Ship of Theseus and Political Parties

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

This is inspired by discussions related to Jobbik and the Swedish Democrats and their "rehabilitation", but can just as easily apply to radical left parties moving into relatively waters (Syriza, the Dutch SP), or parties where national contexts have drifted dramatically to the extent the nation is fundamentally different (e.g. the modern KMT in relation to the revolutionary era KMT). Do you think political parties, especially the aged beasts like, say, the Tories or the Democrats have som fundamental essence baked into their roots, are are they merely a shifting brand name and reflection of contemporary ideals and material circumstances?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

The US democrats and Republican party are clearly nothing more than brand names for vague collations that shift as the wind comes, shifting allegiances and representing counstieunces often at random but that's a particular quirk of the US party system.

Other parties that consider themselves national parties like the Canadian Liberal Party or the British tories are also fairly similar, with their core ideology being malleable and easily shiftable when it comes towards doing what is require to retain power. In extreme cases like in Singapore, the party itself becomes the country's brand.

[Person Man]

At first glance, it looks like almost everyone who would have been a Democrat 100 years ago is now a Republican and vice versa....but if you look far enough, I think you start to get a common pattern or core idea that though profound, may not have an applicability in the real world.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

At first glance, it looks like almost everyone who would have been a Democrat 100 years ago is now a Republican and vice versa....but if you look far enough, I think you start to get a common pattern or core idea that though profound, may not have an applicability in the real world.

That's a lazy oversimplification, large swaths of the great plains state, rural midwest and other parts of the country are as republican then as they are now. Democrats still retain support of many urban machines that they held a hundred year ago. Coallations have changed drasticly but it's not a complete swap(mainly because many social mileaus that current underline both parties didn't realy exist back then as an electoral force).

[Person Man]

At first glance, it looks like almost everyone who would have been a Democrat 100 years ago is now a Republican and vice versa....but if you look far enough, I think you start to get a common pattern or core idea that though profound, may not have an applicability in the real world.

That's a lazy oversimplification, large swaths of the great plains state, rural midwest and other parts of the country are as republican then as they are now. Democrats still retain support of many urban machines that they held a hundred year ago. Coallations have changed drasticly but it's not a complete swap(mainly because many social mileaus that current underline both parties didn't realy exist back then as an electoral force).

That's why I said "at first glance" and you're right. Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, and Utah have always been very Republican. NYC, Boston, Philly, and Chicago have always been very Dem.

Those are both about 10-20% of the map though, right?

I could also agree that the social relationships of the various constituencies have changed with demographic and economic change. 

[Aurelius]

At first glance, it looks like almost everyone who would have been a Democrat 100 years ago is now a Republican and vice versa....but if you look far enough, I think you start to get a common pattern or core idea that though profound, may not have an applicability in the real world.

On the other hand, look at the McKinley vs Bryan campaigns of the 1890s and the R and D messages are remarkably similar to the R and D messages of the present era, at least regarding economics.

[Sub Jero]

[Person Man]

Praeger U really wants the reason for the South flipping R is because that the average southerner wanted to get an MBA.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Praeger U really wants the reason for the South flipping R is because that the average southerner wanted to get an MBA.

Praeger U is terrible obviously.

However, for the low country/urban white South, it could be argued that the coalition they had with the up country on the basis of Civil War legacy and race was unnatural and that removal of that would have thus resulted in a "return to the norm".

A lot of party switch discussion seems to operate on the basis that "history began in 1865" or "backward projection of civil war divides all the way back to the founding". This ignores the reality that both the Federalist and then Whig Parties included large segments of the Southern Elite with the Federalists being NE Merchants, coast wise slave traders and the Carolina Planter class. The Whigs were famously referred to as being the "Lords of the Loom and the Lash".

This understanding of the political coalitions and understanding of the pre-Civil War history as such, tends to make the Civil War alignment of region trumping class and race trumping class, looks like the aberration as opposed to the norm that was "dastardly disrupted by the Republicans in the 1960s". The Southern realignment was a natural result of the existence of the New Deal Coalition, the superfluous nature of the low country tagging along was highlighted by the 1948 elections. What matters, and where there is room for criticism is how and what was done to effect this realignment, and that is where the specific tactics of the Southern strategy are open to criticism.

Along with this, has to be an understanding of how economic development expands what would be a numerically small electorate (in a fair electoral process naturally), especially after the loss of many black belt counties once blacks gained the right to vote. The rise of Southern suburbia, essentially creating a brand new, fast growing and influential voting geography in the South is essential to there being tangible gains for any southern realignment to deliver.

Also a decent understanding of how the destruction of the poor farmers and the movement of the concentration of low income voters towards the urban areas (first in the North and much later in the South) and how this thus effected the realignments over time.

The simple problem is that American historians are, even on the left, horribly reluctant to discuss a class angle in history and this neoliberal perspective is why it is so often written off as "the whole region just being conservatives all along..." Like the support for the socialist Party in Oklahoma, the election of people like Huey Long, and the present of people like Ralph Yarborough and Estes Kefauver, the long tradition of NC progressives (at least economically speaking) and such forth and such like would easily disprove such mistaken superficial glances at the situation. There were pockets that wanted economic populism/progressivism and there were areas that were dominated by wealthy elites who didn't. These battles occurred internally in the primaries and then after 1948 increasingly came to define the Republican versus Democratic battle in what, for a few decades, was very much a swing region with many swing states.

There also has to be understanding of the forces that caused the up country South to go from being Clinton's best areas of the South to some of Trump's best counties in the country over the course of the last 20 years. These areas were hardly racially tolerant, but for a long time they had bigger priorities, especially since their areas were far less diverse anyway. Thus generations that remembered the Depression continued to vote for the people that gave them the TVA, Social security etc. The present of immigrant labor into these communities very well interjected a racial friction that previously was absent, at the same time you had wages falling, the Democrats shifting more culturally hostile and simultaneously more ambivalent shall we say economically. Younger generations being more focused on culture war stuff is a consideration also.

[An American Tail: Fubart Goes West]

The Republicans have generally been anti-immigration and pro-business interests since the 1800s, with the Democrats being more in favor of immigration and less in favor of business interests. I feel like I had IDed a third point of similarity, but I don’t remember what it was.