Historical continuity of Democrats and Republicans

[RINO Tom]

I think it's important to remember that motive is a lot more important than method when analyzing ideology, though.  While a current protectionist Republican (when looking at politicians, I think their numbers are really overstated here...) might be advocating for the same surface-level policy as a protectionist Republican from the Nineteenth Century, it's important to ask why each was doing so. 

A current protectionist is arguing against the economic consensus on what is best for the American economy, which can and often is read as what is best for the business community.  They are effectively saying they don't care and that other things - such as a moral obligation to protect domestic industries and workers hurt by free trade - should trump economic concerns.  Is this really the same?  I'd argue not at all.

Nineteenth Century protectionists wanted high import tariffs because our economy was not in a global position to compete on price yet we had a huge domestic population needing goods ... the "pro-business" answer, ironically, was to tax imports to the point where consumers had a clear incentive to buy domestically and prop up American industry.  While it's supporting the exact same policy, it's doing it for quite literally the opposite reason.  There were certainly campaign speech overlaps ("protect the American worker!"), but who would ever label a modern protectionist as a corporate shill who is championing corporate welfare as these Republicans were accused of?

If we appreciate the historical classification of "pro-business" as a conservative ideology and "pro-worker" as a left-leaning one, I suggest that the motive to achieve those ends is somewhat irrelevant.  I mean, the GOP didn't just drop the high tariffs for no reason in the Twentieth Century; our business community had reached such a height after World War II that it didn't just no longer need them, it was actively harmed by them.  The pro-business Republican Party very naturally adjusted what it wanted to promote BECAUSE of what its end goal - which had not changed! - now demanded.

[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.

[RINO Tom]

As to which party was more conservative, is it completely incorrect to state that it was a bit unclear during the first half of the Third Party System?  Obviously, the parties never switched platforms, and it’s more accurate to state the opposite—that Democrats have always been to the left of Federalists/Whigs/Republicans—exceptions are arguable, especially the period of 1856-1876.  Completely linking the Radical Republicans and Lincoln with modern conservatives is not without its problems, and I think they could have been Democrats today (granted, even the early GOP had people who were clearly more conservative).

I think why you get responses like NC's is that the burden of "proof" for a change in ideology (much less a FLIP, lol) should be on the people SUGGESTING it; it should not be the assumption, as it is for most politically - err - "simple" people.   I don't think anyone here is suggesting that there is this perfect link between Thaddeus Stevens and Donald Trump, but they are suggesting that the most "backed up" explanation is conservatism and liberalism evolving in surprising and interesting ways, possibly leaving past "conservatives" uncomfortable in the "new GOP" and vice versa for the Democrats.  Whether or not that makes those who are now out of place "not conservative" or "not liberal" anymore is certainly where the debate lies.

It's largely acknowledged that there was some real ideological diversity within the parties during the mid- to late 1800s, and this is only natural when a non-ideological issue (IMO) like a civil war or abolition of slavery is involved.  However, from the primary sources I have been lucky enough to stumble across and the reading I have done, I will indeed maintain that there has always been a fundamental difference between a "liberal/progressive" Republican and a "liberal/progressive" Democrat ... kind of one of those "you know it when you see it" things, and it is reinforced by the way the two talked about each other in campaign ads and newspaper quotes.  A good example is Teddy Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan.  They literally hated each other, IIRC, and both are remembered as progressive heroes - neither distinction without merit.  However, I think if you got both in a room and got them both drunk (come on, Bryan!), you would start to see that their underpinnings are different, with Roosevelt's being more "to the right" (however slightly) and Bryan's more "to the left."  From what I can see, this distinction (with obvious exceptions) rings true throughout the parties' histories, at least to the point of the overall makeup of each and distinction of "more conservative" and "more liberal" as whole paries.

[RINO Tom]

A political movement advocating a quasi-feudalist economy, like the 19th-early 20th century Southern elite has to be considered conservative, but conservative in an anti-enlightenment way, not conservative in the pro-business, hands off kind of way.  We've never had an explicitly anti-Enlightenment movement win statewide elections in modern times, so the whole concept feels foreign, as indeed it should because the US was explicitly founded on Enlightenment principles. However, you can see a much stronger strain of this form of conservatism in UK politics- lords and ladies and inherited titles, social class as something fixed for life, heavily restricting who can vote and hold office, etc.  The Southern founding fathers clearly expected the Southern neo-feudal system to die a natural death much faster than it did, as the anti-Enlightenment strain of Puritan New England had collapsed by their time.  Anti-Enlightenment movements in modern politics are pretty fringe, but you do see a strain of it on the integralist right and the eco-left, and also with anti-vaxxers.

