Historical continuity of Democrats and Republicans

[Orser67]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

As college-educated whites increasingly move towards the Democratic Party, I think that there are some parallels to the Second Party System (~1828-1856). The Whigs were the party of the elites and metropolitan areas and generally favored more governmental intervention, the Democrats were the party of rural voters and generally opposed to government action. To be clear, there are still major differences, most notably to me with regard to the goals of today's Democratic Party as opposed to the Whigs.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

Yes it needs to be qualified along the lines that I used a few days ago. Not in a position to do that right now on my phone.

[Wikipedia delenda est]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

Yes it needs to be qualified along the lines that I used a few days ago. Not in a position to do that right now on my phone.

That’s funny, I didn’t see you mention African-Americans in any of your previous posts in this thread.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

Yes it needs to be qualified along the lines that I used a few days ago. Not in a position to do that right now on my phone.

That’s funny, I didn’t see you mention African-Americans in any of your previous posts in this thread.

I assume Yankee is responding to the second part of my post ("lost in trying to be overly simplistic"). There's more that's problematic about Orser67's analysis than neglecting to mention African-Americans.

[Orser67]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

Yes it needs to be qualified along the lines that I used a few days ago. Not in a position to do that right now on my phone.

That’s funny, I didn’t see you mention African-Americans in any of your previous posts in this thread.

I assume Yankee is responding to the second part of my post ("lost in trying to be overly simplistic"). There's more that's problematic about Orser67's analysis than neglecting to mention African-Americans.

I agree that African Americans are the clear exception to the general rule I laid out before, but it's worth mentioning that very few African Americans could actually vote between the end of Reconstruction and the 1930s, when they mostly shifted into the Democratic Party. So there was a brief period (1865-1876) when African Americans were a critical part of the Republican coalition, but unfortunately they were largely disenfranchised during the period they were aligned with the Republican Party.

I am interested in what other parts of my general theory you disagree with, but please understand that I generally don't lay out my full argument on these types of forums unless people ask for more detail.

[Wikipedia delenda est]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

Yes it needs to be qualified along the lines that I used a few days ago. Not in a position to do that right now on my phone.

That’s funny, I didn’t see you mention African-Americans in any of your previous posts in this thread.

I assume Yankee is responding to the second part of my post ("lost in trying to be overly simplistic"). There's more that's problematic about Orser67's analysis than neglecting to mention African-Americans.

Actually, I believe Yankee may have been referring to his posts in this thread, in which he did in fact talk extensively on black voting patterns. I now recognize that my previous post was uncalled for, so I apologize. In any case, I still do believe that it's wrong to view the Republicans as always having been the more conservative party, as Yankee and some others seem to.

I also happen to feel that Yankee and others engage in some motivated reasoning. Since they're Republicans, they want to be able to draw a connection from themselves to the "good old Republicans" that everyone respects like Lincoln and Teddy. That way they can say, "see, those Republicans were conservatives too", even when the contemporary Republican party is nothing like the old one. Of course, I probably engage in the same sort of motivated reasoning from the other end by portraying those Republicans as overly liberal.

But I still do think that Yankee and co. tend to ignore the elephant in the room, the Progressive movement, when talking about the history of the Republican party. Yes, the national party in the Gilded Age was in bed with big business, but what about all the Western Republican progressives, and what about TR? And it's not like the Democrats were any more pro-worker or less pro-business (unless you view free trade in that way), and I think it's fair to say that the Progressive movement was more active inside the Republican party than the Democratic one.

Overall though, in the Gilded Age neither party really had a coherent ideology. There were progressives and conservatives in both parties, many of whom were closer politically to their fellow progressives across the aisle than their more conservative party members. Maybe, then, it's not helpful to consider either party more conservative or liberal. Perhaps a progressive-conservative distinction is more useful, similar to how some historians view the traditional Court-Country divide as still more relevant in 1690s England than the emerging Whig-Tory party system.

Edit: I realize that I ignored your earlier point about progressive conservatism, but what else am I supposed to call the opponents of progressives but conservatives? Well, now that I think about it non-progressive might be more fitting. Actually, I rather like that, implying as it does that the main political division of the Progressive Era was over its ideological namesake rather than between liberals and conservatives.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I don't think those aspersions are called for. Yankee in particular has been outspoken in calling out present-day Republicans for their hypocrisies, especially when it comes to movement conservatism. I certainly have no interest in defending the GOP, yet find your analysis similarly deficient for much the same reasons. Let's leave the personal invective at the door, in the absence of any evidence to support it beyond mere conjecture.

But I still do think that Yankee and co. tend to ignore the elephant in the room, the Progressive movement, when talking about the history of the Republican party. Yes, the national party in the Gilded Age was in bed with big business, but what about all the Western Republican progressives, and what about TR?

Yes, what about them? Certainly we can agree that Teddy and his progressive brothers-in-arms would have much to say about the present state of the Republican party. Ultimately, whether Roosevelt reflects the motives and values of Reagan-era conservatism has a clear answer (no) and is not a very interesting question. What is an interesting question, and far more useful if we hope to understand what made Roosevelt and the progressives unique, is: how is he different?

