Since when did R lost media and intellectuals?

[Wikipedia delenda est]

One of the leading intellectuals of the first half of the 20th century was Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler, who was a Republican Party man and an avowed liberal. Intellectuals had always tended to be on the liberal side of things, which in the 19th century meant with the Republicans and starting in the 1930s with the Democrats. There were also, however, many Southern intellectuals who promoted Lost Causeism and denounced Reconstruction, but in the liberal North intellectuals like Frederick Douglass and Walt Whitman were among Lincoln’s most important supporters.

[Wikipedia delenda est]

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.

[Wikipedia delenda est]

No one in their right mind is going to claim that the Democrats were faithful adherents to the "founders" will in the 1850s and afterwards. That is the whole point and why Republicans sought so hard to claim to be fighting to preserve the legacy of Jefferson, in the face of the corrupting influence of the slave power, these things are well established.

Slavery consumed all aspects of the political sphere and defined many of the arguments in the 1850s and 1860s, but the problem comes when there is a presumption that this extends back prior to this period and extends long after this decade as well even as the issues shift extensively beginning in the 1870s.

So you’re willing to admit then that the Republican Party was founded in liberalism, whereas the Democrats of the same time were conservatives?

[Wikipedia delenda est]

No one in their right mind is going to claim that the Democrats were faithful adherents to the "founders" will in the 1850s and afterwards. That is the whole point and why Republicans sought so hard to claim to be fighting to preserve the legacy of Jefferson, in the face of the corrupting influence of the slave power, these things are well established.

Slavery consumed all aspects of the political sphere and defined many of the arguments in the 1850s and 1860s, but the problem comes when there is a presumption that this extends back prior to this period and extends long after this decade as well even as the issues shift extensively beginning in the 1870s.

So you’re willing to admit then that the Republican Party was founded in liberalism, whereas the Democrats of the same time were conservatives?

Henry, I will never condone any simplistic endorsement of a party flip its just too superficial and frankly insulting the complexities of the time to try and reduce everything down to what are essentially two very charged buzz words.

America was founded on the basis of a doctrine of liberalism, but even within that underlying framework there existed a right-left divide that extended from 1792 until about 1850. Just as a two party system redeveloped after the Glorious Revolution and again after the Hanoverian Succession/Jacobite Risings/Proscription (though it took most of the century). Slavery scrambled the deck chairs and to the extent that Republicans were fighting to preserve traditions of the founding while Democrats let themselves be corrupted of slave power, if you want to assign labels situationally based on that, fine.

However, nobody flipped a switch here and Northern Democrats (Lewis Cass and Stephen Douglas) bumbled their way into this still claiming to adhere to their "liberal principles" ie Popular Sovereignty. Very fitting that a Democratic party would condone the ability of localities to vote away the rights of a minority, very literal interpretation of majoritarian fiat.

The Republican Party was founded by radicals, egalitarians and yes liberals who were sick of this situation from both parties but notably skewing more from the Democrats at first (Van, Van he's a used up man. Then of course the situation of the Whigs is way too complex to reduce to a single sentence here), but it is worth noting that it was not this Republican Party that won and led the Civil War. Its defeat let to a broadening of the platform (Clay's economic policies) and welcoming in a number of more conservative minded people "halting the spread as opposed to outright abolition" and thus created a broad based big tent anti-slavery party that Northerners right to left could embrace for the sake of the country.

I have been saying the same thing here that I have for years Henry.

You mentioned the New York Tribune, the same paper that repeatedly attacked Lincoln, pushed for his replacement and whose editor led the Liberal Republican revolt against Grant. Prominent yes, but certainly not the only voice in town obviously. Clearly over the period of the 1860s into the 1870s, the people in the driver's seat were in flux and we know who won out.

In a party system in which slavery is the great dividing line, I think it is completely fair to say that the Republicans were on the left while the Democrats were on the right, even if the Republicans included conservatives amongst their ranks. I agree that the sort of conservatives Southern planters were was very different from the antebellum Northern Whigs or the McKinley Republicans, but that's because they were so much further right than either. In a sense, they were like the old Federalists, if you're inclined to view the Federalists as monarchists or noble types, which I might disagree with but was how a lot of people thought. When Southerners changed their defense of slavery from "necessary evil" to "positive good", and therefore either implicitly or explicitly repudiated Jeffersonian equality, it became evident that only the most ardent reactionaries could support such a system, which as you said drew Northern conservatives to the Republicans, who, while conservatives in the liberal climate of the North, were liberals relative to the Southern slave power. Even if the deck was scrambled, there was still a clear left and right in the fight. I find this quote from Wendell Phillips illuminating:

Virginia slaveholders, making theoretical democracy their passion, conquered the Federal Government, and emancipated the working classes of New England. Bitter was the cup to honest Federalism and the Essex Junto. Today, Massachusetts only holds to the lips of Carolina a beaker of the same beverage.

According to Phillips, the war against the slave power is the same fight that Jefferson fought, only the Democrats have taken the place of the Federalists. To the extent that they were both fights which pitted individual liberty men against wealth and privilege, I think he is objectively correct, and evidently so did liberal opinion.

I would contend that Stephen Douglas was a very conservative man, one who put "the dollar before the man", but regardless, for every pro-slavery Northern Democrat claiming to care about "popular sovereignty", you had a James Henry Hammond clamoring against the "mudsills of society". Those Southern newspaper excerpts I quoted earlier are indicative of this commonly-held latter attitude.

