revolutionary song named after him and he ended up a Brigadier General in the Union Army. I'm pretty certain the Forty-Eighters would have favoured the Jeffersonian Republicans in the Early Republic, given their outgrowth from French Revolutionary/Jacobin influence. It is noted earlier in the thread that the bulk of the Liberal voters in Britain favoured the North despite the Southern sympathies of some Liberal politicians (IIRC even Gladstone gave a speech favouring the South though John Bright was pro-Union). There are some parallels here to the division of the old Whig Party into the Cotton and Conscience Whig elements.

Thus I think we can see the very early Republican Party of 1854 to the early 1880s as a big-tent party composed of Northern industrial interests, Yankee Protestant social reformers (which could be conservative or liberal), and the radical democrats represented by the Forty-Eighters. Of course, the old pro-business and Yankee Whig element eventually gained pre-eminence but I don't think that should detract from the radical elements of the early Republican Party. I think one can argue that the Republican Party of 1885 was more directly comparable to (at least the Northern wing) of the Whig Party in 1845 then the Republican Party of 1865 would have been due to the eventual marginalization of the more radical wing. One can see this in the political trajectory of someone like Benjamin Butler who claimed Jeffersonian principles but believed it had to be achieved through Hamiltonian means. It's at best a coincidence but its amusing to note that the "Wide Awakes" of 1860 has a parallel today in the term "woke" used to describe awareness of oppression and privilege in contemporary times.
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Paul Weller
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« Reply #179 on: October 06, 2020, 12:12:23 AM »
« Edited: October 06, 2020, 12:55:50 AM by HenryWallaceVP »

This is a great thread and very educational to read. NC Yankee and others have made a strong case for the ideological continuity of the Republican and Democratic Parties from its founding to the present. However, I would note that the most radical elements from Europe-the German '48ers and even Karl Marx himself (who I would argue were far more egalitarian and democratic than almost any native American political figure)-strongly favoured the Republican Party as the instrument with which to destroy slave power. The influence of Forty-Eighters such as Franz Siegel and Carl Schurz on the early Republican Party is well known. Friedrich Hecker has a famous revolutionary song named after him and he ended up a Brigadier General in the Union Army. I'm pretty certain the Forty-Eighters would have favoured the Jeffersonian Republicans in the Early Republic, given their outgrowth from French Revolutionary/Jacobin influence. It is noted earlier in the thread that the bulk of the Liberal voters in Britain favoured the North despite the Southern sympathies of some Liberal politicians (IIRC even Gladstone gave a speech favouring the South though John Bright was pro-Union). There are some parallels here to the division of the old Whig Party into the Cotton and Conscience Whig elements.

Thus I think we can see the very early Republican Party of 1854 to the early 1880s as a big-tent party composed of Northern industrial interests, Yankee Protestant social reformers (which could be conservative or liberal), and the radical democrats represented by the Forty-Eighters. Of course, the old pro-business and Yankee Whig element eventually gained pre-eminence but I don't think that should detract from the radical elements of the early Republican Party. I think one can argue that the Republican Party of 1885 was more directly comparable to (at least the Northern wing) of the Whig Party in 1845 then the Republican Party of 1865 would have been due to the eventual marginalization of the more radical wing. One can see this in the political trajectory of someone like Benjamin Butler who claimed Jeffersonian principles but believed it had to be achieved through Hamiltonian means. It's at best a coincidence but its amusing to note that the "Wide Awakes" of 1860 has a parallel today in the term "woke" used to describe awareness of oppression and privilege in contemporary times.

Great post. I would also add that the top minds of the Confederacy, if they can be called that, were self-described reactionaries who talked about “rolling back the Reformation in its political phases” and “raising the Tory standard in the South.” In the Civil War liberalism was clearly on the side of the North and abolition, while support for the South and slavery was a conservative position. Notice the anti-Reformation rhetoric as well. Yankee Protestants were essentially liberals, in a Lockean sense, and the Southerners hated them for it. Fitzhugh savaged the New England Puritans for allowing “liberty of speech” and “freedom of religion,” and explicitly denied equality and the liberal ideas the country was founded on. To an old-school Tory absolutist like him, they were the same old anarchical heretics that had executed King Charles, led the American Revolution, and defiled the good name of the South by allowing abolitionist “jacobins” like Garrison to speak their minds.

Another important point is that opposition to slavery and advocacy for racial justice has always been and was always perceived as a liberal rather than conservative priority, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. In the UK the abolition movement was led by William Wilberforce and his Quakers, and in Parliament it was taken up by Charles James Fox and the radical Whigs. It was opposed, of course, by the Tories. Even in America someone like Jefferson recognized that slavery was incompatible with his liberal values, and therefore struggled with what we would today call cognitive dissonance as a slaveowner himself. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, on the other hand, was an unapologetic defender of the Southern ruling class and thus thought slavery to be perfectly justified in and of itself. In the Reconstruction period the most vociferous defenders of racial justice were called “radicals”, which had an almost exclusively left-wing connotation at the time. Not to mention the fundamentally redistributive class-based economic policies they pushed for in the South. If you need any proof, look at the Yankee Leviathan passage here.
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #180 on: October 06, 2020, 06:01:35 PM »

Pinckney was a Federalist, most of the plantation elite in the South were Whigs through the 1840s. The exceptions to this were in places like Virginia as Truman has mentioned.

Yes, the South hated New England Moralism and the puritanical influence that stemmed from it, but as Truman has pointed out and has been stated previously, Fitzhugh is not representative of planter much less Southern opinions in this period. "Talk of rolling back the reformation" just emphasizes the point in a region where Baptism and Presbyterian were the dominant faith. Only in Maryland and LA would you find Catholic planters in any big number.

But more to the point, the thread here is not even about the liberalness of the planter class, it is about the liberalness of the Democratic Party and the conservatism of the Republican Party in this time period. It is not going to be exactly like the politics of Britain because the dominant religions in the US are more Calvinistic and furthermore you had a revolution, have a Republic and have as a fundamental basis a more egalitarian basis for that. There would have been people who rejected this concept of egalitarian politics among the planter,s but this is not all planters and furthermore, their alignment with the Democrats is as has been repeatedly stressed a marriage of convenience by people who are well known to place expediency above principle. The relevance of British politics comes in understanding how period ideologies were defined and thus it is important to account for the demographic and historical differences between the two while applying the concepts. Thus instead of being pro-Anglican (or in the case of anti-reformists, Catholicism) as a marker of conservatism, it has to be pulled back to pro-dominant religious faction(s) and the Republican Party was definitely the vanguard of Protestant moral panic at the Catholic peril at the gates.



The primary base of the Democratic party remains in this period immigrant and/or urban laborers and small farmers. A few planters tacked onto this out of convenience doesn't alter the trajectory, anymore then Never Trumpers becoming Democrats will turn that party into a conservative one today. The racism and opposition to equality stems not from planter theology/ideology (even if Fitzhugh was right and he is not), it is a pass through prejudice from their natural base because their natural base was racist. Majoritarianism against a backdrop of prejudice will yield prejudiced views and policies and Democrats were defined by Majoritarianism in this period even after the 1850's realignment (Lewis Cass and Stephen Douglas, and their Popular Sovereignty argument comes to mind).

This natural racism of the Democrats working and laboring base, made the marriage of convenience easier, but it is important to remember who is and has frankly always been in the driver's seat in the Democratic Party.