Roosevelt (and his particular brand of progressive) believed in balance. He opposed the excessive concentration of wealth and power in the hands of capital, because he saw such as inherently dangerous to free enterprise. If competition is the lifeblood of the market economy, then a monopoly is a parasite: left alive, it will drain the host until it kills him. This is, with some important differences, the Marxist critique of capitalism. But where Marx looked to the collapse of the capitalist system as the salvation of the international proletariat, Roosevelt saw the same future —and feared it. He did not want capital to be all-powerful in the American economy, but he did not want labor to be ascendant, either. He fundamentally distrusted left-wing politics and loathed Bryan and Debs as dangerous radicals. His constituency was not the union organizer, but the middle class consumer. That is why, in the 1902 miners strike, he intervened to grant the miners' demands —but not recognition of the union. In that particular case, capital wielded excessive power and was in the wrong, but Roosevelt had no doubt that labor would do the same in a similar position.

Roosevelt did not believe that a fair society would naturally tend towards egalitarianism. This sets him apart from liberal thinkers from Rousseau to Bryan, who did believe that and attributed class inequality to artificial divisions imposed from on high. Rousseau blamed the state; Bryan blamed the financial interests; Debs blamed the capitalist system itself. All three were leftists of some stripe or another, because they rejected the notion of a "natural aristocracy." Roosevelt was fundamentally opposed to this view. His philosophy of the "strenuous life" presumed that some are strong and some are weak, and the strong are inherently more deserving of worldly success, be that glory, riches, or power. His imperialism was not an accident; it grew naturally from his ideology.

Unlike the conservative wing of his party, Roosevelt did not believe that supremacy justifies cruelty. He came from old money, and part of that was a patrician feeling of responsibility to the lower classes. His was a paternalistic concern for the wellbeing of the masses, much in the spirit of a feudal lord for his vassals. This branch of conservatism has all but died out today, but it is conservatism —for the simple reason that it rejects both liberal egalitarianism and communism as the description of life after the end of history.

The Western progressives are another matter: in many ways they were opposed to the Rooseveltian school, and represent the (now lost) radical pedigree of the pre-war Republican party. But it would be a mistake to confuse their progressivism with leftism. As before, these men and women did not want to dismantle capitalism, and they did not want to achieve an egalitarian society. Those that did weren't Republicans —though they mostly weren't Democrats, either. Leftist third parties were quite strong in the Western states during this period, as you'll know; sometimes they allied themselves with either of the major parties to gain a foothold, but often they did not. Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota maintained strong third party organizations well into the twentieth century, most of which had their origins in progressive-era opposition to machine politics.

And it's not like the Democrats were any more pro-worker or less pro-business (unless you view free trade in that way),

Well, yes. The Democratic party of the late nineteenth century was a liberal (as the term was then understood) and not a labor party. They did not align themselves with the interests of the working classes, because they did not feel that was appropriate: even Bryan, who was far from being a conservative in the way that term is usually understood, either colloquially or academically, could not free himself from the Jeffersonian predisposition towards the small farmer as the ideal American citizen to embrace the urban-oriented labor politics that Debs, for instance, championed. Yet I assume you are well-versed enough in the subject matter to know that this is not a contradiction in terms: indeed, laissez faire opposition to state intervention in the economy remains the bread and butter of Continental liberals even today. (Only the uniquely American abomination of the two-party system has led us to consider liberalism as inherently more friendly to labor than conservatism: this has to do with the way in which American liberalism developed in the early twentieth century after the final collapse of the Populists, but that is a different —albeit relevant —conversation.)

If you're a working class voter in 1904, you'll vote for the progressive Republican over the Bourbon Democrat as a matter of practicality —but that doesn't make the former liberal, let alone laborite.

and I think it's fair to say that the Progressive movement was more active inside the Republican party than the Democratic one.

Quite fair. But "progressive" does not mean "left" or "liberal." As I have already expounded on here and elsewhere, it is quite possible to support progressive policies for essentially conservative reasons. Many professed progressives were in favor of eugenics and prohibition, for instance: were those left-wing causes?

Overall though, in the Gilded Age neither party really had a coherent ideology. There were progressives and conservatives in both parties, many of whom were closer politically to their fellow progressives across the aisle than their more conservative party members. Maybe, then, it's not helpful to consider either party more conservative or liberal. Perhaps a progressive-conservative distinction is more useful, similar to how some historians view the traditional Court-Country divide as still more relevant in 1690s England than the emerging Whig-Tory party system.

This is a common analysis in popular history, and a bad one. The Republican and Democratic parties of the late nineteenth century were ideologically distinct; they were simply not distinct in ways that we find compelling from our modern perspective. Just as a Green party voter might form a similar impression of the major parties today, however, this does not mean that no distinction exists: it merely speaks to the extent to which our priorities have changed in the last century.

