Even then it can reasonably be argued that even the Democratic Party’s ancestor in the form of the Jeffersonian Republicans was always the more “populist” party in the sense that it advocated for the common man while the Republican Party’s predecessors-the Federalists, National Republicans, and Whigs were parties that advocated mercantile and business interests.
Not to negate any of the above observations, but one earlier change in party direction is relevant to the discussion: the Republican abandonment of Reconstruction.
What happened was the election of 1876, Sam Tilden (Democrat) versus Rutherford Hayes (Republican), came out virtually tied, similar to the Bush-Gore tied election in 2000; Tilden had the edge in the popular vote but in the electoral college there was chaos, with some individual states unclear on their own results (again akin to 2000, think of Florida). Instead of it being tossed to the Supreme Court, it was settled in back rooms of Congress between powerful politicians from the two parties, and the deal they worked out was this: Republican Hayes would be handed the election if and only if the Republicans, up until then social progressives / party of Abraham Lincoln / emancipators etc, threw the black folk under the bus. Dismantle reconstruction, take your Republican emissaries out of the South and let Southerners (i.e., white Democrats) run the place.
It certainly didn’t shift anti-slavery loyalty to the Democrats but it left the idealists of that ilk not very happy with Republicans, and, had that not been the case, the Republican party probably would have remained closely associated with socially progressive and egalitarian politics, more so than they ended up being in the century that followed.
Between 1876 and the Southern Strategy / fallout of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s, neither party had a solid profile as a party of equality and fairness. The Democratic Party was involved in the labor movement and populist forms of economic equality but the Republican Party was more involved in supporting women’s voting rights. Even after Johnson and Nixon, it was the Republican Party that had support for the ERA as part of its official platform. But by the end of the 1970s the Republicans had again thrown societal outgroups under the wheels and had opted for full-tilt pseudo-nostalgic religious-backed traditionalism, social conservatism, leaving idealism in the discard bin for the Democratic Party to finally claim as its own.
That is as much of an interesting split as the changes related to the Civil Rights movement. We like to look at the split from Lincoln - Republican who freed the slaves to the Dixie Democrats who left the party during Civil Rights and the thinly veiled racism of some Republican standard bearers today…But there are more axises that have flipped over time. Federalist vs. States Rights, populists vs. business, regulation vs. no regulation.
I like the early Federalists, they tended to be more abolitionist minded, believed in a strong central government, and were pro-business - they were also generally Northerners. Today, I lean far more Democrat than Republican. The Jeffersonian Republicans tended to be far more decentralization, small government, states rights, and slavery as a necessary evil.
Neither the Federalists nor the Jeffersonian Republicans can really be divided into “abolitionist” and “pro-slavery” parties except as they were divided along regional lines-the Southern Federalists like Charles C. Pinckney were slaveowners while some Northern Jeffersonian Republicans such as the infamous Aaron Burr were antislavery. Keep in mind, additionally, the Federalists were often violently elitist and reactionary in the British High Tory manner opposing the extension of suffrage to even all white males.
It’s worth remembering that the original Republican Party included Marxists. Lincoln appointed several Marxists to high civil and military posts, and Karl Marx himself published a regular column in Horace Greeley’s Pub-leaning New York Tribune. You can read all about it – and about Thomas Paine’s proto-socialism – in The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition . . . Socialism, by John Nichols.
“puddleglum” - stopped reading right there.
I still have more in common with the Federalists. And less in common with todays Republicans.
Really? Who?
Several? Who? I guess you may claim to have been numerically accurate if you can name three. Let’s have 'em. I’ll have to wait and see what you call a “high” post, though. And I really, really doubt such appointed would have been selected due to their Marxist convictions.
Don’t forget Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrat Walkout at the 1948 Democratic Convention. It was triggered by Hubert Humphrey’s speech in which he called for the Party to abandon “States Rights” and embrace “Civil Rights”.
This was the beginning of the public split. LBJ (Son of the South), when signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, predicted that the GOP would carry the South for 50 years.
Nixon’s Southern Strategy (thanks [Expando) picked up the old CSA.
LBJ was the consummate political analyst.
Hey, I lost seven pounds.
[shrug] I read the book two or three years ago. Why would I be able to name them? I don’t recall anything to suggest they were appointed for their Marxist convictions; the point is 1) those convictions were no objection or obstacle at the time and 2) they were at home in the GOP.
This little graphic tells you all you need to know.
Some republicans say they were the party opposed to slavery, and voted in favor of the civil rights bill. True. But note those stats, NONE of the republicans in the old confederate southern states voted for the civil rights act. It was and is a cesspool of ideas and beliefs, they were pissed at one of their own, a democrat championing the civil rights bill and sought to punish the party by switching to the republican party.
If Lincoln’s Marxists is the source, count me in as skeptical.
I haven’t read the thread, but I am sure someone has already mentioned the overrated “Southern Strategy” by Nixon. That was a product of the switch, not the cause.
Here is what happened. After the Civil War, the Democrats controlled the South. Republicans were the hated anti-slavery party of Lincoln. The Southern states used underhanded tactics to keep blacks (and poor whites) from voting. So segregationist Democrats ran the South. Because there was no competition from other parties in the elections, most Southern states used primary elections to choose their candidates, and those primaries became the de facto election since the Democrat usually won the general election.
The system was disrupted when the Civil Rights Movement and new federal laws allowed millions of blacks to vote in the South for the first time. Since the Democratic primaries were what mattered, they voted in them. That was the cause of the transformation. Suddenly there were anti-segregation, pro-civil rights candidates winning the primaries, and then the general election, including some black candidates. The loss of control of the Democratic party led many white voters and even some office-holders to flee the party for the Republicans.
