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No one familiar with the histories of the respective parties should be remotely surprised by this. One of the proverbial "big lies" the Blue Tribe likes to tell itself is that the Republican and Democratic Parties of the mid-19th century are somehow fundamentally different entities from the Republicans and Democrats of today. "Read more early American history" they'll sneer while pointedly ignoring the most pertinent elements of said history.
What would become the modern republican party was founded in the late 1850s and explicitly organized as a big tent coalition of regional religious and business interests who were united in their opposition to slavery and support for westward expansion. The specific policies under debate may have changed over the last 170 years or so but this core of aligned religious and business interests along with it's identity and organization as a "big tent" coalition is still plain to see in the contemporary party. It's right there in the colloquial name of "Grand Old Party".
When pressed to defend this radical separation between past and present, the Blue Tribe response is typically something along the lines of "bUt RePuBlIcAnS dUrInG ThE cIvIl WaR wErE tHe PrOgReSiVeS oF tHeIr TiMe". Even if that statement is true i don't think it matters.
Durring the latter half of the 19th century Slavery was defeated, the West was won, and the GOP began to shift from fighting over territory to consolidating and building upon what they had won. In short while the axioms attitudes and identity of the party remained consistant they became "conservatives" in the sense that they were no longer working to overturn the status-quo they were working to maintain it.
Guys like Glenn Reynolds get sneered at by all "right thinking people" for pointing out that "Democrats are the Real Racists" (and always have been) but when lies are the norm, telling the truth can be a revolutionary act.
In the 19th century racial segregation and discrimination was both legal and popular and this is the status quo that "conservative" Democrats fought to defend before they became "progressives" fighting against the status quo.
In the first half of the 20th, the status quo that "Progressive" Democrats like Woodrow Wilson looked to weaken and push back against was that which had been forcibly imposed during reconstruction and subsequently codified in the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments. While the branding may have changed ("safe spaces" replacing "separate but equal") over the last century the position of contemporary "Progressive" has not. They are still fighting for legalized racial discrimination/segregation against a Republican opposition party.
In otherwords, this is not...
It is a return to thier normal position after the George Floyd riots and associated fallout/backlash forced the pro-IdPol faction of the DNC to backpedal and "hide thier power" for a bit.
My historical read is that it's more that there's a pretty consistent core around the business/national/religious ideologies and goals around the Republican party, connected to a vision of who are "proper Americans" (which continuously expands as new groups assimilate to Americanness), and the Democrats have then been a looser coalition of those that don't quite fit into the Republican vision at the moment. So in 1800s the "opposing coalition" might include states righters, Catholics and classical liberals, now it would include left-wingers, various ethnic minorities and internationalist business types. In the future the Republicans would probably still develop along organic lines, but the Dems might be something else entirely.
I think that is a fairly reasonable and accurate read.
My point is that the core axioms and organizing principles haven't changed much since the reconstruction period.
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Oh hey, I feel called out.
The modern Republican party was formed from the ashes of the Whigs (who were very much a big and incoherent tent of anti-Jacksonians), and eventually accrued some northern Democrats, along with a substantial share of the Know-Nothings. They weren't initially an anti-slavery party (some abolitionists were Democrats, and many Republicans were anti-abolitionist), though they adopted a harder anti-slavery platform because of the Civil War, obviously. (But even during the war, the "Radical Republicans" who wanted complete and total emancipation and civil rights for blacks were the leftist wing of the party that even Lincoln found difficult.)
YeS THat iS bAsICalLY CorREcT. How does it not matter?
I am really not following your argument - you flat-out admit that the GOP of the 19th century was very nearly the opposite of the modern GOP, and then say it "doesn't matter" and this is a "Big Lie" that Blue Tribe tells. Where is the lie?
Whereas Red Tribe really likes to bring up that the Democratic Party dominated the post-Confederate South and that most KKKers were Democrats, but sneers at the "Southern Strategy" and the great flipping of the Solid South as if it were some kind of myth. If it were not true that most of the people who voted Democrat before Reagan vote Republican now, then where did all those Democratic voters go and where did all the Republican voters come from? Of the few remaining KKKers today, how many do you think vote Democrat? (Note that I am not saying that Republicans are white supremacists or the party of the KKK, but I am definitely saying that the Republicans and Democrats represent cultural roles and political ideologies that are nearly a reverse of their 19th century incarnations. Just saying "Democrats have always been racists - first they were anti-black, now they're anti-white" is a very weak specimen of the "DeMoCRatS arE the ReAL RaCIsTS!" argument.)
There was, I know it’s hard to believe, a lot of generational churn from the end of the civil rights act to the present. The south wasn’t more Republican than the country as a whole until the nineties and that was probably due to evangelical Christianity, not race. Even until pretty recently, there were conservative southern democrats winning elections regularly. Louisiana had a pro-life democrat in the governors office until 2022. The most conservative democrat in the house was from rural Texas in the most recent congress.
And I think ‘evangelical Christianity is a coverup for racism’ is a convenient narrative on Reddit, but the reality is that non-Catholic organized religion has been pretty Republican for most of America’s history(republicans win Orthodox Jews and won Muslims while this shift was ongoing), and this is more returning to form than anything else(Catholics shifting right has mostly to do with pelvic issues taking front and center). When you look at actual figures who became born again Christians you tend to see a shift away from racism on a personal level, and the SBC(far and away the largest religious body involved) shifted pretty hard away from its racial history when it embraced evangelicalism. And clinching Republican control over the south was, well, in a lot of cases going on while bush was playing hard to the evangelical base.
