The History of the Republican Party

by magnificent historian Heather Cox Richardson
https://www.amazon.com/Make-Men-Free-History-Republican-ebook/dp/B00L4FSSZY/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1546236625&sr=1-2&keywords=history of the republican party

Written before the advent of Trump, by the way, I'm going to link you a couple of really great podcasts in which she discusses the things in the book.


I've linked this a couple of times before on Facebook but I can't emphasize enough that if you are looking around at our current situation and thinking "I just don't understand how people can be like this" that your answers lie in a clear view of history. None of this, save Trump as the ultimate tumor, is new at all - and even he couldn't get where he is without a modern manifestation of a very old history. This pod just describes one aspect of that pattern but it's a huge factor. Richardson describes not just a party history but a history of how we "do" America, in a repeating cycle of Progress>Backlash>Greed>Collapse>Progress. But the most fascinating part of this is HOW the greedy manage to reverse the cycle in their favor over and over.

In the comment below the link I have transcribed a few key minutes of her comments but I urge you to listen to the whole thing

http://inthepastlane.com/015/?fbclid=IwAR26C38FbY-OMk0UekCO7OQAKaOGSl-xLz-CwvcKO34tTCPG7tjs0Idx894

"But Eisenhower is a really interesting character, and for sure the man made mistakes, but he lived in terror of the idea of nuclear war. After living through WW2, what that taught him after he was one of the first people on sight at a concentration camp that human beings given the 'wrong', if you will, provocation will turn on each other like savages. And he came to believe, over time, that what was crucially important for world leaders, was to guarantee that those conditions never existed, to stop those conditions from happening.

What he believed was that you had to worry less about the rise of dictators, than you had to worry about the construction of a population that would follow a dictator. So rather than looking at the rise of a Hitler or Mussolini what you really need to look at was how a society created a disaffected population that was ready to follow a megalomaniac who would promise them the moon, that they absolutely couldn't deliver.

And he came to believe that cultural or political dispossession would upset enough people that they would follow anybody that promised to return to some past that they considered the 'good old days'. And that person would rise by promising that the whole problem that these people faced was caused by one particular group. It's a very clear rhetoric.

Eisenhower followed a philosopher named Eric Hoffer who wrote a book called "True Believer" in the 1950s in which he said that the way you created this disaffected population was to convince them that people who are falling behind economically or culturally, that their problem is not that they're out of step with society or that the laws are discriminating against them but rather that it's the fault of this specific group of people. Who that group of people IS doesn't really matter, so long as they can turn their hatred towards something. And gradually as they dehumanize that group of people, the more they dehumanize them the more they WILL dehumanize them and blame them for more and more, because only by dehumanizing them can they, the perpetrators, defend their treatment of them in the first place. And what you get then is a population that is ripe for a dictator to come in and take over."
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'Zat sound familiar at all?
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Here's another one with some different high point but still emphasizes the cycle

https://www.pbcyoungdemocrats.org/ydreview/2018/12/29/the-history-of-the-republican-party


do listen for the full nuance but in a very brief outline...
***The slaveholder oligarchs obtained the dominance in FedGov after, or rather with the successful passage of, the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Their self-interested greed soon caused the Civil War

***During the war, for a variety of Reasons, Lincoln Republicans initiated a series of what we would call progressive reforms designed to broaden and expand the economic base (essentially a sort of "trickle up" economics that proposed that when the common man did well everyone would do well). This included the first national income tax (which expired by law in 1875)

***the rich were horrified by these reforms and worked against them and by the 1880's had once again obtained enough power to re-flip the economy to prioritize the interests of the rich leading to the "Gilded Age"

***there was a big economic collapse in 1893 which laid the groundwork for the popularity of Teddy Roosevelt's progressive reforms proposals (not all he got to install, Taft and Wilson did a lot of what TR wanted)

***by the 1920's the moneied Republicans were back in ascendancy, flipped the priorities again and rode what we call the Roaring 20's. While there was GOP leadership in creating the Gilded Age, this era pretty much locked in the Republican switch over to being much more interested in favoring the interests of the top 1% rather than the common good ideas of Lincoln Republicans (ideas that inspired TR's thinking)

***this led to the collapse in 1929

***which led to the New Deal

***which incensed conservative Republicans, among the whom was not Eisenhower (who defeated New Deal hater Robert Taft for the nomination in '52. This is what's called "Movement Conservatism" which was described by William F. Buckley in "God and Man at Yale" and owes much to Rand.