This is a great thread and very educational to read. NC Yankee and others have made a strong case for the ideological continuity of the Republican and Democratic Parties from its founding to the present. However, I would note that the most radical elements from Europe-the German '48ers and even Karl Marx himself (who I would argue were far more egalitarian and democratic than almost any native American political figure)-strongly favoured the Republican Party as the instrument with which to destroy slave power. The influence of Forty-Eighters such as Franz Siegel and Carl Schurz on the early Republican Party is well known. Friedrich Hecker has a famous revolutionary song named after him and he ended up a Brigadier General in the Union Army. I'm pretty certain the Forty-Eighters would have favoured the Jeffersonian Republicans in the Early Republic, given their outgrowth from French Revolutionary/Jacobin influence. It is noted earlier in the thread that the bulk of the Liberal voters in Britain favoured the North despite the Southern sympathies of some Liberal politicians (IIRC even Gladstone gave a speech favouring the South though John Bright was pro-Union). There are some parallels here to the division of the old Whig Party into the Cotton and Conscience Whig elements.

Thus I think we can see the very early Republican Party of 1854 to the early 1880s as a big-tent party composed of Northern industrial interests, Yankee Protestant social reformers (which could be conservative or liberal), and the radical democrats represented by the Forty-Eighters. Of course, the old pro-business and Yankee Whig element eventually gained pre-eminence but I don't think that should detract from the radical elements of the early Republican Party. I think one can argue that the Republican Party of 1885 was more directly comparable to (at least the Northern wing) of the Whig Party in 1845 then the Republican Party of 1865 would have been due to the eventual marginalization of the more radical wing. One can see this in the political trajectory of someone like Benjamin Butler who claimed Jeffersonian principles but believed it had to be achieved through Hamiltonian means. It's at best a coincidence but its amusing to note that the "Wide Awakes" of 1860 has a parallel today in the term "woke" used to describe awareness of oppression and privilege in contemporary times.

When it comes to the Republicans, yes a big tent is a given here but there is a difference between a big tent where no one is decidedly in a dominant position and a big tent where there is someone in the driver's seat calling the tune and the others are on board because their interest just happen to align.

The Republican party was founded by Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats in WI and MI (the Yankee belt), but as Eastern Parties formed, the Whigs and their business backers quickly become the dominant force in the party. Furthermore, the very nomination of Lincoln as a moderate on the issue of slavery, as someone who had been a business attorney and as someone who supported the traditional Clay economic agenda, was in my view the point at which the Republicans become dominated by business interests as the successor party to the Whigs at least in the North. In 1856 they had run on opposing slave power as the sole focus and on lost, in 1860, Lincoln diversified the platform. Yes, Lincoln was not controlled by these people and he had his own views that often ran contrary to their desires, and these thus allowed for the building of a broad coalition around the opposition to slavery, but in terms of actual policies they almost universally benefited the business interests and set the stage for the gilded age to occur alongside of the Second Industrial Revolution. The embrace of these policies and the spread of industrialism westward, essentially made it economically dependent on these policies and thus regions like WI and MI that had been Jacksonian in terms of economic policy, were now fully on board with the protectionist system.

People over emphasize the importance of 1876 as if their had been some takeover of the GOP, the first of three dates latched onto as a magic flip date. If you really dig into it though, it was more of a calculated desire to get back in touch with voters weary of Southern intervention, recession and corruption. Nominating an outsider was a means by which to get back into the good graces, selling equality down the river was a means to shift the debate back to bread and butter issues and replacing Grant was a means to have a clean slate. It is worth nothing that 1876 is one of only times that an incumbent Party has held the White House in spite of an economic recession in the previous President's term of the same party. While we can lament what this meant for civil rights, it is worth admiring the skill at which the GOP was able to refocus and win in such horrendous political conditions for them.

The key dates for when the GOP became a "pro-business nationalist conservative" party are 1860 when they embraced the business backed economic agenda and were able to enact that into law, thus dominating the political economy of the coming decades (just like the New Deal did for the decades that followed it) and 1872.

The historiography of the GOP's magic flip dates always fall apart on close scrutiny especially when you consider the business relationships and benefit from both Grant and Hayes and thus realize that 1876 rather than being of consequence to the underlying nature of the party, was merely those driving forces re-calibrating to stay in power and maintain the gravy train. Already under Grant you see the incestuous relationship with speculators, the blind eye to business excess, the condoning of monopolies, the move towards hard money that would so damage debtors in the coming decades and the first time the Republicans faced a hard midterm defeat driven by an economic downturn that saw harsh swings in industrial districts as workers abandoned the party of industrialism in favor of the party of the working and laboring classes (the Democrats). Even before you get to that point, you had a rebellion by the likes of those very same radical elements in the form of Horace Greeley and many others, who ended up aligning with the Democrats against Grant only to fail in that election. While they failed then, they undoubtedly set the stage for the wins in 1874 and later on in 1884.

If the historiography of the Democrats as being the "conservatives" is to be believed, the political dynamics of the 1870s and 1880's make absolutely no sense. Likewise, if the Republicans were this radical and liberal party, why was a their a "Liberal" rebellion, that then allied with the Democrats, who are allegedly "conservative" in this period? It also doesn't make sense.

At every stage of the dynamic, 95% of the American spectrum would be "liberals" under a previous context. Most 1860's Republicans would have supported Jefferson over Hamilton/Adams and a majority certainly would have backed Jackson over Clay. Even today, what percentage of Republicans would favor overturning Social Security? 30%, 40%. Whenever a paradigm successfully establishes itself, the board is redivided along new lines. Burke would have supported Locke and the Orangists against the Jacobites. Hamilton supported the Revolutionary War and served in Army. Most Whigs would have supported Jefferson against Hamilton and most Republicans would have probably supported Jackson against Clay.

Also on the matter of abolition always being a liberal idea:

Another important point is that opposition to slavery and advocacy for racial justice has always been and was always perceived as a liberal rather than conservative priority, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. In the UK the abolition movement was led by William Wilberforce and his Quakers, and in Parliament it was taken up by Charles James Fox and the radical Whigs.

Fun Fact: Not Quite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Pitt_the_Younger#Legacy

Quote
Some of Pitt's domestic plans were not successful; he failed to secure parliamentary reform, emancipation, or the abolition of the slave trade although this last took place with the Slave Trade Act 1807, the year after his death. Biographer William Hague considers the unfinished abolition of the slave trade to be Pitt's greatest failure.[96] He notes that by the end of Pitt's career, conditions were in place that would have allowed a skillful attempt to pass an abolition bill to succeed, partly because of the long campaigning Pitt had encouraged with his friend William Wilberforce. Hague goes on to note that the failure was likely due to Pitt being a "spent force" by the time favourable conditions had arisen. In Hague's opinion, Pitt's long premiership, "tested the natural limits of how long it is possible to be at the top. From 1783 to 1792, he faced each fresh challenge with brilliance; from 1793 he showed determination but sometimes faltered; and from 1804 he was worn down by ... the combination of a narrow majority and war".[97]


Conservatives do "liberal things" all the time for the sake of a variety of reasons. Reagan supported immigration reform, a liberal idea in most contexts, because business wanted it and he believed it would allow for Republicans to gain among Hispanic voters. Bush did No Child Left Behind likewise. David Cameron legalized Gay Marriage in the UK.

There was a vested interest by business types in the North to want the destruction of the slave power, its political influence and thus allow them to dominate the country and pursue the policies that would enrich them and also enable the country to become the dominant economic super power (Thats where the nationalist aspect comes back into play).

Beyond that, for a constitutionalist, the type that would say we are a Republic, not a Democracy, they would look to the promises of the Declaration and the founders intent and say the Majoritarianism that overrides natural liberty (Popular Sovereignty) is an excess of Democracy and corruption of the balanced system that constitutes the Republic. This emphasis on the Declaration was fairly common and while the whole system is built around liberal concepts of liberty, the concept of restraining democratic will or checking democratic will is a conservative one (see my signature).

Beyond that you have morality and while the Southern churches were corrupted and split off because of the desire to defend and promote the slave powers, the Northern churches were increasingly being defined by moralistic arguments against slavery and this would thus transcend ideological lines creating a desire to embrace reform in this instance even among someone who would be conservative on most other things.

