Historical continuity of Democrats and Republicans

[All Along The Watchtower]

^You've made some good points in this thread Yankee, and have somewhat convinced me of your "continuously conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats" theory. However, I think that once you start calling plantation owners "liberals", the term basically loses all meaning.

TIL Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry, Andrew Jackson, and investor in the slave trade who helped draft the (obviously pro-slavery) colonial Constitution of the Carolinas John Locke weren't liberals (or rather, Liberals, to be crystal clear).

[All Along The Watchtower]

Anyway, I'd note that the Republicans were explicitly organized as a (loosely) unified ideological party (Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men) in direct opposition to the Slave Power/Southern Democracy (ie. the radical, expansionist - territoriality and slavery-wise - Democratic Party as exemplified by what became the CSA) , while the Democrats (who didn't initially call themselves that, unlike the Republicans - indeed, "Democrat" was an epithet deployed by opponents of Jackson) not only predated the Republicans, but were organized as a confederation of state and local political machines and factions that were loyal to Andrew Jackson and were the first to take advantage of the expanded franchise (universal white male suffrage). The best-organized Democratic machine was in New York (thanks, Martin Van Buren, and Aaron Burr before him!).

Remember, America was a one-party, Jeffersonian Republican country by the time Jackson came along as a political figure (RIP Federalists), that's important context. This was not the case for the newly formed Republican Party of the 1850s.

Anyway, Democrats = diverse but more or less (often less) organized Big Tent confederation of constituencies and interests, Republicans = more ideologically motivated and internally unified on a policy platform has been, I'd argue, a core distinction between the two parties throughout the decades/centuries - even if these respective features manifest differently depending on era.  

[All Along The Watchtower]

Here's an excellent blog post (from 2012!) with analysis that inevitably leads to historical disruption of Democrats and (more importantly) Republicans for you, brought to you by modern American conservatism:

Where in ’57 (William F. Buckley, Jr.) had asserted a right even of a minority of whites to impose racial segregation by literally any means necessary, including breaking federal law, in ’04 Buckley expressed regret for having supposedly believed only that segregation would wither away without federal intervention. Stupid the man was not. He gets credited today both with honesty about his past and with having, in his own way, “evolved up.” Modern conservatives, more importantly, get to ignore the realities of their movement’s origins.

If conservatives today really mean to mark out an American conservative ethos with no remaining ties to racism, wouldn’t they need to reckon, far more seriously and realistically than they seem prepared to do, with the painful legacy of the postwar right when it comes to what was then called racial integration? With the Cold War, integration was the hot issue of the day, precisely at the time when the right wing was in the process of taking over the Republican Party. (Nelson Rockefeller, for example, was a fire-and-brimstone Cold Warrior but hyperliberal on race; he was the type the Buckleyites were trying to knock out.) Ties between conservatism and — no, not just theories of small government and “community standards” — but straight-up, hardcore racism were once so tight that for some of us with long enough memories, it can be bleakly comic to see racism on the part of TNR writers hopefully dismissed as some unhappy anomaly.

In 1952, William Rehnquist wrote a now-famous memo on “Brown vs. Board of Education.” The Times recently revived discussion of it, and of Rehnquist’s never, to me, credible denial that it reflected his own opinion. That memo put forth an idea related in interesting ways to Buckley’s ’57 “advanced race” essay.

In the memo, Rehnquist deemed the Supreme Court a poor place for ruling on individual rights, suggesting that the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment can’t be enforced by judicial review in communities where those rights are opposed by a majority. That is, they can’t be enforced. “In the long run,” Rehnquist wrote, “majorities will decide what the constitutional rights of minorities are.” And that’s at first what Buckley seemed to mean, too, when he said in the ’57 essay that the question of the white right to prevail could not be “answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal.”

But Buckley’s ’57 essay turns that already startling idea upside down. It says that even a minority of whites has a right — nay, a duty — to take measures necessary to prevail against a majority of blacks. That kind of romantic, questing elitism did not fit the Rehnquist-Goldwater populist argument on behalf of majority and states rights in resisting federal enforcement of racial integration. Really, Buckley’s view revealed too much of what “states rights” was so often code for: white supremacy.

https://williamhogeland.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/the-national-review-racist-writing-and-the-legacy-of-william-f-buckley-jr/

Can anyone honestly say that the Republican Party of the past half-century - and specifically, the modern conservative movement that has defined it for this period  - has more in common with the Party of Lincoln than it does with the Southern Democracy?

(Answer: No.)

