This interesting Quora answer discusses how the Democrats’ and Republicans’ political ideologies have essentially flipped over the last century or so. The map of Democrat and Republican states of the Fourth Party System, the period in American political history from about 1896 to 1932, makes clear how things have changed.
Which presidents in US history can be considered to be the left/liberal/progressive candidate in the presidential elections, and which can be considered the right/conservative candidate? How have the concepts of political left and right changed since the foundation of the United States?
This is far too open ended. Whatever individual policy positions we consider left or right today are in no way set in stone. Would Washington be considered a Leftist because of his pro-democracy views, or right wing becuase of his owning people views? There is debate about each president and debate about each policy, you should probably set some parameters for what positions you define as leftist positions, and what you consider to be right wing positions.
Maybe start with the Whiskey Tax. Was it leftist, because taxes, or right wing because it’s a consumption tax? Was it left wing because it’s a luxury tax, or right wing because it’s a sin tax? Was putting down the rebellion left wing because it flies in the face of the right wing fantasy that the founding fathers supported any and all armed insurrection, or right wing because law and order?
I think it can boil down to the left believing in a more egalitarian society and giving a helping hand to the disadvantaged, while the right believes in a more stratified society and has a more “survival of the fittest” mentality. The small government power vs large government power is largely a consequence of these beliefs, as helping the disadvantaged requires that the state take away from the advantaged, in addition to getting more actively involved in the nation’s social and economic affairs in order to manage the distribution of wealth.
While support for slavery would be an anathema to modern left/progressive/Democrat thinking, and would be disqualifying, this debate is about judging the presidents by the standards of the time in which they lived, as well as the beliefs of the candidate they faced in presidential election.
A broad concept of political left and right has existed for a long time, for example the Populares and the Optimates of the Roman Senate, or the Roundheads vs Cavaliers of the English Civil War.
For this debate, let us ask which president, of the two (or more) candidates that competed in each election, could be more closely identified as representing the political left or right. So for each election there will be a left and right candidate, even though they might not match up perfectly to the ideologies of the modern political left and right.
That’s a really interesting page, and it provides for more detailed political definition than binary left or right.
The ideologies of the Fourth and Fifth Party System listed in the link seem easy to split on left/right lines, “Wilsonian” and “Kennedy-ian” being political left and “Nixonian” being political right.
It gets a bit harder looking at the earlier Party Systems, but I’m not sure how much of that is due to my lack of knowledge about earlier presidents.
“Lincolnians” looks like political left. What about Taft, though? Wikipedia says his administration “was filled with conflict between the conservative wing of the Republican Party, with which Taft often sympathized, and the progressive wing, toward which Roosevelt moved more and more.” Furthermore, the candidate that Taft defeated in the 1908 election, William Jennings Bryan, “was also nominated for president by the left-wing Populist Party” (Wikipedia).
Are “Jacksonians” all on the political right? What about [del]“Clevelanders”[/del] “Clevelandians”?
Yeah, it’s a shame there’s a problem with the table width, although one can hold and drag the table to reveal the obscured text. Is there a way someone like @BigT can fix it?
True. Bill Clinton arguably governed from a position somewhere to the right of Richard Nixon. And yet Clinton is considered a liberal and Nixon a conservative.
In this 2011 article, Nate Silver discusses Ezra Klein’s claim that Obama was actually a “moderate Republican”. Silver instead concludes that:
Silver also notes a system, called DW-Nominate, developed by a group of political scientists that rates each member of Congress based on their roll-call votes. Applied to recent presidents, going back to FDR, the scores clearly differentiate the politically-left Democrats and politically-right Republicans.
I do wonder about this at times when my mind is wandering on long drives. I usually tend to think of it in terms of what the president in question would believe if they were transported to the current world. I don’t know enough about all of the POTUSs, but here is my partial list. My decisions tend to be based on how they approached things based on the standards of their own time, which is why I think that a modern day Lincoln would be a liberal and a modern day Woodrow Wilson would likely be a conservative. I’ll make some comments on a few that I think are noteworthy. I think Ike is the last POTUS before we reached our current standard, so I won’t include any POTUS since him.