Then there is the expediency and calculating aspect whereby embracing this cause will thus enable the ability to obtain power and thus proceed with enacting the long sought after nationalist economic agenda and other beneficial policies and thus while more callous, and related in part to the first one, this one is a key factor that has to be considered but it should be noted there are motivations far more negative then this for opposing slave power.

And of course on that note we get to the fear that was thus created after the Fugitive Slave Act and then with the Dred Scott ruling that the South was preaching state's rights while depriving it to those of the North. This would thus induce Northerners concerned about this issue to oppose the South and its political influence for fear that they would be sold down the river and this also feeds into the notion about corrupting the Republic and the courts etc.

Lastly, it must be noted that there were more darker still motivations for opposing slave power, that of economic and job competition, a motivation that had induced voters to be pro-slavery for years but now post Dred Scott, the fear that slavery's continued existence risked that this would thus spread Northward and take away jobs from white people. Thus there is a one racist motivation for opposing slave power and to ignore that would be to paint an incomplete picture, but of course there is thus one more still.

Perhaps some of the more positive elements desiring the end to slavery for moral reasons, also desired to "civilize" what they considered to be third world primitives and it was their quest to do this that was hampered by Southerners in the aftermath of slave revolts who clamped down on religious instruction for fear it would induce slave revolts. This would thus mean their mission to civilize from God was being obstructed by the Plantation Owners, and this cultural Imperialist motivation would have been very prominent among the more fire and brimstone preachers in the pious sects.


Having thus laid to rest the point of how Conservatives could find themselves thus supporting abolition or at least opposing Slave Power, it must be remembered to step back to the underlying points about the role and dominance by 48ers, socialists, and German Revolutionaries among the Republicans while they did have some prominence to say that they were in a dominant position would be a mistake considering that the polices as I have thus already stated were pretty much predetermined and then from there the fact they thus found themselves disappointed and especially once these same moralists began to go after the German's beer, it became increasingly apparent, that the Republicans would not be a consistent advocate for them.

Democrats did amazingly well with Germans in 1874 and this would not have been possible if all their was to the Democrats was simply the carrying of planter class water. No of course not and just with the point about the Liberals revolting in the 1872 election, so to did the Germans find themselves dissatisfied upon realizing that the GOP was dominated by two groups, business cartels who enriched themselves while everyone else went down the tubes, and Protestant moralists who wanted to regulate people's behaviors to comport with their view of the world. Needless to say these were not popular concepts and the Democratic Party as a party more welcoming of immigrants, tolerant on religion and much more in tune with the interests of the working and laboring classes would certainly provide a political home for a large percentage of the German vote and Republicans would not reverse this decline until after WJB nuked the Democrats with various groups of Catholics and other immigrants because of his own Protestant zealousness.
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Paul Weller
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« Reply #181 on: October 06, 2020, 08:30:56 PM »

I wasn't saying that the South hated New England moralism, but that they hated New England liberalism, as I have provided evidence for. So you are implying that the two are connected then, no? I would agree that they are. Moralism is not inherently conservative and it never has been, despite what the religious right would have you think. In many cases liberal views have stemmed from strong religious beliefs, like among abolitionists or Social Gospelers who believed that the inequality in the world was deeply wrong on a moral level.

I would also argue that Yankees were not the dominant faction in the United States. The Slave Power and what succeeded it was. The planters controlled the United States economy and political system to such a degree that they were able to silence critics of slavery via the gag rule and dictate US foreign policy during the westward expansion period. That the planters chose to ally themselves with the Irish and other Catholic immigrants was, as you said, a marriage of convenience. The immigrants were enemies of the Yankees, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Their mutual racism just made it easier as they both despised the efforts of the liberalizing Yankees to improve the lot of the worst off in society, the slaves.

Basically, what I am trying to argue here is that the Southern planters defined the Democratic party just as much as the Northern immigrants did. You can't argue that the latter defined the party and the former just "tacked along" when they in fact wielded effective control over it. Furthermore, if you are defining the Democrats by the urban immigrants, then why not define the Republicans by their Black supporters? Why not say the Northern Yankees just "tacked along"? Is it because the Yankees in the North were the base of the party and far outnumbered Black Republicans? That is a reasonable point, but I would still argue as I have that many of those Yankees were in fact liberals. They were not the dominant group in American society - the Slave Power was. They fought against that power, just as their English Puritan ancestors had fought against the power of the King.

By the way, I found this cool speech from 1910 comparing the English and American Civil Wars. It should be obvious, but guess which side is which:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_parallel_between_the_English_and_American_civil_wars
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« Reply #182 on: October 06, 2020, 09:33:54 PM »
« Edited: October 06, 2020, 09:44:03 PM by Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee »

I wasn't saying that the South hated New England moralism, but that they hated New England liberalism, as I have provided evidence for. So you are implying that the two are connected then, no? I would agree that they are.


We have to be careful of what we are talking about when we say the "south"? Certainly we are not talking about the slaves themselves. I would guess you are not talking about the poor whites that had tended to dominate the Democratic Party (think Andrew Johnson) and would continue to be a dominant force going forward.

Therefore we are talking about the planters, and as really doesn't need to be stated, the planters were despise Yankee Moralism, because they had "meddled" in their affairs and destroyed their power base and relegated them to a backwater as the country surged ahead and they sat on their wrecked plantations jealous and resentful of the wealth being accumulated on Wall Street, in Philly, Chicago, San Francisco and so on. This is cultural and regional animousity, it is not defined by ideology but it will come to define ideology itself especially in the 20th century realignments. I am always concerned about taking Southern slanted views of things at face value, because in so many things they are trying to plant their cultural disappointments where they do not belong. This gets back to the previous posts where you said Fitzhugh and the Planters would reject McKinley as a conservative" And guess what, they don't get to decide that, the politics of the time does.



Moralism is not inherently conservative and it never has been, despite what the religious right would have you think. In many cases liberal views have stemmed from strong religious beliefs, like among abolitionists or Social Gospelers who believed that the inequality in the world was deeply wrong on a moral level.

Is nobless oblige a liberal concept? What if it is being done for the sake of preserving said nobility?

I am going to regret pulling that example out because it is you I am dealing with here, but whatever.

Here is the thing, America doesn't have aristocracy, royalty or a state church as a European country does. What it does have is power bastions that function similarly and thus create around the preservation of said power bastions a conservatism similar to that of Europe in terms of its actual policies and strategy, but different because the interest it serves are different as a result of the fact that it is in America as opposed to being in Britain or France or Germany.

Religion as it functions in terms of policy influence is not something that occurs in a vacuum and while reformism is a discernible measure in this period, it is worth point out that reformism is not contrary to most forms of Conservatism, from Burke to the 1990s, Conservatives sought to control the language of reform but do it within constitutional means if that makes sense.

You do see a lot of push for social reforms, you do see some compromising with the other side on business regulation, but aside from TR (and most from him is after he left the GOP), you don't see much widespread support for leveler sentiment in the Republican Party, despite wracking up Evangelical equivalent margins with pious Yankees (70% to 75%) during this time period.



I would also argue that Yankees were not the dominant faction in the United States.


They became the dominant faction with the rise of the Republican Party in the 1850s and remained so through the Great Depression, when their numbers started to dwindled through intermarrying with Germans and Irish, and vast increases in the number of Catholic voters in places like MA essentially sidelined them both nationally and later on in terms of their ability to control the Republican Party.

The Slave Power and what succeeded it was.
What? By the Civil War and after, the plantation owners were not able to dictate economic policy, and they were not able to exert power beyond their own region. They were able to protect their region from outsider influence via the Senate, but they were not able to project power except for when the Democrats got control and thus via seniority they dominated the committee system.