[All Along The Watchtower]

The Radicalism of Thaddeus Stevens

As the extent and depth of rebellion became clear, Republicans increasingly realized the necessity of social revolution, endeavoring to dismantle slavery piece by piece and enlist black men as soldiers in that fight. While what Karl Marx described as the “revolutionary waging of war” boosted Union prospects on the battlefield, Stevens rejected Lincoln’s early Reconstruction policies as overly lenient. He even protested the less conciliatory Wade-Davis Bill, because its implication that the Confederate states had never left the Union would hinder the possibility of land seizure.

Stevens instead envisioned what he termed “perfected revolution” as an expanded emancipation. He aspired to use his party’s political momentum to free the nation “from every vestige of human oppression . . . of inequality of rights, of the recognized degradation of the poor, and the superior caste of the rich.” Postwar “Black Codes,” violence and coercion against freedpeople, and Andrew Johnson’s personal intransigence and conciliation of former rebels led moderates to adopt firmer measures and also bolstered the Radical ranks, leading to the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and the Fourteenth Amendment.

But that leftward trajectory stopped short of Stevens’s final demand for the confiscation and redistribution of Confederate land. In fact, when Stevens died in August 1868, his influence was at low ebb. Spurious charges of corruption, black domination, and federal overreach were already beginning to turn cautious white Northerners against Radical Reconstruction and the Republican Party as a whole toward the conservative prioritization of business.

Whereas other Radicals viewed African American voting as the culmination of Reconstruction, Stevens recognized that only a foundation of economic power could establish the legal and material conditions to make black enfranchisement meaningful and permanent. In the postwar South, that meant the ownership of arable land. As such, Stevens proposed the creation of an executive department mechanism to seize all estates over two hundred acres — which constituted roughly 2 percent of the Southern families — and to partition that land into forty-acre farmsteads. Poor and middling whites, he reassured, would not be affected.

Once divided among former slaves, the government would then sell the remaining acreage to pay down war debt and provide pensions for Union veterans. Over time, and now with the support of the Union Leagues and black convention delegates in the South, Stevens argued that land redistribution would destroy the concentrated power of the planter class, slowly transform the region into a yeoman republic, and expand the base of the Republican Party.

Stevens’s free labor ethos, which precluded the existence of a landed elite or a landless class, emboldened him to defy individual property rights. In fact, the logic of confiscation was rooted in longstanding Republican critiques of the South, and the idea that slavery and land monopoly had created a dangerously hierarchical and antidemocratic society.

Along with a handful of abolitionists and Radicals, including Wendell Phillips and George W. Julian, Stevens also viewed land as a matter of basic justice. After all, enslaved black people, not white landowners, had provided the human labor that created the plantation system and its immense profits. In other words, these “confiscation radicals” viewed land reform as a basic means of restitution — a precursor to the modern concept of reparations. When leading Senate Republican William P. Fessenden complained to Charles Sumner that Stevens’s land reform bill was “more than we do for white people,” Sumner responded that “white men have never been in slavery.”

But the notion of permanently breaking up mega plantations — even in the service of protecting freedpeople and destroying the political power of Southern elites — proved a tough sell to white Northerners. Democrats denounced Stevens’s “Reign of Terror” and insisted that land confiscation would parrot the worst excesses of the French Revolution. Meanwhile, the Republican Party free labor ideal was predicated on upward mobility and the “right to rise” through a program of public education, infrastructural improvements, and the redistribution of public land in the form of homesteads.

Private landed property was a different matter. In his brilliant 1974 essay “Thaddeus Stevens, Confiscation, and Reconstruction,” Eric Foner explained this small capitalist utopianism as it related to private land: “To a party which believed that a free laborer, once accorded equality of opportunity, would rise or fall in the social scale on the strength of his own diligence, frugality, and hard work, confiscation seemed an unwarranted interference with the rights of property.”

Confiscation was also anathema to the interests of capital. Although Beardian and some Marxist historians have depicted Stevens as an agent of the “money power,” commercial elites tended to view him not as an ally but as a mortal threat. Both Southern landholders and Northeastern textile manufacturers feared that independent black farmers would refuse to grow cotton, which they designated the “slave crop.” Moreover, industrialists recognized that the logic of workers controlling the means of production — the difference between former slaves seizing the plantations and industrial laborers seizing the factories — was only a matter of degree.

In other words, as Levine contends, the distribution of private land to freedpeople failed because it was antithetical to deeply held — and, for the few, fabulously profitable — understandings of private property. Republican losses in the state elections of 1867 effectively killed the issue and helped turn the party away from war-era idealism and toward conservatism, political expediency, and accommodation toward big business. The abandonment of confiscation signaled the larger abandonment of Reconstruction.