Dichotomies are always fraught, but it would be more correct to say that a 'progressive-conservative' distinction existed within both parties, with Republican progressives allied sometimes with Democratic progressives against the conservatives in both parties, and sometimes with Republican conservatives against the Democrats. The most famous example of the former occurred in 1912, when Bob La Follette led his supporters out of the RNC to endorse Wilson; the latter event took place four years later, when Roosevelt turned down the Bull Moose nomination for fear of four more years of Wilson.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Edit: I realize that I ignored your earlier point about progressive conservatism, but what else am I supposed to call the opponents of progressives but conservatives? Well, now that I think about it non-progressive might be more fitting. Actually, I rather like that, implying as it does that the main political division of the Progressive Era was over its ideological namesake rather than between liberals and conservatives.

In fairness, yes, this is a particularly inconvenient lexical gap. With liberalism, at least we have the helpful term "Bourbon Democrat" to distinguish between the progressives and the liberal conservatives, but no such luck on the right flank.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

Yes it needs to be qualified along the lines that I used a few days ago. Not in a position to do that right now on my phone.

That’s funny, I didn’t see you mention African-Americans in any of your previous posts in this thread.

I assume Yankee is responding to the second part of my post ("lost in trying to be overly simplistic"). There's more that's problematic about Orser67's analysis than neglecting to mention African-Americans.

Actually, I believe Yankee may have been referring to his posts in this thread, in which he did in fact talk extensively on black voting patterns. I now recognize that my previous post was uncalled for, so I apologize. In any case, I still do believe that it's wrong to view the Republicans as always having been the more conservative party, as Yankee and some others seem to.

It has always been the more conservative party.

I also happen to feel that Yankee and others engage in some motivated reasoning. Since they're Republicans, they want to be able to draw a connection from themselves to the "good old Republicans" that everyone respects like Lincoln and Teddy. That way they can say, "see, those Republicans were conservatives too", even when the contemporary Republican party is nothing like the old one. Of course, I probably engage in the same sort of motivated reasoning from the other end by portraying those Republicans as overly liberal.

I am trying to break apart an academic consensus that is wrong. How the hell can you label Federalists as "conservatives" while advancing big gov't, Whigs Conservative while advancing economic nationalism and suddenly because it is the 1890's, these same positions are "liberal" or "progressive". Why is there some magic line after which modern definitions (with incumbent distortions) are suddenly appropriate? NO that is not how it works. The traditional narrative here is wrong and the inconsistency has been so obvious for 15 years that it practically smacks me right into the face. John Adams was the conservative candidate in 1796. Henry Clay was the Conservative candidate in 1832 and William McKinley was the Conservative candidate in 1896.

Screw it going bold: Lincoln was the conservative choice in 1860 against radical separatists and their apologists, and naive washed up has-beens: Line of conservative thought to which Lincoln appealed can be found in this post: https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=371767.msg7326666#msg7326666

But I still do think that Yankee and co. tend to ignore the elephant in the room, the Progressive movement, when talking about the history of the Republican party. Yes, the national party in the Gilded Age was in bed with big business, but what about all the Western Republican progressives, and what about TR? And it's not like the Democrats were any more pro-worker or less pro-business (unless you view free trade in that way), and I think it's fair to say that the Progressive movement was more active inside the Republican party than the Democratic one.

I literally mentioned them in the thread you linked as did Wazza. The Western Progressives didn't control the party. Neither did TR. The Party was dominated by the NE establishment, which itself was tied to big business. This establishment only moved left economically, when it was forced to by the New Deal, unionization and the Greatest Generation voting patterns.

Overall though, in the Gilded Age neither party really had a coherent ideology. There were progressives and conservatives in both parties, many of whom were closer politically to their fellow progressives across the aisle than their more conservative party members. Maybe, then, it's not helpful to consider either party more conservative or liberal. Perhaps a progressive-conservative distinction is more useful, similar to how some historians view the traditional Court-Country divide as still more relevant in 1690s England than the emerging Whig-Tory party system.

Oh god the pain:

The closest parallel that can be informative is the post Civil War period. This is often wrongly taught today emphasizing too much that there was a "lack of disagreement" between the two parties. This is fundamentally false, appropriating modern understandings of policy (especially economic) onto a past period. The Republicans, the party of Yankee whites and the Democrats, the part of White Southerners, Irish and other immigrants. The Democrats viewed the success of their opponents as an existential threat to either Southern culture or Irish political and religious rights, or both. Republicans viewed the success of the Democrats as an economic threat risking complete devastation to their wealth and power achieved in the Industrial Revolution and also a demographic threat in the form of displacement by immigrant groups (some things never change).

There is always a post.

One of the worst examples of historical distortion is the mantra that the parties in the late 19th century had "no concrete policy differences" or "no coherent ideology". This is WRONG. Say it with me: This is modern centrict definitions being wrongly applied to a historical context.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Roosevelt (and his particular brand of progressive) believed in balance. He opposed the excessive concentration of wealth and power in the hands of capital, because he saw such as inherently dangerous to free enterprise. If competition is the lifeblood of the market economy, then a monopoly is a parasite: left alive, it will drain the host until it kills him. This is, with some important differences, the Marxist critique of capitalism. But where Marx looked to the collapse of the capitalist system as the salvation of the international proletariat, Roosevelt saw the same future —and feared it. He did not want capital to be all-powerful in the American economy, but he did not want labor to be ascendant, either. He fundamentally distrusted left-wing politics and loathed Bryan and Debs as dangerous radicals. His constituency was not the union organizer, but the middle class consumer. That is why, in the 1902 miners strike, he intervened to grant the miners' demands —but not recognition of the union. In that particular case, capital wielded excessive power and was in the wrong, but Roosevelt had no doubt that labor would do the same in a similar position.

