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Let me bang my "Read more early American history" drum again.
It is absolutely braindead (to paraphrase @Hoffmeister25) to try to map 19th century politics onto the 21st century. The Republicans and Democrats of the 19th century were not the Republicans and Democrats of today. Republicans during and after the Civil War were the liberals of their time. John Wilkes Booth was a Democrat, but more importantly, he was an anti-Union secessionist who was outraged at Lincoln because Lincoln indicated that he was going to give blacks voting rights. Really, try arguing that makes Booth in any way like a modern Democrat or "woke."
I have less to say about Garfield and McKinley as I haven't gotten to their biographies yet, but the pattern held at least to the mid-20th century. Republicans more and more became the party of northern industrialists and urbanites, vs. Democrats as the party of Southern farmers and working class people, but the Republicans began as the remnants of the Whig Party, with a bit of Know-Nothingism mixed in, while the Democrats began more or less with Andrew Jackson - arguably with Thomas Jefferson, but Jackson really made them into the party they became. None of these people would map to what you are conceiving of as a Republican or a Democrat today.
While obviously true in that the Republicans and Democrats of the 19th century have all long since passed on, I dont think that proves as much as you and @Hoffmeister25 seem to think it does.
While the issues of the day change, i don't think people (as a general class) do. I read a lot of late 19th/early 20th century history and it seems to me that the core axioms and motivating ethoses of the respective parties of 1920 are readily recognizable in thier 2020 counterparts.
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"Normie" Republicans like my parents do just that quite often, by way of DR3 arguments: 'the Democrats were the party of racism then, and they're the party of racism now; the only difference is that these days they want to keep blacks trapped on the welfare "plantation",' and suchlike.
It may not be a good argument, but in my experience it's a common one.
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To be completely fair, early twentieth century republicans would be recognizable as plausibly republicans today, just not exactly mainstream ones. Specifically, they'd be recognizable as possibly Rockefeller republicans.
There's a real continuity between Roosevelt and, say, Susan Collins today.
Careful now, you are treading on dangerous ground.
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