***the New Deal was so popular that it took a LONG time for that to really overcome the GOP again. Even Nixon wasn't fully involved in Movement Conservatism, though he was happy to pander to it to win. BUT when the GOP co-opted the disaffected segregationists in the 1970's that voting block, for the most part unawares, empowers that branch of the party in the form of Goldwater acolyte Ronald Reagan

and now we're in an extended Greed Cycle that has created, basically, a new Gilded Age. And a reckoning is coming.

That picture was taken in a blue state ran by a Governor who was also a democrat. Try again dumb ass.

I haven't read the book, but what people ought to realize is that for its first century in existence, the Republicans were the more socially liberal party. As an example, a higher percentage of Congressional Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s than Dems did. And as late as the 1990s, Republicans and Democrats were equally concerned about the environment.

That was before it became wholly the party of Fox News. For shame.

Bullshit! A lib posted that picture so it can't be wrong! You're just a big old narrative destroying racist meanie, that's what you are!

Phase 1- Free the slaves!
Phase 2- Slaves are free...now what?
Phase 3- Fuck it, let's just chase money.
Phase 4- Fuck it, you can't get rich without fucking people over, and racism is easy, and time tested, so let's just be racist.
Phase 5- *Switches bullhorn for a dog whistle*
Phase 6- We're still the party of Lincoln though. Get away from that polling station, nigger!!

having fever dreams again? You mom better check your temperature before she tucks you in for the night.

Your surrender is accepted.

Prove him wrong. With, yanno, facts, not opinions or anecdotes.

Whoops'a daisy! MY MISTAKE! CHAD was the one who posted the picture of blue states showing their true colors (no pun intended) not Diacanu.
I say again my mockery is directed at CHAD not Diacanu - sorry folks & especially Diacanu.

Dixiecrats like oldfella have been running away from the taint of their racist presence for a long time. They infect whatever party they are in with racism and hate, and try to pretend it is not them because they know how shameful it is. It is the way they whitewash things. This is why they hate non revisionist history and intelligence. We all know the modern republican party is the same people who were all about enshrining racism in the constitution even if they hijacked the other party to pretend they are not slime.

what state was that photo taken in? And when? Show your work.

Picture was taken in Alabama 1963 - here's link! A statue was made based on this photograph too.

https://ryandueck.com/2017/07/06/when-the-truth-gets-in-the-way-of-the-story-you-want-to-tell/

Exactly.

And Alabama has never been a "Blue State" in it's entire history. To claim as much is to buy into the Denish D'Souza insanity that the parties have never changed ideologies.

It's the same stupidity of MS conservatives trying to say "well the Democrats ran the state into the ground for over a century..."

Fuck that noise.

EVERY Governor and legislature since Reconstruction has been DEEPLY conservative, in MS and AL and every other former confederate state and a few more besides (except Virginia lately and MAYBE Florida Gov from time to time)

Red = Conservative, not Republican
Blue = liberal, not Democrat

To pretend otherwise is to be profoundly ignorant or maliciously deceptive.

hmmm......yet on election night that big map has red and blue states representing Republican and Democrat victories respectively. No mention of a "conservative" nor "liberal" victory/loss anythere on that map or any other depicting election results.

Zombie Ann Richards disagrees.

Then you're an idiot. Alabama was a blue state until the 1980s. The state was ran by George Wallace, a segregationist, while at the same time voting for Jimmy Carter for President. This is FACT.

Spin it however you want, the Democratic party was once the pro slavery party as well as the party of segregation.They own it. It's history. You and the rest of the race card playing brigade can deal with it.

Once again, you idiots don't understand that as the years changed, so did the issues. A liberal in the 1800 or 1900s would not neccessarily be a liberal in the year 2019. The world has changed and so have the issues. Not a single conservative in the year 2019 would support slavery or segregation. To believe otherwise is to be profoundly ignorant and malicously deceptive.

I know. Why let pesky things like facts destroy a good narrative? The fact that NOVA asked for a link proving where the picture came from is sad in itself. Anyone who knows anything about American history knows where pictures like that came from. Hell, watch a documentary on the 1960s or the Civil Rights struggle and that image pops up again and again. Next shes going to want links for proof of where these events happened...











Her ignorance of American history while trying to preach it to is so amusing.