Roosevelt did not believe that a fair society would naturally tend towards egalitarianism. This sets him apart from liberal thinkers from Rousseau to Bryan, who did believe that and attributed class inequality to artificial divisions imposed from on high. Rousseau blamed the state; Bryan blamed the financial interests; Debs blamed the capitalist system itself. All three were leftists of some stripe or another, because they rejected the notion of a "natural aristocracy." Roosevelt was fundamentally opposed to this view. His philosophy of the "strenuous life" presumed that some are strong and some are weak, and the strong are inherently more deserving of worldly success, be that glory, riches, or power. His imperialism was not an accident; it grew naturally from his ideology.

Unlike the conservative wing of his party, Roosevelt did not believe that supremacy justifies cruelty. He came from old money, and part of that was a patrician feeling of responsibility to the lower classes. His was a paternalistic concern for the wellbeing of the masses, much in the spirit of a feudal lord for his vassals. This branch of conservatism has all but died out today, but it is conservatism —for the simple reason that it rejects both liberal egalitarianism and communism as the description of life after the end of history.

Yes for the love of god fing yes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternalistic_conservatism#One-nation_conservatism.

And this is why labeling everyone in this period with the same "policies" a progressive is so misleading and wrong. Policies aren't one's ideology, contrary to what modern understandings on the left and right want you to believe (they want sheep not thinkers).

[Wazza [INACTIVE]]

Where would this forum be without Truman and Yankee? : D

I also happen to feel that Yankee and others engage in some motivated reasoning. Since they're Republicans, they want to be able to draw a connection from themselves to the "good old Republicans" that everyone respects like Lincoln and Teddy. That way they can say, "see, those Republicans were conservatives too", even when the contemporary Republican party is nothing like the old one. Of course, I probably engage in the same sort of motivated reasoning from the other end by portraying those Republicans as overly liberal.

Funny you say that considering the blue avatars that have a tendency to post in these sorts of threads such as Yankee, RINO Tom, myself (though I’m not an actual registered Republican for obvious reasons), etc. would all be considered ideological outliers in the modern GOP and (especially Yankee) have repeatedly criticised the GOP and Trump administration's actions and policies. You on the other hand come off as generally quite entrenched within the “Progressisphere” of the Democratic Party. If I were in your position I wouldn’t accuse others of being hacks or pushing bad faith arguments...

No one is saying that Teddy Roosevelt would be a free market worshipping Reaganite today and no one really is looking to be an apologist for the contemporary Republican Party. I (and I’m sure the others as well) have a distaste towards the simplification of topics like history and politics for the sake of convenience, wether that be Americans who can’t think outside the “big vs small gov” box, shoddy YouTube bro-facts channels or as Yankee said the creation of reliable political foot soldiers. So when I see takes like “Kennedy would be a Republican today because he cut taxes” and “Eisenhower would be a Democrat today because he accepted the New Deal” or copouts like “The 19th century parties were pretty much the same a mix of conservatives and progressives blah blah blah” it does irritate me.

[Wikipedia delenda est]

Ok, fine. The Gilded Age Republicans were conservatives, the Democrats liberals, both in the classical sense and meaning very different things from today. But if that's really the case, I'm curious, did Republicans back then describe themselves as conservatives, and Democrats as liberals, like they do today? Did other contemporary observers describe them in those ways? Considering the names of the British parties at this time, I don't think I'm being modern centric here.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Ok, fine. The Gilded Age Republicans were conservatives, the Democrats liberals, both in the classical sense and meaning very different things from today. But if that's really the case, I'm curious, did Republicans back then describe themselves as conservatives, and Democrats as liberals, like they do today? Did other contemporary observers describe them in those ways? Considering the names of the British parties at this time, I don't think I'm being modern centric here.

I think this is actually a very good question and, were I an Americanist (I am not), something I'd be keen to answer. I think you've probably a better chance of seeing the Democrats described as "liberals" than Republicans as "conservatives" in that period. I don't really have a reason to explain this other than the fact that I feel like Jefferson and Jackson were more emphatically identified in the past as part of a liberal tradition than their counterparts were as part of their own ideological lineage (Republican rhetoric--I'm going off a few limited impressions here--seems to have been more centered around the idea of the "nation" and patriotic service in the Civil War than around "an unbroken ideological tradition from the Founding to present" in this era; think maybe patriotism over substance and also the lack of truly iconic presidents to look to between Washington and Lincoln, and Lincoln's own association with victory and patriotism). The 1st party system in this sense is rather explicit in terms of who the American "Jacobins" were (Jefferson, Burr), and as I've said years before on this forum, the lines are most blurred from our perspective in the 1824-1896 period (aka 2nd and 3rd party systems), and I know a lot less about the nature of political rhetoric in the era of the Whigs and the first Republicans.

