Since when did R lost media and intellectuals?

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

I think there's always been a segment of the intellectual elite that supported Democrats, read NY Times archives from the early twentieth century for an example of it. Support for the League of Nations was very much an elite cause.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

I think there's always been a segment of the intellectual elite that supported Democrats, read NY Times archives from the early twentieth century for an example of it. Support for the League of Nations was very much an elite cause.

Yeah, for an advanced Civil War & Reconstruction class I took as an elective during my senior year of college, we had to read the book Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War by Bruce Levine.  I think it is back at my parents' house, but I remember a couple of interesting passages quoting Democratic newspapers describing the Republican Party.  IMHO, the tone and arrogance sounded pretty similar to today, describing a business elite that riled up a base of religious fanatics hungry for war.  This is obviously just one man's words in the quote, but it was a newspaper from New York talking about how dumb and "jingoy" many of the Republicans in Congress sounded with their hyperbole about ~the Union~ and framing their views as God's will. 

This is to say nothing of the many historical primary sources that describe Jefferson and his buddies as practically indistinguishable from how many modern conservatives describe "liberal elites" (i.e., snobby wannabe radicals pretty far up their own asses).  Regardless, by at least the late Nineteenth Century, there was clearly a strong "intellectual" component of the Democratic Party.  People always focus too much on them being the "party of the working class" or whatever, but you could very easily they still are today (at least for minorities, who are disproportionately working class), and that obviously doesn't stop them from also being viewed in a nearly opposite light when it comes to "the media and intellectuals" and their support for the party.

Yeah, that reminds me of when I read the novel Copperhead from the nineteenth century and was laughing the whole way through it because the main character is portrayed sympathetically as an anti-war freethinker and educated man in addition to being one of the few educated men in a town in upstate New York populated by uneducated bible thumping abolitionist rubes.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

I think there's always been a segment of the intellectual elite that supported Democrats, read NY Times archives from the early twentieth century for an example of it. Support for the League of Nations was very much an elite cause.

Yeah, for an advanced Civil War & Reconstruction class I took as an elective during my senior year of college, we had to read the book Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War by Bruce Levine.  I think it is back at my parents' house, but I remember a couple of interesting passages quoting Democratic newspapers describing the Republican Party.  IMHO, the tone and arrogance sounded pretty similar to today, describing a business elite that riled up a base of religious fanatics hungry for war.  This is obviously just one man's words in the quote, but it was a newspaper from New York talking about how dumb and "jingoy" many of the Republicans in Congress sounded with their hyperbole about ~the Union~ and framing their views as God's will. 

This is to say nothing of the many historical primary sources that describe Jefferson and his buddies as practically indistinguishable from how many modern conservatives describe "liberal elites" (i.e., snobby wannabe radicals pretty far up their own asses).  Regardless, by at least the late Nineteenth Century, there was clearly a strong "intellectual" component of the Democratic Party.  People always focus too much on them being the "party of the working class" or whatever, but you could very easily they still are today (at least for minorities, who are disproportionately working class), and that obviously doesn't stop them from also being viewed in a nearly opposite light when it comes to "the media and intellectuals" and their support for the party.

I wonder what Republican newspapers said.

Well, the leading Republican paper of the time was the New York Tribune, which espoused economic leftism alongside abolitionism.

As for the other side, here is what a few leading pro-Buchanan Democratic newspapers had to say during the election of 1856:

Free society! We sicken of the name! What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? All the Northern and especially the New England states are devoid of society fitted for well bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meets is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery; and yet are hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman's body servant. This is your free society which the northern hordes are endeavoring to extend to Kansas.

Repeatedly have we asked the North 'has not the experiment of universal liberty failed? Are not the evils of free society insufferable? And do not most thinking men among you propose to subvert and reconstruct it?' Still no answer. This gloomy silence is another conclusive proof added to many other conclusive evidences we have furnished, that free society in the long run, is an impracticable form of society; is everywhere striving, demoralizing and insurrectionary.
We repeat, then, that policy and humanity alike forbid the existence of the evils of free society to new people and coming generations.
Two opposite and conflicting forms of society cannot, among civilized men co-exist and endure. The one must give away and cease to exist, the other become universal.
If free society be unnatural, immoral, unchristian, it must fall, and give way to a slave society—a social system old as the world, universal as man.