The planters controlled the United States economy and political system to such a degree that they were able to silence critics of slavery via the gag rule and dictate US foreign policy during the westward expansion period.

The Planter class was divided in the Jacksonian era though.


That the planters chose to ally themselves with the Irish and other Catholic immigrants was, as you said, a marriage of convenience. The immigrants were enemies of the Yankees, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Their mutual racism just made it easier as they both despised the efforts of the liberalizing Yankees to improve the lot of the worst off in society, the slaves.


You are oversimplifying and forgetting a key part of this alliance.


Basically, what I am trying to argue here is that the Southern planters defined the Democratic party just as much as the Northern immigrants did. You can't argue that the latter defined the party and the former just "tacked along" when they in fact wielded effective control over it. Furthermore, if you are defining the Democrats by the urban immigrants, then why not define the Republicans by their Black supporters? Why not say the Northern Yankees just "tacked along"? Is it because the Yankees in the North were the base of the party and far outnumbered Black Republicans? That is a reasonable point, but I would still argue as I have that many of those Yankees were in fact liberals.


Its not just Planters and Irish Henry and for the love of God I made sure to mention them every time just so you wouldn't get confused on this point but you are as always hopeless predictable.

I said, immigrants and/or working class laborers and small farmers. This included a range of people from Irish immigrants in NYC, to the small farmers in central Tennessee. This was undoubtedly the natural base of the Democratic Party and as for them controlling them, it is because of ambivalence or outright hostility towards blacks among these immigrants, laborers and small farmers, that they essentially were willing to condone the planters racial policies and it is also worth noting that the Civil War rhetoric by the South was precisely structured with this in mind and yet even with this their was opposition to secession in poorer parts of the South, though more so in Whig Mountain areas then upcounty Democratic Farmers.


They were not the dominant group in American society - the Slave Power was. They fought against that power, just as their English Puritan ancestors had fought against the power of the King.

This is borderline embracing Lost Cause mythology at this point, Henry. The war was not what put the Yankees in the dominance position in the country. The Yankee exodus as I call it place them in a range of states in enough numbers that when combined with them voting 75% enabled them dominate these states ranging from Maine to Minnesota, and compete in more diverse places like Indiana and New York.

The North already had 25 million people, while the South had 9 Million of which 3 million were slaves. That is 74% of the population. Of this, Yankees were probably a majority in the Six New England states, MI, WI, MN and substantial minorities in OH, NY, PA, IN and ILL. It is very possible depending on who you count as Yankee, that there were more Yankees in the North then there were people in the South (including the Slaves). They could be as low as 37% of the North's population and account for more than 9 million people. They were probably in the mid 40s range though.

The North dominated the House of Representatives, Free States were by the 1850s obtaining the majority in the Senate, and it was only a matter of time before the North would dominate the Presidency and by extension Supreme Court. This demographic reality was already clear before the South seceded and it is why they took that step once Lincoln was elected.

To further belabor the point, the North had 82% of the bank deposits, and anywhere from 2/3rds to 3/4rds of the Factories and railroads. Even while dominating the manufacturing sector, the fact that the South grew so much cash crops, meant that the North grew more wheat, oats, rye and I think they might have tied the South on Corn. This is because while only I think 40% of the North worked on farming compared to I believe 80% of the South, the larger base of people means more people worked on farms in the North. 40% of 25 million is 10 million. 80% of 9 million is 7.2 million. So the North had a 3 million edge in Agricultural employment and when you throw in cash crop versus food stuffs, early mechanized farming and better infrastructure, the North was dominating production of food stuffs and they were exporting that to Britain (always forgotten in the talk of British lust for cotton, was their dependence on the North for imports as well).

And for all the Lost Cause Southern bs about paying all the taxes. The South paid 8% to 25% of the tariffs, while New York alone paid 2/3rds.

Southern Planters were on the verge of being completely left behind and irrelevant in a country completely defined by different values. This means that the right versus left divide is not going to be determined by them and they are by definition going to be hanger on, not a driving force.

When a paradigm ends, a new paradigm is created.  
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« Reply #183 on: October 12, 2020, 03:45:53 PM »
« Edited: October 12, 2020, 04:18:04 PM by HenryWallaceVP »

Ok, but even if the North was in the dominant position relative to the South, that doesn't make their position any less liberal. It's not how much money you have that determines your ideology, but what ideas you are fighting for. In the case of the Civil War the North was fighting for liberal ones and the South for conservative ones, as defined by the political theorists on both sides. Look at the English Civil War for instance. Read this passage from the speech I linked comparing the American and English Civil Wars:

Quote
In very many respects the position of the Parliament resembled that of the Federal government. Both began the war with great advantages. The Parliament, like the North, held the seat of the national government, and controlled whatever central machinery existed. But the possession of London meant much more than the possession of Washington; it was Washington, New York and Boston in one the headquarters of the administration, the money market, and the intellectual centre united and it had comparatively a larger population than those three cities put together. Oxford, the seat of the royal government, situated almost on the frontier of the territory which the King held, furnishes a sort of analogy to Richmond; year after year the forces of the Parliament marched against it and failed to take it and its fall marked the end of the war.

These are superficial resemblances. It is more important to remember that the Parliament, like the Federal government, possessed far greater financial resources than its adversary. It held the richest part of the country, most of the capitalists lived in its quarters, the taxes it levied were more productive, and it could raise loans with greater facility. In the American Civil War the possession of mines and foundries and factories was one of the elements in the superiority of the North; in our Civil War the simpler economic organisation of the time made the control of the manufacturing districts less vital.

In other words the Roundheads controlled the richer parts of England - the South and East - where Puritanism was strong among the prosperous mercantile bourgeoisie in the coastal cities. By contrast the Royalists received the bulk of their support from the North and West - the poorer sections of the country with stronger remnants of ancestral Catholicism. The Parliamentarians were clearly in a dominant position relative to the Royalists, but you wouldn't say they were the more conservative side, would you?

Also, if you say that "Southern Planters were on the verge of being completely left behind and irrelevant in a country completely defined by different values", doesn't that basically make them reactionaries by definition since they were trying to preserve their feudalistic society in a rapidly changing world?
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« Reply #184 on: October 14, 2020, 07:59:41 PM »
« Edited: October 17, 2020, 12:46:36 PM by HenryWallaceVP »

Additionally, this economic nationalism as you call it is not just a conservative thing. Friedrich List, the German nationalist economist of the early 19th century, was a political liberal who was greatly inspired by the economic thought of Alexander Hamilton. My father is actually reading a book right now called Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder, which just came out this year. Going back further, you'll find that the Whigs, not the Tories, supported protectionism. In the 17th and 18th centuries the Whigs backed protectionist policies primarily for anti-French/national security  reasons and developed an economic theory to go along with it, while the Tories advocated free trade. It's just not true that classical liberalism and laissez-faire have always gone together, or vice versa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry_argument

http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm (I disavow the paragraph about Lincoln and the Civil War)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whigs_(British_political_party)#Protectionism
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« Reply #185 on: October 15, 2020, 05:22:15 PM »




This is a YouTube video which just came out today that makes a lot of really good points related to our discussion. Have a look at this article as well, comprised of direct quotes from the 19th century:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/abolitionism-socialism-slavery/
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« Reply #186 on: October 17, 2020, 07:10:26 PM »

Additionally, this economic nationalism as you call it is not just a conservative thing. Friedrich List, the German nationalist economist of the early 19th century, was a political liberal who was greatly inspired by the economic thought of Alexander Hamilton. My father is actually reading a book right now called Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder, which just came out this year. Going back further, you'll find that the Whigs, not the Tories, supported protectionism. In the 17th and 18th centuries the Whigs backed protectionist policies primarily for anti-French/national security  reasons and developed an economic theory to go along with it, while the Tories advocated free trade. It's just not true that classical liberalism and laissez-faire have always gone together, or vice versa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry_argument

http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Chang1.htm (I disavow the paragraph about Lincoln and the Civil War)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whigs_(British_political_party)#Protectionism

I am very much familiar with the changes of the Whigs and Tories on economic policy in the 17th and 18th century, but it is necessary to remember two important things. These were motivated by perceived benefits to set interest groups.