I hate political ideology prefer stuff thatyg works.

Oh fuck off. I LIVE in Mississippi and live with the politics. If they thought they could get away with it the white folks would vote 2-1 for Jim Crow segregation TOMORROW.

Yes, 19th century "liberal" isn't the same thing as 20th century liberal - our current political definitions are framed in light of the New Deal, which "liberals" (including Eisenhower) supported and Movement Conservatives hated.

The nuance is that rural segregationist conservatives DIDN'T hate the New Deal initially. It was only after Desegregation and the Civil Rights laws when they became alienated from the Democrats that the Movement Conservatives co-opted them. You start seeing that in 1964 (on the presidential level). In 1968 the Democrats got less than a third of the vote in every former confederate state except Texas (where he got 41%). And '76 was a post-watergate fluke.

But the fact remains, that as any 21st century person with a clear view of history would describe "liberal" the Deep South has never been controlled by liberals, even allowing for the occasional fluke moderate governor like Carter.

There hasn't been a (modern definition) liberal with any power in the GOP since at least Eisenhower (if you count him) and before that you go back to TR and then Lincoln. From the begining of the New Deal until the CRA there was some mingling on the national level, but on the state level the Democrat party wasn't the liberal party anywhere in the South until...probably Bill Clinton (and he was only liberal in the context of contrast to the politics of the region around him. True liberals still revile his moderate Democratic organizing as a sell out.

Don't come in her presuming I don't know my history sir. I know enough of it to know you can't get accuracy from right wing neo-confederate apologists the Republicans love (like D'Souza and David Barton)

Oh?

Go look at a map of the 1964 presidential race (one year after that photo) and tell me what you see.

I didn't ask for a link. I ask for a comment beyond the photo so I could set up the remarks i made.

It was rhetorical in order to bait you into the bullshit claim that liberals were responsible for the events in the photo.

(sure, you SAY "Democrat" but that's a slight of hand to try and fool the gullible into associating the Democrats of Wallace with the Democrats of today - but no one here is that gullible)


ETA: You're really not very good at this.

Good reading here about how the post-war (Civil War) evolution of political thought set the narratives that have been a running them in our politics ever since (not strictly a party instinct, at the time, but the contest between the interest of people and the interest of property)
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/racism-reconstruction-homestead-act-black-suffrage

And I live in Florida, have lived in Georgia and have relatives in Tennessee and Kentucky. Just because you live in a backwoods hick town doesn't mean the rest of the South or Republicans for that matter think like that.

Who was claiming that liberals did? I said DEMOCRATS you blibbering idiot. You do understand the difference between a political party and personal ideology right? You do understand that the parties were much more blurred before 1980 right?

No shit Sherlock. The parties are much more diveded along ideological lines than they use to be. Hence why you cant pigeonhole them as conservative and liberal before 1980.

Without his "moderacy" the Democrats would not have won the White House back in the 90s.

Don't spout a bunch of ignorant,partisan garbage and I won't.

Good thing I got my history from reading books. And what is with this ignorant belief of yours that everyone you disagree with watches that garbage? You are aware that there is a large population of people who are properly educated, dont watch the nightly pundits and..gasp....disagree with you?
,

Sure you did.

Then you failed miserably because , unlike you, I understand the history of the two parties and would never make that mistake.

Wow, you really are confused if you think that stating facts is trying to "fool" people. No, stating facts is what educated people do in a debate. Do me a favor, go back to school and get properly educated. And I'd suggest somewhere other than Mississippi because judging by the large amount of ignorance Ive been seeing from you, your state still has a lot of work to do in that area.

As long as the could still have African American athletes on their football and basketball teams, probably.

https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2012/03/13/miscegenation-and-the-south


As recently as 2012 polls showed that 29% of likely Republican voters thought that interracial marriage should be illegal.

You said this:

You really think every single one of those people changed their views since then?

Seriously?? From your link...

Sorry, but a partisan motivated poll from 6 years ago isn't exactly a solid case. Ill admit that saying "every single conservative" was probably a bit much considering you can poll anyone on any subject and find a small percentage as an outlier. But its certainly not Representative of everyone in that group like the OP is trying to make it out to be.

"Who was claiming that liberals did? I said DEMOCRATS you blibbering idiot. You do understand the difference between a political party and personal ideology right?"

Given that was EXACTLY my original point....yes. Thanks for your confirmation.