Why did the Republicans and Democrats essentailly swap ideologies during the twentieth century?
I have long wondered at the apparent political shift that occurred during the twentieth century in which the conservative reactionary national Democratic Party battling the Progressive Republican Party each switched ideological identities. It's frankly puzzling. I'm no historian, so I am going to try to present a layman's view of what I think happened. It seems to revolve around the failure if the otherwise Progressive Republicans to deal with the Great Depression they created by ideologically based failure to use government to either prevent or cure the Great Depression which put the Democratic Party into power nationally until 1994.
The Republican Party of the early twentieth century was controlled by liberal Progressives, but part of older liberalism was the free market ideology. The Progressive Republicans were taken over by Wall Street, and Wall Street drove the total free market ideology which both created the Great Depression and intensified it. That was what discredited the Republicans nationally and put the Democratic Party into power. They essentially remained there until 1994. The Democratic leaders led recovery from the Great Depression and then led the U.S. to win WW II. This set an all new set of more realistic leaders into national office who were willing to use government to prevent economic disasters and to win wars. The free market anti-government ideology was completely discredited with most of the crop of FDR era WW II leaders in both parties. Both parties took a largely pro-government Progressive public image.
One large element of that progressive message was that segregation was clearly not practical nor was it humane. The same leaders who came in on a message of using government to resolve the Depression and win WW II also took the realistic position that segregation had to end. Truman (not a flaming liberal, but a very practical man) integrated the military because he could. The Supreme Court recognized the impracticality and the Constitutional inconsistency of legal segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement grew. The practical Democratic leaders in office joined with the progressive Republicans to end segregation. After nearly two decades of internal battling over Civil Rights, the pro-Integration Democrats under LBJ were able to get the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act passed. The Republicans, as the minority party then, acted as the opposition always does on major national issues when there is no clear outside enemy or threat. They voted lockstep against the civil rights legislation.
The ideological shift between the two parties was almost complete, except that the solid Democratic South was firmly against Integration while the national Democratic Party and the Progressive Republicans favored it. This was a real threat to the Democratic Party relative lock on national majority party status. That's the first point to consider. The second is that the apparent ideological homogeneity of the two national parties we see today is quite new. It is largely a function of the ability of national TV to elect candidates.
Taking that second point first, let's look at American national politics and political parties. Political parties in America are not innately ideologically homogeneous. They tend to be made to look that way nationally, the power of TV to elect candidates to office. The demand for ideological consistency nationally is a development since the 1960 Presidential election when Nixon, to his great surprise, narrowly lost because of his poor performance in the Presidential debate. Since then the parties have been made to look more ideologically homogeneous. It makes a better brand to sell to the public. Bill Buckley recognized this and pushed for an ideologically pure party in the National Review.
The current image of ideological homogeneity is a media creation to try to attract followers and funds, and the political leaders have spend the last five decades trying to manipulate their party to match the media image. That manipulation by the party leaders is an effort to try to win favor with enough voters to gain or build power for the party. This is not an innate characteristic of a political party. It is something the top politicians and the party leadership shape the party structure to be because it helps them get elected in the TV age. It is their TV political brand name to be identified and used to attract voters. Think about the structure and purposes of political parties.
American national politics is structured around the government, with political leaders attempting to attract sufficient voting followers to gain power. Those leaders organize political party institutions to organized blocs of voters and get them to the polls. People who want the government to act for them organize into blocs to put politicians forward to achieve the government actions they want. Those politicians communicate with and direct the voting actions of those blocs through organizations such as churches, businesses, unions, clubs, etc., and since WW II, the politicians have also communicated directly with the voters through the mass media. The power of the media becomes greater as voting day gets nearer, but the older methods of voter organization still exist.
So what you have is voters and public passions on one side, Party leaders and top party officials on the other, and the two are connected by the creation of party organizations. Those party organizations are creations of and reflections of what those politicians think will get them elected. The purpose of the party is to coordinate all the various ways politicians connect with voters and get them to vote for them.