Second of all it should be well known obviously that the Tory Party of the pre-1740 period is not the same as the Tory Party of William Pitt the Younger in the 1780s and afterwards, who spent decades acclaiming themselves as Whigs, and denying the Tory label. This goes back to what I said before about new paradigms being created when an old one is settled (with one side rejected), and that is what happened in this case. Furthermore, there was a free trade wing of the Tory Party and later the Conservatives, hence the origination of the Peelite wing of the Party and those Peelites joined the Whigs in the formation of the Liberal Party in the 1850's, leaving a protectionist Conservative Party that was vastly out numbered at the polls by the pro-Free Trade Liberal Party.

It should also be noted that not all Federalists in the US were protectionists, though Hamilton gets the attention. It really must be remembered that the Federalists were a party of merchants and so they backed things that benefited their merchant base and opposed things that harmed it, this informs its opposition to the embargo Act of 1807, the opposition to the War of 1812, support for attempts at secession and also the fact that a small section of Federalists ended up joining the Jacksonians, if memory serves me this was James Buchanan and Roger Taney along with a few others. Its hilarious that a party that defined itself in the 1790s on a strong federal gov't, economic nationalism and uniting the US economically, went out defined by secession, separatism, treason and free trade. Special interests are a hell of a drug.

List is a complicated figure, for instance he opposed protectionism on agricultural products, whereas as applied, such protectionism was much more concerned with the interests that promoted it then philosophically backed selective application thereof and there were and are many instances of protectionism being used to benefit farmers throughout this period and even today on things like sugar. Furthermore there certainly is a decided left conceptualization here that comes about particularly in later phases of the German Historical School of economics, especially when it comes to unions and such forth. That being said, economic nationalism can suit the interests of laborers (protecting labor from foreign labor) and it can suit business (protecting capital invested domestically from foreign competition), this means an alliance of convenience can often be formed between capital and labor, but at the same time it is important to remember who is in the driver's seat in these arrangements as they often determined whether economic nationalism is operating as a left or right context.

For the most part, variable by local interest economically, protectionism was operating on the right in 19th century politics and while this often led to political marriages that seem irrational today, we have well established the strong influence of business on the Republican Party in this thread already and many American industrialists got rich by redirecting commerce to American firms in this fashion. This is much different from the 1970's-2000s situation where labor was the driving force behind protectionism or opposition to free trade, meanwhile capital was leaving them in the dust for foreign markets and cheaper production.

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« Reply #187 on: October 17, 2020, 07:27:46 PM »

Ok, but even if the North was in the dominant position relative to the South, that doesn't make their position any less liberal. It's not how much money you have that determines your ideology, but what ideas you are fighting for. In the case of the Civil War the North was fighting for liberal ones and the South for conservative ones, as defined by the political theorists on both sides. Look at the English Civil War for instance. Read this passage from the speech I linked comparing the American and English Civil Wars:

Quote
In very many respects the position of the Parliament resembled that of the Federal government. Both began the war with great advantages. The Parliament, like the North, held the seat of the national government, and controlled whatever central machinery existed. But the possession of London meant much more than the possession of Washington; it was Washington, New York and Boston in one the headquarters of the administration, the money market, and the intellectual centre united and it had comparatively a larger population than those three cities put together. Oxford, the seat of the royal government, situated almost on the frontier of the territory which the King held, furnishes a sort of analogy to Richmond; year after year the forces of the Parliament marched against it and failed to take it and its fall marked the end of the war.

These are superficial resemblances. It is more important to remember that the Parliament, like the Federal government, possessed far greater financial resources than its adversary. It held the richest part of the country, most of the capitalists lived in its quarters, the taxes it levied were more productive, and it could raise loans with greater facility. In the American Civil War the possession of mines and foundries and factories was one of the elements in the superiority of the North; in our Civil War the simpler economic organisation of the time made the control of the manufacturing districts less vital.

In other words the Roundheads controlled the richer parts of England - the South and East - where Puritanism was strong among the prosperous mercantile bourgeoisie in the coastal cities. By contrast the Royalists received the bulk of their support from the North and West - the poorer sections of the country with stronger remnants of ancestral Catholicism. The Parliamentarians were clearly in a dominant position relative to the Royalists, but you wouldn't say they were the more conservative side, would you?

Also, if you say that "Southern Planters were on the verge of being completely left behind and irrelevant in a country completely defined by different values", doesn't that basically make them reactionaries by definition since they were trying to preserve their feudalistic society in a rapidly changing world?

It is not their position of dominance that determines their ideology, it is that relative position of dominance politically and economically speaking as well as the continued existence of the political divide in that area completely absent the South, which had seceded and than afterwards was largely outnumbered, that puts the North in a position to dictate the terms of the political divide.

That is to say a Northern Conservatism, yes committed ostensibly to the American things, the Declaration and so forth but at the same time very much in tune with both the dominant economic power structure (the robber barons and their economic desires) and also the dominant religious and cultural structure (the Protestant Moral Panic as I heard it term).

This is how you end up with McKinley as the Conservative in 1896 even though the people you cited would have loath to call him a conservative and my response was "they don't get to determined that". The reason they don't get to determine that is because 75% of the country lived in the North.

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« Reply #188 on: October 17, 2020, 07:50:00 PM »




This is a YouTube video which just came out today that makes a lot of really good points related to our discussion. Have a look at this article as well, comprised of direct quotes from the 19th century:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/abolitionism-socialism-slavery/

In the 1960s, Southern politicians blamed the Civil Rights movement on communist influence? Does that mean that every civil rights supporter from conservative supporters like Everett Dirksen and Robert Taft to more liberal supporters like Harry Truman, LBJ and JFK, were all communists?

Likewise in the 1850s, the Southern politicians threw all kinds of crap towards the supporters of abolition. Does that mean that every opponent of the slave power from Francis P. Blair, to more labor populisty Nathaniel P. Banks were Marxist? No of course not.

The South always wants to define things with an us versus them mindset, with everyone that opposes them on anything, being radical communists who want to eat your babies for lunch.

It makes sense that the Left would facilitate and enable this Southern revisionist history, because it stands to benefit them in terms of the narrative. I can think of no bigger match made in hell then this academic shot gun wedding between Lost Cause Neoconfederates and marxist revisionists.

Here is the problem with this argument and painting of the Civil in this manner. There were a range of motivations for people to support the Republican Party and furthermore, when it was just about opposing slave power in 1856, the GOP lost. It was only when they adopted the pro-business Whig platform and moderated their position to containment that the GOP actually won under Lincoln. Process this, it would have never happened were it not for the fact that business in the North was on side with the Republicans. That is what made the political power to win 1860, to win the Civil War and so on, possible.

Also when it comes to WEB Dubois, just who do you think he is talking about when he says "Conservative Businessmen" who worked with the slaveowners? He means pro-business Northern Republicans who realized that that continuing reconstruction was bad for business and bad politics after 1873 and sold black civil rights down the river in 1876 to hold onto power. And as I have already established, these were not newcomers taking over the GOP, they had been there since the beginning practically and had come to a position of such dominance already by 1872, much less 1876.

There is a reason why the Democrats cross endorsed the Liberal Republicans in 1872, which was led by one of the more leftist abolitionists, even in spite of the fact that they were running on an equality plank. It is because Democrats priority at this time was defined those of its poor farmer/poor immigrant/city laboring and artisan base against the business dominated Republican Party of Grant. Its racism arises from this base's innate racist tendencies.

