DBWI: Republicans the "party of the right" and Democrats the "party of the left"

Whilst the political centre of gravity in America is far to the right of anything I personally would consider sensible, the Republicans are generally on the left of it, historically being the party of civil rights, tax and spend interventionism, and the unions, whilst the Democrats are to the right of it, being the party of the bankers and big business, and, while the Republicans aren't beyond stooping to such levels, are considerably more likely to resort to race-baiting, red-baiting, and pandering to the religious right.

Yet this wasn't always the case, and historically both parties had both right-wing conservative and left-wing progressive/populist wings, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (it's hard to think that the Democrats were once the party of the New Deal). Also how would this affect each party's approach to issues like states' rights, abortion, gay marriage, etc?

When did their trends towards the left and the right become inevitable, and how could it have been reversed?
 
Prevent the assassination of FDR in '33. His VP, John Nance Garner, ended up losing the '36 to Teddy Roosevelt Jr., who promised a revival of his father's progressive policies.
 
And Eisenhower pushed forward on civil rights in a sensible, appealing, middle-of-the-road fashion. Only once or twice did he directly point out that black soldiers had served honorably during WWII just like white soldiers, but that fact was probably always in the background.

Democrats kicked at these civil rights initiatives, and tried to build support for conservative economic policies by playing off resentment toward African-Americans. That was probably the key hinge point.
 
Prevent the assassination of FDR in '33. His VP, John Nance Garner, ended up losing the '36 to Teddy Roosevelt Jr., who promised a revival of his father's progressive policies.

OOC: I would have gone with Harding living and losing in 1924 due to his many scandals, but that works too.
 
I think we have to see the New Deal as an aberration. The post-Garner Democrats were electorally confined to their Southern fortress - there never was any chance that that bunch would develop into a left-leaning party.

It's probably easier to make the Republicans right-leaning than the Democrats left-leaning.
 
It's probably easier to make the Republicans right-leaning than the Democrats left-leaning.

It's not. In one way or another, they were left-wing since their formation, with being seen as radicals in 1854 and being extremely socially progressive (for their era) in the nineteenth century and being very pro-Negro even during the First Progressive Era. The reverse is true for the Democrats. Although it is true that Bryan and Wilson were progressives (along with the Democratic Roosevelt), Wilson was extremely racist, Bryan never emphasized race much, and the Democratic Roosevelt was president for such a short time we are unsure of his political views.
 
I agree. Both are real challenges, but that's why we do alt history!

Maybe the brief Republican flirtation with gold only, no free silver in the 1890s ? ? ?
around the time of the aforementioned William Jennings Bryan.

I know it's a stretch, but maybe this could expand to pro-corporate, pro-big business all across the board. And before you write this off as complete ASB, work with me a little! If this is too exotic and too small a departure, then give me something else. And please remember, some rich New Englanders were part of the early Republican party.
 
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Whilst the political centre of gravity in America is far to the right of anything I personally would consider sensible, the Republicans are generally on the left of it, historically being the party of civil rights, tax and spend interventionism, and the unions, whilst the Democrats are to the right of it, being the party of the bankers and big business, and, while the Republicans aren't beyond stooping to such levels, are considerably more likely to resort to race-baiting, red-baiting, and pandering to the religious right.

Yet this wasn't always the case, and historically both parties had both right-wing conservative and left-wing progressive/populist wings, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (it's hard to think that the Democrats were once the party of the New Deal). Also how would this affect each party's approach to issues like states' rights, abortion, gay marriage, etc?

When did their trends towards the left and the right become inevitable, and how could it have been reversed?

If you really want to stop the decline of the left-wing of the Democratic Party, you'd definitely need to prevent the massive purges that the Party engaged in at the behest of the more hardline conservatives, such as Mississippi Senator Ted Bilbo(who, prior to his death in November 1953, started to become an extremely staunch anti-Communist, so much so that it prompted WI Senator Joe McCarthy to greatly moderate his own stance), etc. thanks to the insanity of the Red Scare in the late '40s/early to mid '50s, which would likely entail making sure that HUAC never forms, or is *not* lead by the conservative Democrats, etc.; this, and the party's refusal to condemn the increasing nastiness of Jim Crow or to fight the Klan, etc., would eventually lead many Northern Democrats to defect either to the GOP, or, from the '60s onwards, to the newly reformed Progressive Party, particularly in many of the Western states(especially California and Washington), as well as Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, and a handful of other places(and, also, the GOP might not lose those few of it's most liberal members to the Progressives in the '70s and '80s during the height of the Cold War).
 
Wonder what would of happened had someone like Truman or JFK had stayed Democrat? I mean after Thurmond won the Democrat primary in 48 that drove out most the moderates like Senator Truman of Mo. Also it turned off lots of the northern Liberal's like the Kennedy's of Boston.
 
Wonder what would of happened had someone like Truman or JFK had stayed Democrat? I mean after Thurmond won the Democrat primary in 48 that drove out most the moderates like Senator Truman of Mo. Also it turned off lots of the northern Liberal's like the Kennedy's of Boston.

Yes, it did. Even Lyndon Baines Johnson in Texas(later one of the greatest governors the state ever had) ended up becoming a Republican, as did both Lawton Chiles and Claude Pepper in Florida.

But also, what of Estes Kefauver? Although a Democrat, he was rather moderate on just about every issue one could think of, and his 1967 assassination in Austin, Texas, at the hands of deranged white supremacist gunman Edgar Ray Killen no doubt horrified many Americans of many stripes(R.W. Whitaker's attempted assassination of the then Republican president George Wallace in September 1983 was reportedly inspired by Killen's acts). One must wonder if the Democrats could have recovered in the long term by counter-purging the Dixiecrats and other reactionaries from the party; believe it or not, there actually were a few efforts to do so, but they stopped not too long after Frank Church lost the '76 election to George Wallace(of course, it didn't help that the Progressives were able to win over even some hundreds of thousands of Southern voters, not to mention nine million mainly ex-Democrats elsewhere, thanks to their economic policies, despite being rather more liberal than the Republicans on social issues, nor did the presence of Curtis LeMay's and Lester Maddox's American Conservative Party, which almost won South Carolina and Mississippi).

And then we had Howard Baker, one of the last of the truly moderate well-known Democrats before the faux-populists, the corporatists, and certain others began to take over the party completely(although some people these days, amazingly, try to pass off President Dick Daley as a moderate.....which he wasn't; he was a fairly solid neo-con, if perhaps not particularly inclined to roll back the clock on women's rights like the mostly Southern Religious Freedom Caucus. And let's not get started on the Iran War-how he still managed to win a second term in 2004, other than maybe sheer luck, is beyond me.).



OOC: Okay, I know this may be difficult to believe, but, apparently, IOTL, Wallace was actually fairly moderate prior to 1964.
 
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