We have got to hating everything with the prefix FREE, from the free negroes down and up, through the whole catalogue— Free farms, Free labor, Free society, Free will, Free thinking, Free children, and Free schools—all belonging to the same brood of damnable isms. But the worst of all those abominations is the modern system of FREE SCHOOLS! The New England system of free schools has been the cause and source of the infidelities and treason that have turned her cities into Sodoms and Gomorrahs, and her land into the common nesting-places of howling Bedlamites. We abominate the system, because the SCHOOLS ARE FREE.

Your point is well-taken in regards to the second two. The first one though (if you swap out the geographic region) could mirror some liberal rhetoric against Mitt Romney in 2012. I think it's fair to say that both parties have had an elitist and populist element and has been more prevalent then the other has varied from decade to decade and sometimes from individual election to individual election.

[TransfemmeGoreVidal]

I think there's always been a segment of the intellectual elite that supported Democrats, read NY Times archives from the early twentieth century for an example of it. Support for the League of Nations was very much an elite cause.

Yeah, for an advanced Civil War & Reconstruction class I took as an elective during my senior year of college, we had to read the book Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War by Bruce Levine.  I think it is back at my parents' house, but I remember a couple of interesting passages quoting Democratic newspapers describing the Republican Party.  IMHO, the tone and arrogance sounded pretty similar to today, describing a business elite that riled up a base of religious fanatics hungry for war.  This is obviously just one man's words in the quote, but it was a newspaper from New York talking about how dumb and "jingoy" many of the Republicans in Congress sounded with their hyperbole about ~the Union~ and framing their views as God's will. 

This is to say nothing of the many historical primary sources that describe Jefferson and his buddies as practically indistinguishable from how many modern conservatives describe "liberal elites" (i.e., snobby wannabe radicals pretty far up their own asses).  Regardless, by at least the late Nineteenth Century, there was clearly a strong "intellectual" component of the Democratic Party.  People always focus too much on them being the "party of the working class" or whatever, but you could very easily they still are today (at least for minorities, who are disproportionately working class), and that obviously doesn't stop them from also being viewed in a nearly opposite light when it comes to "the media and intellectuals" and their support for the party.

I wonder what Republican newspapers said.

Well, the leading Republican paper of the time was the New York Tribune, which espoused economic leftism alongside abolitionism.

As for the other side, here is what a few leading pro-Buchanan Democratic newspapers had to say during the election of 1856:

Free society! We sicken of the name! What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? All the Northern and especially the New England states are devoid of society fitted for well bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meets is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery; and yet are hardly fit for association with a southern gentleman's body servant. This is your free society which the northern hordes are endeavoring to extend to Kansas.

Repeatedly have we asked the North 'has not the experiment of universal liberty failed? Are not the evils of free society insufferable? And do not most thinking men among you propose to subvert and reconstruct it?' Still no answer. This gloomy silence is another conclusive proof added to many other conclusive evidences we have furnished, that free society in the long run, is an impracticable form of society; is everywhere striving, demoralizing and insurrectionary.
We repeat, then, that policy and humanity alike forbid the existence of the evils of free society to new people and coming generations.
Two opposite and conflicting forms of society cannot, among civilized men co-exist and endure. The one must give away and cease to exist, the other become universal.
If free society be unnatural, immoral, unchristian, it must fall, and give way to a slave society—a social system old as the world, universal as man.

We have got to hating everything with the prefix FREE, from the free negroes down and up, through the whole catalogue— Free farms, Free labor, Free society, Free will, Free thinking, Free children, and Free schools—all belonging to the same brood of damnable isms. But the worst of all those abominations is the modern system of FREE SCHOOLS! The New England system of free schools has been the cause and source of the infidelities and treason that have turned her cities into Sodoms and Gomorrahs, and her land into the common nesting-places of howling Bedlamites. We abominate the system, because the SCHOOLS ARE FREE.

Your point is well-taken in regards to the second two. The first one though (if you swap out the geographic region) could mirror some liberal rhetoric against Mitt Romney in 2012. I think it's fair to say that both parties have had an elitist and populist element and has been more prevalent then the other has varied from decade to decade and sometimes from individual election to individual election.

Really? I think it sounds much more like the kind of classist language used by Romney about the "47 percent".

Nevermind, actually your right. I was tired and misread it lol.