A while ago you dropped a bunch of quotes from Douglass. It is worth noting that Douglass was pining for a GOP that had long ago abandoned the legacy he celebrated while pleading with black voters to stay loyal to the GOP. By the time of WEB Dubois, that ship has long sailed and he is acknowledging the fact with his comments "slave owners and conservative businessmen", and it is worth noting that Dubois paved the way for large scale shift of black voters to the Democratic Party, though that would come some years later.
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darklordoftech
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« Reply #189 on: October 21, 2020, 12:48:25 AM »

I find it interesting that whether in the English Civil War or in American politics, Irish Catholics and Cavaliers have tended to see each other as a lesser evil than Puritans. In ~1854-1928, Democrats were Irish Catholics + Cavaliers and Republicans were Puritans and since ~1968, Republicans have been Irish Catholics + Cavaliers and Democrats have been Puritans.
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« Reply #190 on: October 21, 2020, 03:30:06 AM »
« Edited: October 21, 2020, 03:33:40 AM by Alcibiades »

I find it interesting that whether in the English Civil War or in American politics, Irish Catholics and Cavaliers have tended to see each other as a lesser evil than Puritans. In ~1854-1928, Democrats were Irish Catholics + Cavaliers and Republicans were Puritans and since ~1968, Republicans have been Irish Catholics + Cavaliers and Democrats have been Puritans.

Well first of all, I would not say your post-1968 classification is completely accurate:
-If by Cavaliers you mean the Southern elite, then they were some of the first in the South to abandon the Democrats, but of course many white Southerners were voting Democrat downballot until 2010.
-With Irish Catholics, it’s more a case of having gone from being overwhelmingly Democratic to voting like the white population at large as they assimilated; they are certainly not a strongly Republican group, and in states like MA are still mostly Democratic.
-Puritans/Northern WASPs have definitely gone from being very Republican to mostly Democratic, and this process was already starting in the 60s, but it was not in full swing until the 90s.

As for the English Civil War, initially the Tories (the Cavalier party), were more pro-Catholic than the Whigs (the Puritan party), as the Stuart monarchs were Catholic. Of course at the time, there were very few Irish Catholics in Britain. However, by the late 19th Century (by which time there had been lots of Irish Catholic immigration to Britain), more Catholics were voting Liberal than Tory in an uneasy alliance with the Nonconformists (and many also voted for the Irish Parliamentary Party, which held a seat in Liverpool), and in the 20th century would vote largely for Labour.

The difference between the UK and the US is that in the former, the Cavaliers were the in-group and the Puritans and Catholic were the out-group, while in the US, on a national scale, the Puritans were the in-group and the Cavaliers and Catholics were the out-group (although the Cavaliers were very much the in-group within their own region, the South).

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« Reply #191 on: October 22, 2020, 03:19:35 AM »

It seems that Republicans have always been more eager to build up the military than Democrats.
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« Reply #192 on: October 22, 2020, 09:11:02 PM »

Also don't forget, WJB is considered a conservative culturally by the 1920's against the likes of "progressive" Al Smith. And Al Smith was a Republican by 1940 for all intents and purposes.
I’d argue that there’s a continuity between Cleveland and Smith (Governors of New York, economically moderate, “wet”, cosmopolitan) and between Bryan and McAdoo (rural, “dry”, religious, economically progressive). The laissez-faire capitalist consensus of the 1920s prevented people from paying attention to the economic views of Bryan, McAdoo, and Smith.

Smith was a relatively progressive governor. He always was more moderate then FDR but definitely moved to the right during the New Deal era, some of which may have been owing to intra-party feuds within the New York Democrats.
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« Reply #193 on: October 22, 2020, 09:33:16 PM »
« Edited: October 22, 2020, 09:45:50 PM by Asenath Waite »

It's not that I ignore the progressive movement, actually quite the opposite. The problem is that there isn't one unified progressive movement to speak of prior to the New Deal. Even within the Roosevelt clan there was bitter hostility. Also there is a strong tendency to label establishment ex Whigs like Harrison as Progressives just bc they advance the old Whig economic line, and yet the Whigs are very often regarded as "conservative" and rightly so.

As for drawing lines of continuity, it is not my objective to project or legitimize my own views. I don't have to. From the time I was a young kid studying the early days of the Republic, the whole concept of the parties switching places just didn't work in my brain.

It is not I who is trying to draw lines, it is ex Republicans and their descendents trying to fabricate a history of liberalism to grab hold of and cloak cultural elitism behind faux history. Here are some things to consider. Why is ideology treated as a fixed construct? When you do that you unavoidably hit modern bias. Second a lot of what we consider to be ideology is not actually ideology, it is cultural influence. For instance the GOP became more pro immigration, trade and military when they moved South. This wasn't ideological, it is the local economic interests influencing the party. Think about that and then ask yourself what would a  Northern Conservative look like in 1884, using period definitions for the term?

Harrison was not a liberal  or a progressive. He was a mainstream Whig turned Republican. Even at the time there was a sense that TR was out of place and that is why most of his career involved establishment business types kicking him out or kicking him upstairs to get rid of him.

I was thinking about this post just now. I actually wanted to respond to it a long time ago but was locked out of my account for a long time. I had a similar experience of coming to realize that the "party switch" theory didn't make sense. I actually first noticed it first in high school when I was studying the Civil War and thinking about Lincoln's suspension of Habeus Corpus and how it was Democrats at the time who criticized him heavily and accused him of ignoring the constitution. As a young liberal at the time I drew a parallel in my head to Bush supporters using the Iraq War to justify the suppression of Civil Liberties and accusing Democrats of being traitors in the midst of a war and I think for a while I developed some misguided Copperhead sympathies as a result and would describe myself as a "Jeffersonian Democrat."

Different issues have come to the forefront in the Trump era and obviously Civil Liberties and foreign policy aren't as partisan as they once were. I do notice different parallels in this era though, particularly on immigration and trade. I think we may continue to see other historic parallels become even more apparent in the near future. Modern day liberals who idolize TR hate it when I point this out but to some degree the sort of "National Conservatism" that seems to have been embraced by people like Carlson, Hawley and Rubio is sort of ideologically similar to TRs version of progressive Republicanism in that it combines protectionism and anti-monopoly sentiment with immigration restrictionism. Meanwhile Democrats have an uneasy coalition of centrist free traders like Biden, Cuomo and Newsome on one hand and more populist debtors represented by AOC and Bernie on the other, it's just that in the present day the populist debtors tend to be downwardly mobile urban millennials rather then poor farmers.
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« Reply #194 on: November 02, 2020, 01:40:04 AM »

How did New England go from simple-living Puritans and Quakers to the merchant elites that formed the base of the Federalist Party?
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« Reply #195 on: November 02, 2020, 07:55:53 AM »

How did New England go from simple-living Puritans and Quakers to the merchant elites that formed the base of the Federalist Party?

Pennsylvania wasn't part of New England. That said, New England went into mercantile pursuits because it had to. Its farmland was barely able to feed its people, let alone produce export commodities. If it hadn't been able to develop its maritime industries, it would have been as poor as Appalachia.
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« Reply #196 on: November 02, 2020, 09:41:27 AM »

I'm just going to leave this here:

OP if forced to choose major-party candidates?

Explanation: Democrat, anti-racist, anti-papist. Smiley

Actually I think I'd be a Hughes-Harding-Coolidge-Smith voter (Debs in 1920 and LaFollette in 1924 if third-parties allowed). Since anti-Catholicism in the 1920s came mostly from the Klan rather than Northeasterners, I would've firmly opposed it.

Actually I had no doubts your voting preferences would be exactly like that, but you know I like to trigger you.

By the way, what kind of voter would have feared Al Smith's Catholicism only because of possible ties to Mussolini and Primo de Rivera? It sounds absurd.