Wealthy Southerners prior to WWII weren't particularly religious either, so they don't really fit in with modern pro-church conservatism either.  Indeed, the people they were oppressing were usually more devout than they were.  There is more of a straight line from the poor family farmers of the Upland South to modern Christian conservatism, but those were the people in the South who were most likely to consider voting Republican 100+ years ago.   

Good post.  I think it's worth pointing out that this is where a decent amount of confusion comes about - the Southern Democrats (specifically the plantation class) was rather alien to the political system of the US, and they are hard to classify.  While they have obvious "right wing" elements, a lot of those operate so far into reactionary territory that they really can't be accurately associated with the tradition of *American conservatism*.  (This does not, of course, mean that you can't classify them as "conservative" in ways.)  NC Yankee did a good job of pointing out the ways they were perhaps not so stereotypically conservative.

Most historians agree that the Democratic-Republicans were, for every intellectual intent and purpose, to the left of the Federalists, and it's also not usually controversial to suggest that the Jacksonian Democrats were to the left of the Whigs.  So, then we find ourselves with a party born out of the Federalist and Whig tradition (the Republicans) and one born out of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition (the Democratic Party), finding themselves largely divided over one major issue - slavery/the Civil War.  This causes an ideological mess, but even if we monolithically label the Southern Democrats as conservative due to their reactionary nature, that still does not mean that the Democratic Party was more conservative than the Republican Party, as they (in my humble opinion) attached themselves "like a barnacle" (as Stevens says in Lincoln ) to the more left-leaning party.  If the Democratic Party started courting conservatives in the South (already happening??), it wouldn't change the fact that the GOP is made up of largely conservatives, as well, and the pre-existing Democrats were to their left.

[RINO Tom]

Seeing as the Civil War/Slavery were non-ideological issues, did the early Republican Party have many or a lot of people who were former Democrats and who were on other issues Jeffersonians/Jacksonians? I know Fremont and Hamlin were former Democrats (and I'm assuming that they had been typical Democrats when they had been Democrats) but were former Democrats like them common in the early Republican party, and to the extent that they existed, were they noticeably different to the former Whigs? Like, was Fremont noticeably more Jeffersonian/liberal in philosophy from his co-partisan Lincoln, with significant divergences outside of the national question? Or was there not much difference?

Given the non-ideological nature (on a political matrix, anyway) of the Civil War and slavery, the coalitions naturally drew people of all ideologies, so yes - there were many former Democrats who became Republicans due to either a support for the Union, their opposition to the spread of slavery or because they believed that Jeffersonian and Jacksonian principles had been bastardized by the current Democrats in power (a very fair assertion).  What most of us on the Parties Didn't Switch Sides, As That's Ridiculous Team™ try so hard to point out, though, is that this gets overemphasized by people practicing revisionist history, and thus we de-emphasize both the conservative elements of that era's GOP and the liberal elements of that era's Democratic Party.  I would argue that the fact that these types of people largely wound up back in the Democratic camp by the late Nineteenth Century or early Twentieth Century (i.e., once sectionalism had defused a bit) points to the fact that the assertion of the GOP being the "more liberal party" rests almost entirely on a support for Black rights, and we argue that this is very misguided, as we must view that issue through the lens of THEIR time ... otherwise, we end up with an ideological classification system that more or less treats the Good Guys of History™ as liberals and the Bad Guys of History™ as conservatives (regardless of how either approached issues or what they thought about lesser issues), believing in a Marxist type "march" to history.

I do not have something at hand right now to back this up, but I would wager that in the North (where the vast, VAST majority of Republicans were), the conservative faction was largely made up of former Whigs, and the more "progressive" faction was largely made up of former Democrats or people who would later defect the GOP and/or take major issue with its post-Reconstruction path (a path that I would argue wasn't some strange divergence but rather what the GOP always wanted to do on the whole, absent a Civil War).

As for your last question, there is precious little to go on unless you are REALLY willing to dig deep, as so much of that period's historical record is focused on the Civil War.  A lot of my knowledge on this subject comes from either an advanced Civil War and Reconstruction class I took in college or the book we had to read for that class, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War by Bruce Levine (a great read if you're interested in this, by the way!!).  While I don't have much in the way of an answer on Fremont or Hamlin, I do recall that there was actually extreme ideological diversity among the so-called Radical Republicans, with motives running the entire spectrum of possibilities, but often from the list below:

- More of a "social justice" desire for government intervention (i.e., more "liberal")
- A fervently religious/puritan perspective that wanted to punish sinners (i.e., more "morally conservative")
- An almost-sort-of "blood lust" attitude fueled by a very black and white sense of patriotism (similar in flavor to conservatives during the Iraq War, IMO)
- A financially motivated desire to kick the Southern agrarian economy while it was down to help out Northern industrialists (i.e., a pretty unambiguously conservative motive)

That is the problem with transposing our current perspective onto the past.  It's easy to look at White Southerners preaching for small government (which is a TOTAL myth about the Confederacy or Southern Democrats, by the way ... Dred Scott and the confiscation of private property in the CSA make this obvious) and liberal Northern Democrats preaching for government intervention to help minorities and draw the conclusion that the parties "flipped."  However, this topic is SO much more complex (and interesting!) than that, and it deserves to be delved into seriously by people who are actually interested in dissecting the truth ... as I believe everyone in this thread is.

