Sorry if this is a seems a silly question.
What does GOP stand for? It seems to be interchangable with the Republican Party but none of the websites I search say exactly what it stands for.
It appears to be one of those things that are so well known that nobody bothers explaining it anymore.
Grand Ol’ Party.
(The Democratic Party is actually older, which I find highly amusing.)
But didn’t they switch sides at one point? I seem to recall the old Democratic party being rather conservative.
Yeah, well, there’s been a lot of switching around over the years. During the Civil War the Republicans were very abolitionist and anti-cessation folks (Lincoln was a famous Civil War Republican). I suppose that could be considered a liberal position for the time. The Southern Democrats were the party of the southern aristocracy at the time and many supported slavery. Now the Republican party is seen as being much more aristocratic and the Democrats, because they tend to have much more liberal economic views, like to bill themselves as the party of the common man.
A bit more detail from the Republican Nataional Committee:
http://www.rnc.org/gopinfo/origin
Some of the history to the term.
At one time, it stood for “Gallant Old Party”, which, in terms of the Civil War role, may have been more apt then.
>> there’s been a lot of switching around over the years
Not to metion with the meaning of the words themselves. "liberal"now has come to mean pretty much the opposite of what it originally meant and of what it still means in the rest of the world which is a position where the government intervenes as little as possible in people’s lives. Politics has distorted the meaning beyond recognition and now books written a few decades ago or in other countries have to expalin what they mean when they say “liberal”. hayek’s “Road to Serfdom” carries such an explanation.