That had a big effect on the national parties, of course. But Republicans in other parts of the country had always had a contingent of conservatives, just as there were liberals in the Democratic party outside the South (and in the South, though they couldn’t take power because blacks couldn’t vote). The “Conservative Coalition” of southern Dems and northern Republicans voted together for many years in Congress before Civil Rights. So both parties had a better mix of liberal and conservative, and now they’ve polarized more. There are fewer liberal Republicans and fewer conservative Democrats than there used to be.
There were other important factors that caused voters to switch parties, and they’ll be mentioned here, but the above is the mechanics of how it actually got done, voter by voter.
If you can’t name them then you should not have cited them.
(1) If the Marxist convictions were not openly proclaimed then objection could have been evaded. For example, some googling reveals that Carl Schurz once attended a speech in Germany by Marx, and wrote glowingly that he accepted its intellectual content. Lincoln might have had no idea of this when years later he appointed Schurtz ambassador and then general. Furthermore Schurz might by then have changed his mind about Marx, and your source might have committed distortion by omitting that detail.
(2) If they were active Marxists then they could not have been ideologically “at home” in the GOP at any time in the history of the GOP, a least-of-all-evils accommodation being a matter of tactics rather than persuasion.
I disagree. The Southern Strategy was the single most important move in politics since the end of Reconstruction, and was done for the same motives.
The Republicans did not have to massively court the bigot vote. They choose to do so, out of the basest opportunism. The center of the party was in the northeast and midwest; now it is in the south. The liberal and moderate wings of the party are essentially gone. Those wings did not see their disappearance coming because they thought they could control the new masses, even though they should have seen that even the business Republicans in the south tended to be ultraconservative. (Dallas: “City of Hate”.)
Every division in today’s politics stems from the Southern Strategy. It is impossible to overestimate its importance.
That’s the liberal conventional wisdom, but it’s wrong.
First, Southern Democrats typically were not “conservative” on any issue except race. Most were enthusiastic supporters of the New Deal.
Second, most Southern states continued to elect Democrats to the Senate long after 1964.
Southern Democrats were famously conservative throughout the 20th century. They fought progressive reforms. They fought economic reforms. They gave some support to the New Deal but Roosevelt had to continually curb more extensive reforms because of resistance from the South. Southern Democrats were far more conservative than the Northern wing of the party from the 1850s on. There was never a time when the South was anything but conservative, oligarchical, militaristic, anti-labor, anti-immigrant, and inward-looking. This interacted with the need to suppress the black population, which before the Depression was heavily concentrated in the South (NYC was less than 5% black in 1930), so reforms which might help African-Americans were automatically opposed, but the “anti” element was far greater than that one dimension.
Of course, Democrats continued to be elected after 1964. It’s called the Southern Strategy, not the Southern Magic Wand.
That this wasn’t a deliberate bigoted ploy is standard conservative apologetics (easily found on this Board, sadly) but that argument has the intellectual weight of a Conspiracy Theory. Like CTs, it will endlessly, if wearily, be refuted, albeit probably to as little effect.
Mississippi’s popular vote in Presidential elections may indicate how stark and sudden the shift was:
[ul]
[li] 1940 D 96% … R 4%[/li][li] 1944 D 94% … R 6%[/li][li] 1948 D 10% … R 2.6% … Dixiecrat 87%[/li][li] 1952 D 60% … R 40%[/li][li] 1956 D 58% … R 24% … States Rights 17%[/li][li] 1960 D 36% … R 25% … D-Byrd 39%[/li][li] 1964 D 13% … R 87%[/li][li] 1968 D 23% … R 13.5% … AI-Wallace 63.5%[/li][li] 1972 D 20% … R 78%[/li][/ul]
The overwhelming Democratic majorities in the 1940 and 1944 Mississippi elections were the most lopsided of any state those years. Yet the overwhelming Republican majorities in the 1964 and 1972 Mississippi elections were, again, the most lopsided of any state those years. Note that the 87% vote for Goldwater in 1964 came despite that, nationally the vote against Goldwater was the most lopsided ever. (In the 1948 and 1960 elections, most votes were won neither by Republicans nor (pledged) Democrats.)
There’s a lot of talk above, and rightly so, about the Southern Strategy and how the Republicans basically took over the South. But if that were the only change, the Democrats would not have won any presidential election since then. The South has gained lots of electoral votes due to migration, so it going all Republican really hurt the Democrats.
But changes also happened in other parts of the country and not just in the North. Consider the West. Up until fairly recently, it’d been fairly solidly Republican. Yes, even California. Except in Democratic landslide elections (Wilson, FDR, LBJ), the West generally voted R during the 20th century. Jimmy Carter, for example, didn’t take any western state except Hawaii (which is only nominally in the West anyway).
This changed starting in 1988, or at least that’s the election where the changes started to become apparent. Not all the West changed to Democrat, but most of the ones with higher populations did. Especially the west coast; none of the 3 west coast states have voted R since 1988, when California did. In more recent elections, Colorado and New Mexico have also voted mostly D.
So what happened? A combination of migration and the changes in the Republican Party, mostly the latter. Starting during the Reagan years, the conservative wing has largely taken over the GOP, but most of the Republican elected officials in those western states were moderates or even liberals. They basically got pushed out of the party (Reagan’s quote about the Democrats moving away from him applies here in reverse) and the conservatives that the R’s routinely nominate don’t get anywhere in the liberal big cities. For example, it’s been 14 years since a Republican won a state-wide election in Oregon and they haven’t won a governor’s race in that state since 1982.