As for the Republicans, it is true that the radical wing of the party lost control after the defeat in 1856, so that the party which nominated Lincoln was much more of a big tent than that of four years earlier. Accordingly they became less radical on abolition, but I would disagree that their economic positions saw a change. It is important to remember that for many Americans, slavery was as much an economic issue as it was a moral one. The monopolization of western lands by wealthy slave owners prevented small farmers from moving west and having a piece of their own land to work on. This was the main anti-slavery argument of the Free Soilers, and it was wholly adopted by the Republicans, who believed in equal economic opportunity for all Americans. They also believed in the economic harmony of all classes, distinguishing them from class warriors on both sides. While on the one hand Southern planters envisaged a society in which the rich would hold down a permanent underclass, and on the other socialists imagined a dictatorship of the proletariat, Republicans held that the prosperity of each class depended on the others' well-being. Accordingly, they put into effect economic policies designed to benefit all segments of the population. I know you like to focus on how their tariffs benefited businessmen, but that's only one part of the picture. During the war the government experimented with printing greenbacks and implemented a progressive income tax, both of which helped the poor and hit wealthy men. They passed the Morrill Acts, drastically expanding the system of free schools which Southerners so hated, in order that any American could get an education and rise in the world according to his or her own talent. Perhaps most important of all was the Homestead Act, which allowed vast numbers of small farmers to obtain pieces of western land that previously had been monopolized by rich slavers. It was the ultimate expression of Republican and Free Soil principles.

It should be no surprise, then, that the economically left-wing New York Tribune stood solidly behind all of these policies. It may not have been the only voice in town, but surely it says something about the ideological leanings of the Republican Party that this radical paper run by a quasi-socialist was by far the main organ of that party. When Greeley went after Lincoln it was because he did not go far enough and was too moderate for the man. But yes, I would agree that the driver's seat of the party certainly changed under Grant, as men like Charles Sumner were pushed aside to make room for the Roscoe Conklings of the world. The Republicans abandoned their original emphasis on equality to become the party of big business, and it would not be until Theodore Roosevelt that the original liberal spirit of the party would see a revival. So with that, perhaps it would be best to end here with a quote from Roosevelt, describing Lincoln:

To-day many well-meaning men who have permitted themselves to fossilize, to become ultra-conservative reactionaries, to reject and oppose all progress, but who still pay a conventional and perfunctory homage to Lincoln's memory, will do well to remember exactly what it was for which this great conservative leader of radicalism actually stood.

[Wikipedia delenda est]

In a party system in which slavery is the great dividing line, I think it is completely fair to say that the Republicans were on the left while the Democrats were on the right, even if the Republicans included conservatives amongst their ranks.

I am generally not fond of situational or relativist basis for assigning ideological labels, especially when we live in an era where it is so common place for people to presume ideologies as they existed today have existed unchanged since time immemorial so as to facilitate the exclusion and elimination of non-conformists to the expected party line. If you want to tread these grounds for your own satisfaction, that is on you.

I wouldn't say I am "assigning" ideological labels. There is every evidence that contemporaries well understood the ideological contours of the slavery debate, and it is rather insulting to their intelligence to assume they could not. It's not an accident that in Europe, liberal and radical opinion was unanimously in favor of the Union, while conservatives and the nobility overwhelmingly sympathized with the Confederacy. And I've already been over the fact that in America leftist papers like the New York Tribune didn't just happen to support the Republicans, but operated as the single biggest organs of the party. Considering also how openly reactionary were the Slave Power and its Democratic supporters, it's really not even a question where the parties stood on an ideological spectrum.

[Wikipedia delenda est]

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".

[Wikipedia delenda est]

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.  

I think that is exactly the wrong way of looking at it. The Civil War era Democrats weren't prefiguring today's Democrats, they were echoing 17th century Toryism:

Perhaps his best known polemical pamphlet was An Account of the Growth of Knavery, which ruthlessly attacked the parliamentary opposition to Charles II and his successor James, Duke of York (later King James II), placing them as fanatics who misused contemporary popular anti-Catholic sentiment to attack the Restoration court and the existing social order in order to pursue their own political ends.

Although some Catholics backed Breckinridge—particularly fellow Kentuckians from the western portion of the state—most members of the Church in the region supported Douglas. The northern Democratic candidate promoted unionism and vowed to uphold the status quo, which, to Catholic clergy, meant an adherence to the law and the preservation of social order. As Catholic historian William B. Kurtz explained, “Catholics’ faith and religious worldview, which emphasized stability over reform, also made them predisposed to favor a conservative and national party.” Douglas gained the support of Catholics because he advocated the policy of popular sovereignty to decide the fate of slavery in the West, opposed abolitionism, promised to protect the rights of immigrants, and promoted the sanctity of the Union by running a national campaign. For example, regarding the dispute over slavery in the western territories, the Douglas Democratic platform pledged to “abide by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States [the Dred Scott decision] upon these questions of Constitutional law.” Thus, clergy from the Border States viewed Douglas as the candidate least influenced by Protestant liberalism and most committed to the interests of the Church and the nation.

Clergy referenced Catholic theology, doctrine, and dogma to offer an alternative course of action than the one pursued by abolitionists and antislavery Republicans. According to members of the American hierarchy, Catholicism defended national laws, protected the social order, and prevented political factionalism because it provided a central authority—the Church—to settle internal disputes. On the other hand, prelates and priests contended that Protestantism allowed for lawlessness, fomented social disorder, and led to political disunion because, without the acceptance of a central moral authority, Protestantism allowed each man (or woman) to become a law unto himself (or herself). Thus, not only did clergy oppose the Republican Party because of its perceived anti-Catholic stance, but prelates and priests also disparaged the party of Lincoln because it represented the interests of northern Protestants, a group that Catholics considered uninformed religious fanatics that fomented disunion.

Why is it so impossible for you to admit that Protestant fanaticism, even in the 19th century and even in the United States, was very often adjacent to liberal and radical political views, and that in turn Catholicism and Catholics were very often politically conservative or reactionary, and therefore opposed to these views?