Since when did R lost media and intellectuals?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

It has to be considered who is in the intellectual class and why.

Prior to a certain point, the only people who got higher education were mostly people who were already rich and this would create a skew of its own. Add to that the dominance sources of employment for higher educated people would have been business or industrial related either directly or as professionals that serviced said industrial economy, so it all ties back both demographically and economically to a pro-Republican stance.

This began to change in the 1930s with greater government support for academia and other similar fields, meaning that finance and industry were not the only game in town and the supporting cast of professionals thus serviced a combination of business and government related industries as well.

Add to that the effects of the GI bill and the gaining of access to higher education by more and more non-WASPs, and over time you get a shift towards the Democrats and the left.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

It has to be considered who is in the intellectual class and why.

Prior to a certain point, the only people who got higher education were mostly people who were already rich and this would create a skew of its own. Add to that the dominance sources of employment for higher educated people would have been business or industrial related either directly or as professionals that serviced said industrial economy, so it all ties back both demographically and economically to a pro-Republican stance.

This began to change in the 1930s with greater government support for academia and other similar fields, meaning that finance and industry were not the only game in game and the supporting cast of professionals thus serviced a combination of business and government related industries as well.

Add to that the effects of the GI bill and the gaining of access to higher education by more and more non-WASPs, and over time you get a shift towards the Democrats and the left.

I don't think this was true back then.  Most of the famous 19th century industrialists and inventors weren't college graduates.  Vanderbilt didn't even learn to read until he was in retirement!  Education in that era was something you did for social status after becoming wealthy, not something that brought wealth.  On a middle class level, it was pursued by people who wanted to be local schoolteachers or professors or lawyers, not by people who wanted to become wealthy in industry. 

It took quite a while for production and management to get complicated enough to make higher education more beneficial than work experience for aspiring business owners, let alone required to become wealthy in industry.  You could say we are only just now seeing the political impact of a world where education is what makes most people rich.

How does one bold a section and then make a counter point that is practically stated in the sentence just prior to where said bolding starts?

Prior to a certain point, the only people who got higher education were mostly people who were already rich and this would create a skew of its own.

The next line starts "add to that" meaning it is an additional supporting point to that.

However, I would challenge the notion that every rich person was an inventor or shed tinkerer who struck it rich.

I also outright stated that as you said few people sought higher education, however those that did were most certainly pulling from a select group that is already wealthy.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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 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.

I am glad we live in more civilized times where the concept of tribalism driving one side to oppose everything that the other side supports right down to the color of the sky and the grass is completely lost.

It helps me sleep so much better at night, I am always asleep by 10.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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.

I never said they saw "a change". It is important to note that because the GOP in 1856 was much more radical it was also far less Whig and more Free Soiler and thus economics was not emphasized as much, though surely many supported the pro-Northern policies on tariff and the like, the focus was far more on slavery.

 I have discussed at length how these policies and slavery intertwined from refuting Lost Causers to discussing Henry Carey and his publications laying the blame for the Civil War on the free trade policy encouraging the preservation of slavery. However, such linking of the two was certainly a Lincoln era conceptualization and earlier their would have been a fear of alienating ex-Democrat Free Soilers on this and other economic issues. This is why the 1856 goes more hot and heavy against slavery, while Lincoln mellowed that tone and put more focus on what was essentially Clay's program minus the bank.

Also helping matters was the demographic shift and spread of industrialization into states that had previously been rather much Jacksonian farm country (WI, MI, ILL etc)

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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 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.

Yes because Charles Pinckney and his clan weren't reactionary slave owners, who led the drive for the pro-slavery wing in the convention and were some of Hamilton's closest allies. Also worth noting that if memory serves me, Taney was a Federalist before becoming a Jacksonian.  

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.

Your penchant for taking points I made elsewhere and throwing them back at me like hand grenades is precious.

Yes there was an evolution in thought regarding slavery once slavery ballooned in scope in the early 19th century. I would call this a corrupting influence and I would be inclined to accept the term reactionary here as well but I would not be so inclined to accept the word conservative. This is especially when you start to get to the points where they are overturning court precedent, reading things into the constitution and the founders, overturning the Missouri Compromise, weakening the sanctity of Free States and ultimately engaging in rebellion. At a certain point, you go so far that you are radically upending the system you really cease to be a conservative. It is why words like reactionary and fascism exist, to describe a radical extreme right, that will go to any lengths to achieve what it wants.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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.

What is insulting is to write out of existence the farmer in Pennsylvania who may have voted for Buchanan because Fremont was crazy but jumped to Lincoln in 1860 because of Dred Scott, the post Dred Scott recession and the increasing radicalism of Southern politicians in promotion of their special interest. I would consider this to be a conservative voter under most reasonable definitions of the term (and Lincoln's success with these such "Conservative anti-slavery voters" is why Lincoln won PA overwhelmingly while Fremont lost it), joining with a bunch of liberals yes, but for the sake of the preservation of the country. To which I might add, is a line Lincoln stuck with until the politics, ie the appetite of these voters to act against slavery "for the sake of the war effort", was present enough to allow for an Emancipation Proclamation. One of the Generals that Lincoln overrode on such grounds in1861, was Fremont IIRC.

I know of at least one set of "Liberals" in Europe that was pro-Southern and it was arguably the most powerful and most relevant such liberals on that continent. I am of course referring to the ruling Liberal Party in the UK, or at least the leadership thereof. And I have posted extensively on Union intelligence efforts to stir up working class and labor opposition to said government's stance as being a major factor as to why they did not go that route.

Also worth remembering that the Bonapartist regime in France was likewise sympathetic though I am generally not in the business of awarding any favors to either Bonaparte and certainly not giving them the pleasure of attributing popular-Authoritarian caesarism with liberalism. Though if you follow Roman examples Caesarism was opposed by folks generally accepted as being conservatives (I mean people like Cato and Cicero, not opportunists like Pompey). The point being is that not every opponent of conservatism is necessarily a liberal or on the left. In theory conservatism would be opposed to Bonapartism, Caesarism, Fascism, and even Reactionary tendencies if taken too far.

The most pro-Union of the European Powers, was arguably Tsarist Russia, which while under the modernizing force of Alexander II, was still the most reactionary major power in the world. It seems to be that opportunism was the biggest force in terms of these players, then ideology hence why support and opposition among such power players is all over the map. Intellectuals and such can talk all day long, but power considerations and geopolitics often over ruled such thinkers in favor of practical interest. Splitting up the US, protected Canada for the British. Splitting up the US enabled France to keep screwing around in Mexico. A united US threatened Canada and was thus in Russia's interest because Russia and Britain were playing chess with each other over Central Asia to see who could block who's advance.

This not only applies to geopolitics but to internal politics and especially voting demographics.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I am glad we live in more civilized times where the concept of tribalism driving one side to oppose everything that the other side supports right down to the color of the sky and the grass is completely lost.

It helps me sleep so much better at night, I am always asleep by 10.

I mean, given those are editorials from literally right before a civil war, it is fairly obvious why they'd be mega tribal and divisive?

If anything I guess editorials like that from the 1880s or 1890s would be a better point

That passage was satirical right down to the time stated, since I posted it after midnight on the east coast, hence definitely not asleep by ten.

To your point I guess it comes down to how much you buy into the "Are we heading for another Civil War".