Question: The transformation of the Democratic Party

Before the civil war the democratic party was pro-slavery, pro-expansion, pro-states rights, pro-agrarian, and anti-tariff. They also wanted a strong executive(from what I could tell), with a weak congress. It took a couple decades for the democratic party to shift from this to being pro-labor and all of the other things that go with it. How did this happen?
 
The Republicans backed business expansions and industry to generate economic growth. So once they became pro-business a niche opened up for pro-labor once the IR was in full swing, especially once there were clear areas where the rich were benefiting at the expense of the poor (long depression silver standard stuff/gilded age). Also populism proved a better fit with the Dems existing coalition (see the Democratic-Farmer-Labor parties like in MN) than the Republicans which relied more on the capitalists. I mean obviously it's a simplification but it's basically the story of the two party system flavored with class struggle.

Now people will emerge to say I am full of shit. :D
 
The Republicans backed business expansions and industry to generate economic growth. So once they became pro-business a niche opened up for pro-labor once the IR was in full swing, especially once there were clear areas where the rich were benefiting at the expense of the poor (long depression silver standard stuff/gilded age). Also populism proved a better fit with the Dems existing coalition (see the Democratic-Farmer-Labor parties like in MN) than the Republicans which relied more on the capitalists. I mean obviously it's a simplification but it's basically the story of the two party system flavored with class struggle.

Now people will emerge to say I am full of shit. :D

I don't know much here, but let me just say I'm glad you didn't post "Democrats were the Conservatives in the Civil War and Republicans were Liberals. Then after that they magically flip-flopped to what we have now."
 

birdboy2000

Banned
There's also the immigration factor - the Republicans were the establishment party in the north, so the Democrats, being the opposition in a two-party system, gained the favor of the immigrant, "ethnic" poor, often through political machines like that of Boss Tweed. (And they tolerated a good deal of corruption because they provided public services, and most of the taxpayers they were embezzling money from were yankees anyway.) In time the party grew to adapt to their political views, which were often at odds with the southerners who had previously dominated the party.
 
It doesn't really pay to try to compress either party, at any time, into one coherent position.

When you have a winner-take all election system, having just two parties is strongly favored. It follows that everyone's diverse viewpoints and interests must somehow or other be shoehorned into one or the other (or if a person shifts between them, both).

Thus--some Democrats, quite a few, were pro-slavery before the Civil War. Quite a few were openly and proudly racist for a century after the Civil War.

Throughout that entire time period, there were other Democrats who were against slavery and even against racism.

The Republican party formed as a coalition of many prior movements. They cohered in part because I think there was something of a common thread to those movements, one that united--for a time--a diverse group of people. It sounds good to reduce what that coherency was to some ringing phrase and to claim it resonates forever, but that is not true. The fact is, the Republican coalition started to split up after the Civil War, as the Free-Soiler farmer types started noticing a severe divergence of interests from the big-money business types. But they had started out in the same bed for good reasons. Both sides denounced the others for failing to adhere to true Republican values, but actually both were adhering to different evolutions of the same core concepts. Quite a few of the rural yeoman Republicans wound up becoming Greenbacks, then Populists, then this led them to wind up voting for Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

Meanwhile the Democrats have always had wings for different interests too and has always appealed both as a party of the lowly working-man and as an advocate of certain visionary business interests. It has never been true that all businessmen are all Republicans (or before that, Whigs). (The slavery lobby is a case in point--but actually the Southern Whig party was of course quite as much captive to slave interests as the Southern Democrats were. But business leaders, particularly those who are pioneering developing new fields and technologies, very often appeal to the Democratic party to break the mold of the tried-and-true establishment that tends to gravitate more toward the more explicitly "pro-business" party of the day).

I think it is meaningful to make distinctions between them and even to hold that certain things have always been characteristic of each, but it simply won't do to flatten it down to stark and simple differences.

Unless of course one is indulging in political polemics.;)
 

elder.wyrm

Banned
Before the civil war the democratic party was pro-slavery, pro-expansion, pro-states rights, pro-agrarian, and anti-tariff. They also wanted a strong executive(from what I could tell), with a weak congress. It took a couple decades for the democratic party to shift from this to being pro-labor and all of the other things that go with it. How did this happen?

The Democrats were pro-labor early on. It's just wage laborers were such a small part of the electorate you don't hear about it much. The city mechanics and artisans tended to be for Jefferson and against Adams in the election of 1800, for instance. The Democrats only lost that position somewhat because, after the Civil War, the Republicans had so established the policy manifolds that an old style Democrat could not get elected and, in the off-chance he was, he couldn't get anywhere in Washington politics.
 
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