[RINO Tom]

Just as a more general thought to bring this conversation back down an intellectual notch ... when looking for party continuity, you will rarely find easy evidence of this the more specific you get, as things change so much with time.  Few people are doing this, but a lot of your average Joe's perception of a "party flip" starts with very surface-level suspicions around questions like,

- "If Southern Whites went from being that Democratic to that Republican, something fundamentally must have changed in the parties, right?"

- "If Black voters abandoned the party that championed their emancipation, something fundamentally must have changed in the parties, right?"

- "If modern conservatives are campaigning on small government and state's rights, then someone who empowered the Executive Branch to the extent of Abraham Lincoln would probably be a Democrat today, right?"

These questions, while understandable and certainly worth asking, easily lead people down the wrong path, in my lowly, non-expert opinion.  One needs only look at George W. Bush's Presidency or Democratic governors' reaction to Trump's executive initiatives (from immigration to COVID-19) to see that the tradition of liberals and conservatives using big government when it suits them and federalism when it suits them is alive and well.  People describe an insidiously manipulative GOP implementing the Southern Strategy to win Southern White voters yet turn around in the same breath and speak of the GOP pre-1964 - the very GOP that would have needed to agree to GO AFTER these Southern Whites - as if it were a completely different party.  People will simultaneously champion FDR as a progressive hero and suggest that the GOP didn't become the more conservative party until the 1960s ... I honestly don't even think they stop and think about it enough as a whole, because these conversations are only ever focused on such tunnel-vision-based points.  These are obviously your run-of-the-mill Facebook commenters, not posters here, but it's easy to see how this idea gains traction ... I mean, it's a comforting narrative for both modern liberals who prioritize social issues and for some Southern conservatives who are trying to reconcile their politics with the ancestors that they over-revere.  That leaves a few of us screaming into the wind in the middle.

It's my humble opinion that you see continuity more in broad ideas and ideals ... basic things like the GOP's worship of the self-made man and the idea that the only thing stopping anyone from achieving the American dream was a lack of hard work or overt structural barriers like slavery or legalized segregation ring through every era of Republicanism, even among many progressive Republicans.  These assertions have always been met by suspicion and a collective eye roll from Democrats, alleging that it's a fanciful myth to comfort those who have achieved success due to privileges they were born with ... that might have been being an English Protestant in the 1850s, but by the 1960s it easily included one's race and upbringing and by 2020, it includes things like sexual orientation.  Liberalism, IMO, naturally evolves in a way so as to somewhat ostracize past liberals; its standards are constantly changing, and people like Jackson and Wilson who were once heralded as progressive icons will start to look worse and worse as the scope of progressive egalitarianism broadens.  It wouldn't shock me in the least if, in 100 years, Barack Obama's venerated image has pushed Japanese-interning FDR to the Jackson/Wilson dustbin.  The fact that Democrats in the North apologized for slavery might make that action/view necessarily "not liberal" or even "right wing" to you, but it does NOT make THEM "right wing" on the whole.  A Republican who decries slavery as a gross barrier to free enterprise and the American Dream might look "liberal" for that, but I think what says more about their ideology is what they wanted to do about it after they succeeded ... many more liberal/progressive continued to champion initiatives to help Black Americans, but many other former Radicals showed their true colors and saw their jobs as done and the rest of the work to be done by hardworking Freedmen themselves.  You saw a similar phenomenon with the GOP and civil rights in the mid-Twentieth Century.  They were happy to provide massive majorities for civil rights legislation that moved legalized racist barriers, but many declared "Mission Accomplished" at that point and were ready for a colorblind society that let the free market work its magic ... all of a sudden, as the litmus test for supporting "civil rights" now included things like busing, fair housing and subsidizing poorer neighborhoods through social programs, the GOP found itself bewildered that anyone thought there was more to be done, IMO showing their fundamentally conservative outlook on supporting what many might consider a "liberal" cause.