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Maybe a little, but you are not the only one nor the most egregious.
None of this contradicts the claim that...
In fact Pam from The Office might even say that they are the same picture.
It doesn't matter for the reasons I go into in the following paragraphs. To answer your question, "the big lie" is that the underlying axioms and organizational principles of the respective parties today are fundamentally different from what they were before. That the parties today are somehow "the reverse" of what they were in the 19th century. Where as the truth is that the positions of parties never changed, what changed was the status quo.
It is a myth, the so called "Southern Strategy" is another one of those "Big Lies". Contra the popular narrative Nixon didn't win the 68 election by inviting segregationists into the fold. He won because the Democrats ended up splitting their votes between Wallace and Humphrys and a lot of people on both sides of the aisle found themselves suddenly receptive to Nixon's appeals to "Law-and-order" in the immediate aftermath of MLK's assassination and the associated race riots. Why current year Democrats might want to sweep these associations under the rug is left as an excercise for the reader.
Reagan won a supermajority by making an effort to appeal to working class Democrats and blacks in addition to the existing Republican base.
A cynic might even suggest that Reagan's success in this endeavor explains both the Democratic party's abandonment of labour-based principals and the increasingly "populist" tenor of the GOP.
I don't think Nixon invited segregationists into the fold and the Republicans suddenly became the party of the KKK. I think Republicans became right wing when they used to be progressive, and Democrats became left wing when they used to be... well, not really conservative but certainly more appealing to cultural conservatives.
The Republicans became the party of conservatives and the Democrats became the party of progressives - which was essentially a reversal of their previous roles. Someone who voted Republican in the 1850s would probably vote Democrat today, and vice versa. Obviously direct comparisons are not going to fit exactly (an 1850s voter wouldn't even understand many of our issues, and many things that were important in the 1850s aren't now). Perhaps it's simplistic to say they simply traded places, but their "axioms and organizing principles" absolutely changed, and in many cases were reversed.
As far as I can tell, your objection to the "myth" (which it is not) that Republicans and Democrats have changed and come to represent very different constituencies (which party attracted black voters from after the Civil War and which party attracted the working class throughout most of the 20th century) is that you'd really like to keep hanging racism around the Democrats' necks, and they'd really like to claim Republicans are now the party of racists. Both arguments are tactical political ones but neither addresses what actually historically changed.
...and I don't think that this claim is borne out by the historical record.
The Republican Party of the late 1800s is a big tent coalition organized around a core of aligned religious and business interests and that remains a fairly accurate description of the Republican Party today. This along with the fact a man like William McKinley (with his rhetoric about unskilled immigration is driving wages down, and advocacy for higher tariffs and lower taxes to promote investment in American business) is not only immediately recognizable as "Republican" within the context of the contemporary parties but surprisingly relevant for someone who's been dead for over 120 years, is strong evidence against the claim that the party's axioms and organizing principles have changed significantly in the intervening years.
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I do wonder, did civil war-era Americans even use the "left" and "right" labels? I know that the terminology originated in the French Revolution, so there's no reason they couldn't have, but I haven't heard them used in that context.
No. They mostly identified with their party, or occasionally used words like "radical" or other slang terms of the day. I don't think "right/left" became common political labels in the US until the 20th century.
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Exactly. People change their party affiliations over time. Parties change their platforms over time. Ascribing a consistent principled philosophy to a political party, a group that is a Ship of Theseus in both membership and in ideas, is a fool's errand. It would be more accurate to treat the parties as brand new groups every election. Republicans_1984 is not Republicans_2024. And criticizing a party based on the platforms of past parties that share the same name is invalid. It was different people and a different platform.
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I don't think you're completely wrong, especially in the mind of the average voter.
To the extent that "Southern Strategy" is frequently hung on Richard Nixon in the '72, election, I think it's relevant that he carried every state except Massachusetts and DC: it's not like he needed the South to win the election. Which is doubly ironic to me given the entire Watergate fiasco.
If nothing else, I think any voters in '84 (the last opportunity to vote for Reagan) are at least very close to retirement now. The average Reagan voter is almost certainly dead.
That the "southern strategy" gets hung on Nixon is one of the ways you can tell that its a lie. Current year Democrats are capital-D Desperate to erace Wallace and the dixiecrats from the popular consciousness lest anyone start asking akward questions.
As Democrats, no, we're really not. We're happy to say unfortunately, when this was more of a racist country, unfortunately due to historical political ties, there was a very odd alliance of African-American's, unions, and racists. Thankfully, we eventually forced them out of the coalition thanks to the works of great men like Hubert Humphrey and so on, but unfortunately for the country, instead of casting them out and refusing their support, the Republican's were happy to allow with these racists, and now, that stain has been shifted to them and creating the festering wound that led to Trumpism.
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Damn, man, we GenXers may be aging but we ain't dead yet! (Okay, granted the average Reagan voter was probably a Boomer - but they're not all dead yet either.)
Only about 2 years of Gen X would have been eligible to vote for (or against) Reagan.
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