A liberal intellectual voter, as I said, who paid close attention to international affairs. It may sound absurd, but at that point the Catholic Church was still a profoundly illiberal institution in bed with reactionaries and dictators across the world. It wasn't just bigoted Southerners or the Klan who feared that a Catholic in power would bring in theocracy or take orders from the Pope, but secular Northern liberals too. In that spirit the National Liberal League had supported the Blaine Amendment some 50 years earlier. Here's a passage from The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism on just that:

Quote
The membership of this movement, largely well-to-do and well educated, came from the old Puritan regions in New England and from the areas of the Puritan diaspora in the upper Middle West, and they had important friends in Congress and even the White House. (President Ulysses S. Grant had made separation part of the Republican agenda.) The Liberals, or "total separationists," as I will call them to distinguish them from the earlier anti-Catholics, were in some respects heterogeneous. Some were atheists, some were Jews, others called themselves agnostics, and still others experimented with various forms of non-Christian "spiritualism" in vogue at the time. None of them saw any reason the United States should have any connection with Christianity, and they girded themselves to battle for "the absolute separation of church and state."

Liberals, then, rejected Christianity--but not Protestant religiosity.

[...]

At first glance, it is startling to see an unapolgetically anti-Christian movement flourish in a nation whose traditions and public institutions were steeped in Protestant Christianity. Yet a closer look would show that the Liberals were really located at the far end of a Protestant continuum [...] Even the Liberals, who disliked all forms of Christianity, could easily agree with the often-voiced Protestant view that Catholics did not think for themselves but took orders from a foreign power. In the campaign to pass the Blaine Amendment, Liberals formed a close working relationship with many pious Protestants. They were able to achieve this kind of working ecumenism because there was a broad Protestant consensus, at least in the North.

Also, somewhat tangentially I remember reading that in 1896 Mark Hanna courted Catholic voters as a winnable bloc for McKinley against the pietist Bryan because he saw the Catholic Church as a global force for conservatism. Furthermore that greatest of classical liberals, William Ewart Gladstone, strongly opposed Catholicism because of its innate conservatism.

I'd also like to address NC Yankee's point regarding the "Liberal Republicans." I get the sense that they called themselves "liberals" in order to distinguish themselves from the Radical Republicans then in charge ("radical" had an almost exclusively left-wing connotation at the time, by the way). In other words, they weren't trying to differentiate themselves from some sort of Republican "conservatism", but rather the radicalism that was then dominant in the party. You could say that their version of "liberal" meant moderate or compromising, a willingness to work with the other side. And yes, the other side was conservative.
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« Reply #197 on: November 02, 2020, 11:57:25 AM »

I'm just going to leave this here:

OP if forced to choose major-party candidates?

Explanation: Democrat, anti-racist, anti-papist. Smiley

Actually I think I'd be a Hughes-Harding-Coolidge-Smith voter (Debs in 1920 and LaFollette in 1924 if third-parties allowed). Since anti-Catholicism in the 1920s came mostly from the Klan rather than Northeasterners, I would've firmly opposed it.

Actually I had no doubts your voting preferences would be exactly like that, but you know I like to trigger you.

By the way, what kind of voter would have feared Al Smith's Catholicism only because of possible ties to Mussolini and Primo de Rivera? It sounds absurd.

A liberal intellectual voter, as I said, who paid close attention to international affairs. It may sound absurd, but at that point the Catholic Church was still a profoundly illiberal institution in bed with reactionaries and dictators across the world. It wasn't just bigoted Southerners or the Klan who feared that a Catholic in power would bring in theocracy or take orders from the Pope, but secular Northern liberals too. In that spirit the National Liberal League had supported the Blaine Amendment some 50 years earlier. Here's a passage from The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism on just that:

Quote
The membership of this movement, largely well-to-do and well educated, came from the old Puritan regions in New England and from the areas of the Puritan diaspora in the upper Middle West, and they had important friends in Congress and even the White House. (President Ulysses S. Grant had made separation part of the Republican agenda.) The Liberals, or "total separationists," as I will call them to distinguish them from the earlier anti-Catholics, were in some respects heterogeneous. Some were atheists, some were Jews, others called themselves agnostics, and still others experimented with various forms of non-Christian "spiritualism" in vogue at the time. None of them saw any reason the United States should have any connection with Christianity, and they girded themselves to battle for "the absolute separation of church and state."

Liberals, then, rejected Christianity--but not Protestant religiosity.

[...]

At first glance, it is startling to see an unapolgetically anti-Christian movement flourish in a nation whose traditions and public institutions were steeped in Protestant Christianity. Yet a closer look would show that the Liberals were really located at the far end of a Protestant continuum [...] Even the Liberals, who disliked all forms of Christianity, could easily agree with the often-voiced Protestant view that Catholics did not think for themselves but took orders from a foreign power. In the campaign to pass the Blaine Amendment, Liberals formed a close working relationship with many pious Protestants. They were able to achieve this kind of working ecumenism because there was a broad Protestant consensus, at least in the North.

Also, somewhat tangentially I remember reading that in 1896 Mark Hanna courted Catholic voters as a winnable bloc for McKinley against the pietist Bryan because he saw the Catholic Church as a global force for conservatism. Furthermore that greatest of classical liberals, William Ewart Gladstone, strongly opposed Catholicism because of its innate conservatism.

I'd also like to address NC Yankee's point regarding the "Liberal Republicans." I get the sense that they called themselves "liberals" in order to distinguish themselves from the Radical Republicans then in charge ("radical" had an almost exclusively left-wing connotation at the time, by the way). In other words, they weren't trying to differentiate themselves from some sort of Republican "conservatism", but rather the radicalism that was then dominant in the party. You could say that their version of "liberal" meant moderate or compromising, a willingness to work with the other side. And yes, the other side was conservative.

You’re implying here that the Liberal Republican Party was some sort of conservative reaction against the “radical” Republican majority. I must say this is incredibly ignorant considering who founded and supported the party...

Carl Schurz: Founder of the Liberal Republican Party, 1848 Revolutionary and GOP Senator from Missouri
Charles Sumner, Abolitionist Republican Senator from Massachusetts
Charles Adams, Free Soiler turned Republican from Massachusetts. Later became a Democrat
Nathaniel P Banks: Abolitionist Democrat turned Republican, Governor of Massachusetts.
John Cochrane: Union General, War Democrat and Radical Democracy candidate from New York
Cassius Clay: Abolitionist Republican from Kentucky, later became a Democrat.
Lyman Trumbull: Democrat turned Republican, Senator from Illinois, later Populist party supporter who represented Eugene Debs and other Labour leaders before the Supreme Court.
Salmon P. Chase: Free Soiler and abolitionist turned Republican from Ohio. Later became a Democrat.
Horace Greeley: Editor of the NY Tribune, long time slavery opponent who often promoted radical ideas in his newspaper (He promoted Thoreau’s works for instance).

This solidifies that the formation of the Liberal Republican Party was rooted in genuine Liberal thought. Whilst it may be hard for present day individuals viewing the past through modern narratives to grasp, there was indeed great concern over the corruption and centralisation of power within the Grant administration, combined with disagreement over issues such as trade, and this motivated many Liberal minded Republicans to abandon it.

As for the two Conservative Parties you mentioned, obviously it was in the interest of the Southern elites to oppose reconstruction, however they obviously didn’t share the same motivations as the Liberal Republicans. Also, the VA party predates the Liberal Republicans whilst the SC party wasn’t formed until 2 years after the election so I’m not sure what you’re getting at here with regards to tying these parties and the LR’s together.
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Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee
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« Reply #198 on: November 02, 2020, 12:05:31 PM »
« Edited: November 02, 2020, 12:08:48 PM by Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee »

I'm just going to leave this here:

OP if forced to choose major-party candidates?