[darklordoftech]

I definitely see a parallel between the Silver Standard in 1892 and 1896 and student debt forgiveness and publicly-funded college today. A group of people in debt as a result of a recession hoping for the government to relieve them of debt and waging war against moderate Democrats, who they perceive as controlled by Wall Street.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Ok, fine. The Gilded Age Republicans were conservatives, the Democrats liberals, both in the classical sense and meaning very different things from today. But if that's really the case, I'm curious, did Republicans back then describe themselves as conservatives, and Democrats as liberals, like they do today? Did other contemporary observers describe them in those ways? Considering the names of the British parties at this time, I don't think I'm being modern centric here.

I am going to regret making a partial post on my phone from work. Back then there wasn't the Pence mindset in terms of emphasizing ideology over party. What they did do is emphasize the derivitive points and those points in turn serve as standard tropes for one ideology or the other. Also there would be general loyalty to the party bc the party was seen as a loyal vehicle for the advancement of those tropes.

I will add more later when I get home. I got a book to cite for Caths point to narrow his range of years.

[Skill and Chance]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

Yes it needs to be qualified along the lines that I used a few days ago. Not in a position to do that right now on my phone.

That’s funny, I didn’t see you mention African-Americans in any of your previous posts in this thread.

I assume Yankee is responding to the second part of my post ("lost in trying to be overly simplistic"). There's more that's problematic about Orser67's analysis than neglecting to mention African-Americans.

I agree that African Americans are the clear exception to the general rule I laid out before, but it's worth mentioning that very few African Americans could actually vote between the end of Reconstruction and the 1930s, when they mostly shifted into the Democratic Party. So there was a brief period (1865-1876) when African Americans were a critical part of the Republican coalition, but unfortunately they were largely disenfranchised during the period they were aligned with the Republican Party.

I am interested in what other parts of my general theory you disagree with, but please understand that I generally don't lay out my full argument on these types of forums unless people ask for more detail.

As an alternative history, I am really interested in what might have happened if Harrison got to sign his proto-VRA "Force Bill" into law in 1890?  Assume he gets reelected.  Democrats are clearly going to take over after the Panic of 1893 and will either quit enforcing it or just repeal it outright, but Harrison's 2nd term will mean a good 6 years of strong enforcement for black voters to regain control of some Southern state governments where they were at or close to a majority of the statewide population. In some states, this would have to be done in coalition with some poor white voters opposed to the planter elite.  That actually happened for 2 or 3 elections in NC in the 1890's without anything like the VRA, so this isn't crazy.  It's conceivable that Jim Crow laws could be permanently blocked at the state level in some states, while the system hardens after 1896 in other neighboring states. 

Could cross-racial anti-elite Southern coalitions become a permanent feature of Republican politics?

[Orser67]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

Yes it needs to be qualified along the lines that I used a few days ago. Not in a position to do that right now on my phone.

That’s funny, I didn’t see you mention African-Americans in any of your previous posts in this thread.

I assume Yankee is responding to the second part of my post ("lost in trying to be overly simplistic"). There's more that's problematic about Orser67's analysis than neglecting to mention African-Americans.

I agree that African Americans are the clear exception to the general rule I laid out before, but it's worth mentioning that very few African Americans could actually vote between the end of Reconstruction and the 1930s, when they mostly shifted into the Democratic Party. So there was a brief period (1865-1876) when African Americans were a critical part of the Republican coalition, but unfortunately they were largely disenfranchised during the period they were aligned with the Republican Party.

I am interested in what other parts of my general theory you disagree with, but please understand that I generally don't lay out my full argument on these types of forums unless people ask for more detail.

As an alternative history, I am really interested in what might have happened if Harrison got to sign his proto-VRA "Force Bill" into law in 1890?  Assume he gets reelected.  Democrats are clearly going to take over after the Panic of 1893 and will either quit enforcing it or just repeal it outright, but Harrison's 2nd term will mean a good 6 years of strong enforcement for black voters to regain control of some Southern state governments where they were at or close to a majority of the statewide population. In some states, this would have to be done in coalition with some poor white voters opposed to the planter elite.  That actually happened for 2 or 3 elections in NC in the 1890's without anything like the VRA, so this isn't crazy.  It's conceivable that Jim Crow laws could be permanently blocked at the state level in some states, while the system hardens after 1896 in other neighboring states. 

Could cross-racial anti-elite Southern coalitions become a permanent feature of Republican politics?

That would be fascinating. The Populists actually did have some success outside of NC in building up a cross-racial coalition of voters, and it was partly the threat of this movement that led to the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s (to be clear, Democrats had already taken control of the South following the end of Reconstruction, but it was only in the late 1890s and early 1900s that the South really became a one-party system). But perhaps the extra intervention of the federal government could have been enough to establish some durable cross-racial coalitions.