[RINO Tom]

I find it interesting that we often hear that slavery is “America’s Original Sin” and we hear of “America’s Puritan Roots” whenever there’s a discussion about alcohol or sex, but the Puritans and the slaveowners hated each other. The slaveowners were Cavaliers, the enemies and polar opposite of the Puritans.

It's worth noting, though, that many Republicans (including Lincoln) drew a VERY hard distinction between slaveholders of the Founders' generation and those of the 1850s and 1860s.  They effectively argued that they had bastardized the Founders' original plan of letting slavery die a natural death by implementing radical new measures to protect the dying institution under the guise of "preserving" something.  In essence, Republicans argued that they weren't trying to fundamentally change ANYTHING; they were trying to achieve the Founders' goal of ending slavery, which would have been achieved by the time of the Civil War if it hadn't been for the slavers' Constitutional gymnastics and shameless pivoting to keep the system alive.  It was only then that action was even NEEDED to halt slavery's expansion so aggressively.  I imagine an 1850s Northerner would be absolutely appalled to hear Confederate apologists of today even SUGGESTING that the slaveholders were some Constitutionally guided, small government group, haha.

[RINO Tom]

I find it interesting that we often hear that slavery is “America’s Original Sin” and we hear of “America’s Puritan Roots” whenever there’s a discussion about alcohol or sex, but the Puritans and the slaveowners hated each other. The slaveowners were Cavaliers, the enemies and polar opposite of the Puritans.

It's because the perception of the Puritans has changed so drastically in the past 100 years, from that of tolerant and liberal-minded individuals to censorious and prudish. Most Americans don't understand the Puritans as how they actually were in the context of their time, and instead project backward views and attitudes onto them they didn't hold. For most of their history, the Puritans nearly always found themselves opposed to despotism and on the side of liberty.

Slavery was sinful to the Puritans because it infringed on the equality of man under God. If that sounds like liberal rhetoric, it is no accident. Liberalism as an ideology owes its existence to radical Protestant theology, and its tenets flowed directly from it. Almost any historian would agree that the Puritans were the radicals of their day and on the "left" of the political spectrum, so I'm frankly tired of RINO Tom's revisionist attempts to prove otherwise.

Lol, what?

[RINO Tom]

When did people starting advocating for the rights of blacks and women with liberal motives?

I mean, some always have; and no one here has denied that.  However, I’d argue the association of advancing Black standards of life and increasing their rights with mainly liberalism formed as a result of the New Deal.

[RINO Tom]

^ A couple of novice thoughts:

- Just as Puritans in America didn't necessarily inherit the spirit of their English ancestors' starting ideologies, I would argue that the Southern planters' obsession with being the successors of European aristocrats (compared to the trashy, uncultured industrialists of the dirty North) had a significantly different flavor.  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."  Even though it was mostly nefarious and not genuine, the assertion on their part that slavery was a benevolent institution in place for the well-being of a fundamentally inferior race of people often led to the assertion that the GOP wanted slaves freed to even out the price advantage the planters had over Northern-made goods only to let these Freedmen starve on the streets of Northern cities or live dirt poor lives in the rural South with no master to care for them.  I agree that I would never call the slavers something as simple as "liberal," but some of their tone does resemble a modern liberal elitist living in a high rise rather than a modern conservative/reactionary elitist living in a McMansion in the exurbs.

- This comparison has fallen out of favor as the GOP base has shifted toward the South over the last several decades, but I remember reading once that the steam behind the first real pro-life movement after Roe v. Wade was that these people saw themselves as the second coming of the abolitionists - fighting for God's will against cold, unsympathetic and scientifically-minded pro-choice heathens to protect the unborn just as their political ancestors had fought to protect the slaves.  Now, as someone who happens to be pro-choice and has the advantage of being removed from the time, I obviously see where this comparison is lacking.  However, imagining a conservative point of view that sees the slaves and the unborn as helpless people in need of moral activism, both times facing a "less religious" (to them, anyway) and antagonistic force of "science" helps me see how slavers might not have seemed overly "conservative" to the Northern abolitionists who were more religiously motivated.  At least to me.  Again, these terms weren't widely used in the same way we use them today, so this is all kind of a lost cause (heh, heh).  However, I do find that point interesting.  As I said on another page, if abortion becomes outlawed someday and our descendants look back on it in 200 years as a barbaric practice, their analysis of the Republicans as "liberals" for fighting to end it would no doubt be flawed.

[RINO Tom]

^ The article I had read it in was actually critiquing the view that the Religious Right had of itself as the reincarnation of abolitionists (and arguing for the desegregation-related view point you mentioned), I was just making the point that this isn't how (at least a sizable number of) pro-lifers saw themselves, which I thought was relevant to the conversation about how abolitionists might have seen themselves vs. how we see them.