Washington - liberal
John Adams - liberal
Jefferson - liberal, would probably be a Democrat but end up like Al Franken or Anthony Weiner when it comes to his approach to women
Jackson - conservative
Tyler - conservative
Buchanan - conservative
Lincoln - liberal
Andrew Johnson - conservative
Teddy Roosevelt - most likely would be an independent that caucuses with the Democrats if he was in congress, a more populist without being racist version of Bernie Sanders*
Wilson - conservative
Coolidge - conservative
Hoover - conservative
FDR - liberal
Eisenhower - most likely would be a center left Democrat, the closest I can think of in today’s terms would be Joe Manchin
I don’t think Sanders is racist. I mean that in today’s climate being a populist seems to go along with being a racist. Teddy would probably be a populist without being a racist.
IMHO you have to go back to Eisenhower before it begins to get fuzzy with the possible exception of Nixon. Judged by our time, he did have some liberal positions (founded the EPA, opened trade with China, ended the Vietnam war), but if we brought him to 2019, he I suspect he would drop those and become a typical Republican.
Eisenhower described himself as a “progressive conservative”, and used terms like “progressive moderate” and “dynamic conservatism” to describe his approach. According to Wikipedia, he was popular among the liberal wing of the Republican Party since he continued the major New Deal programs, including Social Security, yet was criticized by some conservatives for not doing enough to advance the goals of the right.
It seems to me to me that he’d be center-right politically. In today’s terms, that would place him closer to modern Democrats than modern Republicans, similar to how former Republicans in the media, such as Michael Steele, Nicolle Wallace, Joe Scarborough, Rick Wilson, or Elise Jordan, seem much more aligned with Democrats, although I expect they’d probably consider themselves as “independents”.
JFK is considered the gold standard for liberalism, even though he had a hawkish Cold War foreign policy, and most of the civil rights legislation he’s magically credited with actually got passed before or after his term. He was mindful of the consequences of driving white southern Democrats overwhelmingly into the Republican party, and he picked his battles accordingly. I’d be hard-pressed to name a modern president who was both a social and fiscal liberal.
We might just track political parties, rather than Presidents. Were there Presidents who deviated sharply from their party’s policies? Teddy Roosevelt comes to mind; with his trust-busting, environmentalism and regulations of railroads, food and drugs, he was far more progressive (left-wing) than McKinley. Examples other than Teddy?
Support for or opposition to a strong federal government has been a major political difference, but how should this be mapped to “left” and “right”? The Federalists supported a strong federal government, but it was in support of businessmen and urban areas. Jefferson opposed central power and favored the interests of “the common man,” but in those days that often meant farmers.
The development of banking laws and a central bank (here’s a pdf summary) was a divisive issue. The Federalists chartered a First Bank of the United States modeled after the Bank of England, but its charter was allowed to expire when Jefferson’s Democrats got control. This was soon seen as a mistake; a Second Bank was chartered; but was destroyed by the populist Andrew Jackson, who regarded the Bank as a vehicle for the rich moneyed class to subjugate the common people. These “leftist” sentiments led to the “free banking era,” now the wet-dream of hyper-libertarians.
And Jackson’s persecution of Native Americans would not endear him to today’s liberals. Opposition to such excesses spurred the growth of the Whig Party. The Whigs and later the Republicans also wanted to reconstitute a Central Bank. This didn’t happen, but Lincoln did enact legislation to regulate banking.
Late in the 19th century, the Democrats under W.J. Bryan supported Free Silver, with the intent of inflating the dollar for the benefit of the countryside but against moneyed Wall Street. After the Panics of 1907 and 1929, the need for a Central Bank become clear (at least to some); it was two Democratic Presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, who enacted the legislation that led to our present system.
He may be nostalgically viewed by some older Democratic voters, but I really take issue with/need a cite for “gold standard.” On what metrics would he set any standard? (Screwing Marilyn Monroe? Beautiful wife? I’d argue Obama beats him on the latter, and gets extra points for not being a cheater.)