On the other hand, especially with a Democrat in the White House in 1897, it seems entirely plausible that Southerners would respond much as they did in NC: with a violent crackdown that re-established conservative, white, Democratic control of the South.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

While we're all eagerly awaiting Yankee's post, I'll throw in some general observations drawn from my own experience working with primary sources. (My recent reading has focussed on sources of mid-nineteenth century provenance, so of course not all of it is applicable to the Gilded Age.)

(i) There is a strong trope running through nineteenth century partisan rhetoric of establishing a dichotomy at the outset, against which the rest of the address is arranged. I'm reminded of a particular speech by Seward, made in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, in which he explains the political predicament of his day as a battle between labor and capital (!). Of course, he does not adopt these terms as Marx gives them to us; but defines "labor" as all professional men who work for their living (wage laborers, yes, but also farmers and businessmen —a union of the proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie) and "capital" as those whose wealth is derived from the value of their property (bankers, speculators, and of course slaveholders). So at once we see that this is a class-based worldview, but one that proposes an all-embracing middle class as the constituency of the new Republican party. This goes back to what I referred to before as progressive conservatism, and what Yankee has called national ("one nation") conservatism. Depending on the moment and the issue, you might see "labor" and "capital" replaced with the two sides of any issue that was seen to embody the ground on which an election was to be fought —"Cotton" vs. "Conscience" Whigs, etc.

(ii) Ideological markers were used (though as Yankee notes, differently from how we might use them today), but they were not the same markers we are accustomed to. "Conservative" meant something like "moderate," so of course every politician argued that he and his party represented the conservative interest, and his opposition were dangerous insurrectionists/reactionaries —as the case may have it. "Radical" and its less frequent cousin, "ultra," were more openly ideological. This is not a hard rule —but in general "radical" refers to causes of the ""left"" and "ultra" to causes of the ""right."" Both were pejoratives, denoting a position outside the mainstream —i.e. not conservative. I've bracketed "left" and "right" with scare quotes because Radicalism was not really leftism as we would imagine it. It is a callback to a time when Liberalism was viewed as a disruptive and potentially revolutionary force: the English Chartists, and of course their predecessors as the bogeyman of Europe, the Jacobins, being exemplary of this. Though the term is more commonly associated with the leaders of Congressional Reconstruction, the original Radical Republicans had begun their careers as Jacksonian Democrats: John C. Frémont, Salmon P. Chase, Hannibal Hamlin, and David Wilmott being just a few. (After the Civil War was ended, many of these were gradually reabsorbed into the Democratic fold by way of the Liberal Republican party, along with a few former "Conscience Whigs" who would become Bourbon Democrats in the changing economic landscape, most notably Charles Francis Adams.) Then you have the plethora of factional nicknames —Barnburners, Bourbons, Stalwarts, Halfbreeds, etc. —which indicated the applicant's affiliation in various inter-party squabbles, some of which had ideological implications, some of which did not.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Ok, fine. The Gilded Age Republicans were conservatives, the Democrats liberals, both in the classical sense and meaning very different things from today. But if that's really the case, I'm curious, did Republicans back then describe themselves as conservatives, and Democrats as liberals, like they do today? Did other contemporary observers describe them in those ways? Considering the names of the British parties at this time, I don't think I'm being modern centric here.

I think this is actually a very good question and, were I an Americanist (I am not), something I'd be keen to answer. I think you've probably a better chance of seeing the Democrats described as "liberals" than Republicans as "conservatives" in that period. I don't really have a reason to explain this other than the fact that I feel like Jefferson and Jackson were more emphatically identified in the past as part of a liberal tradition than their counterparts were as part of their own ideological lineage (Republican rhetoric--I'm going off a few limited impressions here--seems to have been more centered around the idea of the "nation" and patriotic service in the Civil War than around "an unbroken ideological tradition from the Founding to present" in this era; think maybe patriotism over substance and also the lack of truly iconic presidents to look to between Washington and Lincoln, and Lincoln's own association with victory and patriotism). The 1st party system in this sense is rather explicit in terms of who the American "Jacobins" were (Jefferson, Burr), and as I've said years before on this forum, the lines are most blurred from our perspective in the 1824-1896 period (aka 2nd and 3rd party systems), and I know a lot less about the nature of political rhetoric in the era of the Whigs and the first Republicans.

I will now strive to condense down that window.

When Rutherford Hayes stepped down as President he saw himself as "the best President since John Quincy Adams, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln". Abraham Lincoln, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur (I think) and certainly Benjamin Harrison were all Whigs prior to becoming Republicans. There is also that clip from 1929 interviewing senior citizens and one of them said he had voted Republican all his life and before that "The Whig ticket".

Whenever a party collapses, there is always some scattering to the winds and some who end up joining the other side eventually. However, it is easy to over emphasize this. Most Whigs in the Northern states became Republicans, as did a number in the border states (eventually).

If you really want a good understanding of how the transition from the Whig Party to the Republican Party happened, I cannot stress enough how you need to read Michael F. Holt's work on the subject: https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195161045.001.0001/acprof-9780195161045

Not just the decline, but the formation of the Party and the sources that it drew support from.