Explanation: Democrat, anti-racist, anti-papist. Smiley

Actually I think I'd be a Hughes-Harding-Coolidge-Smith voter (Debs in 1920 and LaFollette in 1924 if third-parties allowed). Since anti-Catholicism in the 1920s came mostly from the Klan rather than Northeasterners, I would've firmly opposed it.

Actually I had no doubts your voting preferences would be exactly like that, but you know I like to trigger you.

By the way, what kind of voter would have feared Al Smith's Catholicism only because of possible ties to Mussolini and Primo de Rivera? It sounds absurd.

A liberal intellectual voter, as I said, who paid close attention to international affairs. It may sound absurd, but at that point the Catholic Church was still a profoundly illiberal institution in bed with reactionaries and dictators across the world. It wasn't just bigoted Southerners or the Klan who feared that a Catholic in power would bring in theocracy or take orders from the Pope, but secular Northern liberals too. In that spirit the National Liberal League had supported the Blaine Amendment some 50 years earlier. Here's a passage from The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism on just that:

Quote
The membership of this movement, largely well-to-do and well educated, came from the old Puritan regions in New England and from the areas of the Puritan diaspora in the upper Middle West, and they had important friends in Congress and even the White House. (President Ulysses S. Grant had made separation part of the Republican agenda.) The Liberals, or "total separationists," as I will call them to distinguish them from the earlier anti-Catholics, were in some respects heterogeneous. Some were atheists, some were Jews, others called themselves agnostics, and still others experimented with various forms of non-Christian "spiritualism" in vogue at the time. None of them saw any reason the United States should have any connection with Christianity, and they girded themselves to battle for "the absolute separation of church and state."

Liberals, then, rejected Christianity--but not Protestant religiosity.

[...]

At first glance, it is startling to see an unapolgetically anti-Christian movement flourish in a nation whose traditions and public institutions were steeped in Protestant Christianity. Yet a closer look would show that the Liberals were really located at the far end of a Protestant continuum [...] Even the Liberals, who disliked all forms of Christianity, could easily agree with the often-voiced Protestant view that Catholics did not think for themselves but took orders from a foreign power. In the campaign to pass the Blaine Amendment, Liberals formed a close working relationship with many pious Protestants. They were able to achieve this kind of working ecumenism because there was a broad Protestant consensus, at least in the North.

Also, somewhat tangentially I remember reading that in 1896 Mark Hanna courted Catholic voters as a winnable bloc for McKinley against the pietist Bryan because he saw the Catholic Church as a global force for conservatism. Furthermore that greatest of classical liberals, William Ewart Gladstone, strongly opposed Catholicism because of its innate conservatism.

I'd also like to address NC Yankee's point regarding the "Liberal Republicans." I get the sense that they called themselves "liberals" in order to distinguish themselves from the Radical Republicans then in charge ("radical" had an almost exclusively left-wing connotation at the time, by the way). In other words, they weren't trying to differentiate themselves from some sort of Republican "conservatism", but rather the radicalism that was then dominant in the party. You could say that their version of "liberal" meant moderate or compromising, a willingness to work with the other side. And yes, the other side was conservative.

There were numerous radical Republicans in the ranks of the Liberal Republicans, though. This includes of course Horace Greeley himself, which you have cited in the past as indicative of far left radicalism of the early Republican Party. There was also a radical equality plank in the platform of the Liberal Republicans.

You are right about their being a divide between Liberal Republicans on the one hand and Radical Republicans on the other in certain situations. I have even cited in the past the relationship that Nathaniel P. Banks had with Radical Republicans in the MA political scene. The ironic thing about this dynamic is the selective radicalism I have described before, whereby Banks being rather pro-labor, found himself opposed by a number of "radical" Republicans who were bought and paid for by business interests. There were a number of these in Massachusetts by this point in time in the late 1860's. This is a common dynamic where a set of social issues is hijacked with the pro-business side taking more extreme positions to one up their tribal opponents. The same way Southern business types often "out-segged" more populist and Progressive Democrats through the mid 20th century, Northern business types would have been inclined to out radical and "out wave the bloody shirt", relative to their populist and pro-labor rivals on race within the GOP in the 1860's and early 1870s. Bank's support for the Liberal Republicans was stated to be because of the drift of the GOP towards a more pro-business footing.

As for the Democrats, I have explained this repeatedly. The vast majority of the Democratic party was immigrants and small rural farmers. They were opposed to equality, because their base was racist and prejudiced from the draft riots to fighting for the South in the Civil War, thus making for an alliance of convenience with Conservative Planters (now shut out of the dominant political power structure) easy. The fact that a bunch of planters and their politicians, some of whom were led by former Whigs even like here in NC with Zebulon Vance, called themselves "Conservatives" and allied with the Democratic Party does not change the nature of the Democratic Party's long standing political base, or its orientation on issues both in terms of economics and religion towards the other party.

Furthermore, the Democrats overlooked the Radical Republicans equality plank to endorse a radical abolitionist with Marxist Sympathies as you have noted yourself in 1872. The reason being is that by this point in time the Republican Party was completely owned and dominated by robber barons and speculators, long the enemies of the Democratic Party's traditional base, as they were often the ones steeling their land for railroads or taking it via banks foreclosing on their loans.

There is a desire here it seems to paint a broad brush whereby every Radical Republican is a marxist and every Democrat is a Conservative plantation owner. I think therein lies the problem here, one of over generalization as well as discounting other political issues which by the 1870s were beginning to rise to the forefront again as the Civil War receded to the background and especially so with the Panic of 73 a year later.
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« Reply #199 on: November 02, 2020, 03:50:13 PM »

(I'd written out a lengthy reply and the time-out ate it —gah!)

There is a desire here it seems to paint a broad brush whereby every Radical Republican is a marxist and every Democrat is a Conservative plantation owner. I think therein lies the problem here, one of over generalization as well as discounting other political issues which by the 1870s were beginning to rise to the forefront again as the Civil War receded to the background and especially so with the Panic of 73 a year later.
THIS.

While today's progressives are quite understandably inclined to sympathize with Radical Reconstruction given the obvious benefits for modern America had it succeeded (and I am one of these people), at the time many so-called Liberal Republicans—Sumner, Chase, Greeley—objected to the most extreme proposals for Reconstruction precisely because they went against their liberal, democratic values. To illustrate this by way of an imperfect example, it is easy to imagine many liberals today having problems with a plan to defund the police that included the permanent mass disenfranchisement of current and former law enforcement officials and confiscation of private property. Similarly, many Republican radicals were genuinely torn between their commitment to protecting the rights for former slaves and the sometimes illiberal means necessary to uphold Reconstruction. Whether the ends justify the means is a conversation for another thread, but it should at least be possible to understand why they felt this way.

Yankee brings up economics/class issues as a motive for the Liberal–Democratic alliance in 1872, and it's worth remembering that many of the first generation Radical Republicans were in fact former Democrats or Free Soil men —Hamlin, Hale, Frémont, Wilmot, and Chase, to name a few. Those who remained in the Republican party after 1874 were mostly former Whigs, reflecting the reversion to a class-based party system as Reconstruction faded into the background. An interesting case is that of Charles Francis Adams, a Conscience Whig-turned-Free Soil man who became a Democrat after 1872, voted for Tilden in 1876 and Hancock in 1880.

Also, it's worth noting that while, yes, "radical" can usually be read as "left-wing" in the nineteenth century, radicalism is not socialism or Marxism and it is a very, very bad idea to confuse the two. (The direct lineal descendants of the English radicals are the Liberal Democrats, for instance.) The radicals didn't become socialists, they were supplanted by them as radicalism grew obsolete and its policy prescriptions insufficient to address the political situation of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. So it's fine to say the Radical Republicans were left wing for their time, but there are important differences between their worldview and that of contemporary progressives that are not entirely contextual.
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