To begin with in 1824, and going back a few years who basically had a one party state develop around Jefferson's party. However, the streaming of Federalists into the DRs as well as the disconnect between the Party's establishment and its more old school DR/Jacobin members, is what created the seeds of that party's unraveling.

You remember that James Madison himself had been a Federalist but was one of the earliest defectors to the DRs. In the aftermath of the War of 1812, the Madison administration signed off on a new bank of the United States and the tariff of 1816. This is kind of like Bush enacting NCLB and Medicare Part D. There are voices even years prior to this, lamenting the "federalization of the DRs". You also have to account for the rise of the Nationalists, the War hawks in the West and South including Henry Clay. On top of this there is the destruction of the old financial elite in the NE largely focused on trading (with Britain) and its replacement with the textile industry. The former was devastated by and hated the war for obvious reasons and the embargo before that. The latter was literally born of the embargo and the war, and wanted the tariff to keep them going. As you can imagine, a lot of DRs didn't sign up for these Hamiltonian policies. Finally, it is worth remembering that many states and places had property requirements or at least wealth requirements to vote and there was a widespread movement to overturn these limitations. This is overwhelmingly overlooked against a backdrop of how restricted voting remained along race and gender even after that and it is true. But you cannot in the process of emphasizing that aspect, neglect to consider just how revolutionary this was in the 1820's.

Andrew Jackson's movement, which became the Democratic party, was literally birthed from this anti-establishment discontent with banks, tariffs and restrictive voting, and wanted to get back to the basics of opposing the elites and expanding democracy (that is literally why they took that name and it should be mentioned that 'democracy' was a dirty word for many in the establishment even in America at this time). For his part, and this is why he said and you get the famous quote, "Andrew Jackson considered himself a Jeffersonian Republican". Of course for all of his radicalism in his day, Jefferson was not thrilled with this raging populist championing a return to "hard line Jeffersonianism" and as such you get the other part of the famous quote, "Thomas Jefferson considered him (Jackson) a dangerous man".

It is easy to look back now and view Jackson a certain way, but to a Philadelphia banker like say Nicholas Biddle of the time, they would have had the same view of Jackson and the Democratic Party as you average Wall Street hedge fund guy today would view Bernie Sanders and his political movement today. As dangerous group of extremists who threatened to tear apart the fabric of the system. Its almost as if this is cyclical whereby the DRs/Dems take in a bunch of wealthy finance guys and then in reaction to that, the vast ranks of poor people who look tot he party for help, stage a revolution and take back control of the party from them. 1824/1828, 1896, 1972, 2020s? How's that for continuity for ya?

On the other side of the equation you have the Nationalist Republicans and most of the ex-Federalists and they coalesce behind JQA and Henry Clay. They thing that the control of the establishment machinary and state legislatures will help them dominate Congress and then rest on Congressional supremacy against a backdrop of opposing executive tyranny (King Andrew). This is where the NRs and later the Whigs (hence the name) especially differ substantially from the Federalists. The Federalists wanted a strong Presidency, even a life time serving one, the Whigs wanted a weaker one. This is not because of a magical flip, its more because "OMG THE PLEBS TOOK THE WHITE HOUSE". Finally, I will note getting back to what I said before about it never being clean transitions, some Feds did join Jackson but only a small number.

The Whig Party was created because the NRs realized that betting on institutional power instead of masses of people was a losing proposition. By creating a larger umbrella party, they could thus expand and better thwart the Democrats, at the expense of cohesiveness. That being said, the Whigs were often dominated by former NR Henry Clay and it is Clay's economic program that gets passed on to Lincoln and the Republican Party. The American System itself was indirectly derived from Hamilton's economic philosophy. There is also a tie in with the German Historical School and Fredrich List as well, who were in turn influenced by Hamilton as well.

So you have one party that is trying to break up a political and economic elite, and another that is doing everything it can to preserve and it expand its power instead.

Once the Republican Party is formed, you do have a realignment based on the slave issues and this plus the Reconstruction Period. However, there is still an inherent conservatism to the Republican Party, even during this period, as I explained in the thread that I linked above. The South was hypocritically violating Northern State's rights, it had corrupted the judiciary and the damage that the ever increasing demands of slave power, posed an existential threat to the Republic (it is one of three reasons why they selected that name, the others were to appeal to Jeffersonian legacy especially for Free Soiler Dem's sake and also to differentiate with the popular sovereignty argument advanced by the Northern Democrats). That doesn't even get into the whole concept of preserving the constitution and union itself against radical separatists. And yes there are indeed the whole Radical Republican faction, but it is worth noting that Lincoln often quarreled with this group obviously.

By 1876, with an ex-Whig Presidential candidate, the economy in ruins and the party basically giving up on civil rights, there is a clear desire to hone in on the protectionist system, and also to use that as a backdrop to create a "pro-business nationalist" coalition for the GOP that included some Southerners as well. In a sense, they basically were trying to reconstruct the Whig Party. You see this in the policies that Harrison pursues, not just protectionism but cheap money (Jackson favored hard money because he believed it would tamp down on speculators, whereas the Whigs wanted soft money to fuel business investment. The reason why WJB takes a different view from Jackson is because WJB's base was debtor farmers who benefitted from inflation while Jackson's base was people who were screwed over by speculators).

As much as I would like to continue, running out of energy here. I will have to continue this later.

[OSR stands with Israel]

Grover Cleveland though was a clear exception in that he was arguably one of the 4 most pro-business presidents we have ever had (Coolidge, Harding, McKinley) and its not even really for small vs big government because you honestly can call Andrew Jackson left despite being anti-big government as he did it from a populist framework while Cleveland was anything but a populist .


Cleveland was a strong supporter of the Gold Standard , was very anti union, and was pro-business in almost every conceivable way and you could make an argument he was more conservative than Harrison.


Politically on Economic issues/Domestic Policy there were far far more similarities between Grover Clevelend and William McKinley then there were between Grover Cleveland and William Jennings Ryan

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

"OMG THE PLEBS TOOK THE WHITE HOUSE".

And hardly an original alarm, at that. You know this, of course —but that combination of the commons and the crown against the senate is arguably the oldest alliance in all of Western history, going back to Marius and Caesar. We're used to hearing the story from the aristocracy's perspective, but taken from a different angle the rise of parliaments was often a step backwards for the δῆμος in the short run, as appeals to regal authority were a way for the peasantry to fight the local tyranny of feudal lords. Hence why, in the original ballads featuring Robin Hood, the principal antagonist is not John but the Sheriff of Nottingham, whose reign of terror is ended by the personal intervention of the king; and why in the early stages of the American Revolution, the colonies framed their petitions in appeals to George III for protection against a tyrannical parliament. With this in mind, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the French word for "state" is the same as the word for the old feudal orders: état. Looking backwards, we see the Jacksonian era as situated at the dawn of modernity, but at the time feudalism was only just in the rear-view mirror —and some places not even that. (The South remained an essentially feudal society until after the Civil War, and arguably longer, with its rigidly-hierarchical social order, and the concentration of land—and therefore, wealth—in the hands of a few families, who relied on the labor of a permanent class of under-serfs. Meanwhile, feudalism would survive on the Continent into the 1850s, only being finally abolished in the Russian Empire at around the time of the American Civil War.) Hence why liberals of the period saw the state as the primary threat to individual liberty and the primary obstacle to egalitarianism. There were no feudal lords in the U.S., of course, but there was a gentry —the Van Rensselaers in New York, the Fairfaxes in Virginia —who fulfilled much the same role. It was this group the Senate was set up to represent: an upper house of, by, and for the upper classes. (Significantly, there was no upper house under the original confederation —this innovation, like the constitution itself, was a direct response to Shay's Rebellion, which sparked much the same terror in the ruling class in the 1780s as Jackson would a generation later.) How natural, then, that the masses should turn to a president (who anyways was not so different from a king in the strict construction of Article II, except that his reign was subject to regular review) for their champion against the elites; and just as natural, that the outraged and offended senators should take up the label of the English aristocracy in their battle against absolutism a century earlier.

[Orser67]

This quote is from the first page of Lewis Gould's "The Republicans: A History of the Grand Old Party", and I think it's an interesting insight:

The historical record shows that through more than a century and a half of its existence, the Republican Party has viewed the world of American politics as an arena in which it is entitled to govern against a partisan rival that has always been out of the national mainstream. Thus, for the Republican Party, the issue of legitimacy is not some arcane political science term. Republicans have always believed that they have an inalienable right to hold power because of their record and their values. They see themselves holding firm against the Other: Democrats-potentially if not actually disloyal, influenced by non-American ideas, and never to be trusted. The unfolding of Republican history has been the working out in practice of these fundamental beliefs.

I had never considered that a "right to hold power" was a key aspect of the Republican Party before, but in my own experience I have found that Republicans do tend to view Democrats as illegitimate more often than the reverse (though it's certainly not a sentiment exclusive to Republicans), and this would at least support that notion.

[RINO Tom]

I sort of view it as the Republicans always being the representative of the "in-group" (starting with Northern WASPs and expanding to other whites as time went on) and Democrats being a coalition of "out groups" (Southerners + white ethnics in the 19th century, shifting more to non-whites in the 20th century).

Well, there is one very obvious exception to this "rule." There's something of merit here, but it's lost in trying to be overly simplistic.

I agree on the whole ... but there seems to be ample historic evidence that even many abolitionists hardly viewed Black Americans as a "group" to be considered at all in such a context.  I remember seeing a quote from Stephen Douglas from the book Half Slave and Half Free that was something along the lines of, "only the Democratic Party cares about the well-being of ALL White men, regardless of their religion, country of origin or social status."  I think that speaks volumes to the mindset/political realities of the day.

I'm pretty much just saying that I don't think a complete disregard for the welfare of Black Americans or their freedom necessarily prevents Nineteenth Century Democrats from being the more egalitarian party, on balance, in the minds of the voters at the time.