The process of organizing public groups into voting blocs is played out inside organizations (churches, unions, big businesses, and others) and other media channels. When the time comes down towards the election the mass media become the key media channels, so that the elections themselves are played out most visibly in a mass media landscape. It's that mass media landscape that we are most familiar with because it is the most broadly visible. It is the political leaders and the party structures they create that coordinates all of the communications between politicians and voters other than direct personal contacts that occasionally occur. If the question is "why did the two political parties switch ideologies during the twentieth century ?", then the answer is that the switch was a series of steps, each taken by the party leaders, in order to win the next election. The political party is the key tool used by the existing political leaders to work for reelection and expand their power over government.
Earlier I stopped the narrative to look at the structure of political parties. When I stopped, the Democrats had been the dominant national political party since the Depression and they had developed a crop of experienced realistic leaders who, along with using government to control the vagaries of the economy, also took the progressive steps to resolve America's largest and longest lasting social problem, Race. This put the Democratic Party out of step with the Old South, which had been the single most reliable bloc of national Democratic votes. The crop of Depression and WW II era leaders were running out. Goldwater showed the first real national effort to replace the relatively progressive national leadership. The Goldwater movement failed, but then LBJ gave away the solid South, and as we now know, he knew what he was doing when it did it.
Nixon (another of the WW II era leaders, but always an outsider) took advantage of the Democratic weakness in the South with his "Southern Strategy." Nixon's resignation set up the situation for Jimmy Carter to come out of nowhere and take the Democratic nomination in a year that was going to be a dead-certain Democratic win, but Jimmy Carter thought like an engineer, not a politician. That set up the situation for Reagan - the conservative candidate made for TV - to come out of the West and take the Presidency from the Democrats. I am told that Carter did not believe in Party Politics, and I believe it. The Conservative Republican Party machine ran over him, and he had done nothing to build the Democratic Party to deal with such opposition. Carter was an Engineer by training, not a politician. Thinking like an engineer, Carter solved problems and ignored the political power situation those problems existed in. Where a politician would have strengthened the party for the Presidential battle, Carter solved problems in many ways that weakened the party (the Panama Canal giveaway, for example. That was handled in a totally non-political manner.)
Nixon's Southern Strategy solidified the identity of the Republican Party as the States Rights anti-integration party. The States Rights anti-government message worked well along with the Wall Street Republicans. Nixon's Southern Strategy solidified the identity of the Republican Party as the States Rights anti-integration party, and the demand by Bill Buckley and his National Review conservatives to create an ideologically unified party worked to drive all the progressives in politics towards the Democrats. The political power of the TV media solidified the new ideological image. The constant demand by Bill Buckley and his National Review conservatives to create an ideologically unified party worked to drive all the progressives in politics out of the Republican Party structure and towards the Democrats.
Nixon and Reagan were the last of the real WW II era Presidents. Both were outsiders and represented a rebellion against the more progressive leadership of the Greatest Generation. Bush 41 was made a national politician by Nixon based on his blue-blood Republican credentials, and then was made President because Reagan could not run for reelection. That was the transition to the younger generation. They were all a reaction to the progressive imposition of Civil Rights legislation on the nation along with the development of TV as a key element of winning national elections.
Unfortunately, the conservative movement that grew up to exploit TV images for political use carried with it a toxic ideology as its political brand. That toxic ideology carried the anti-modernist idea that unrestrained free markets could work and that government could not. The demand that slavish adherence to the Republican TV brand should control every action the party takes created a group of party politicians and leaders unable to govern a modern industrial nation. It has taken the multiple disasters of the Bush 43 administration to prove to a majority of the voting public that the conservative ideology simply does not work.
The Republican anti-government message and behavior, reminiscent of Hoover's reaction to the Depression and again demonstrated in the failed reaction to Katrina, totally unsuits them to run a national government of a modern industrial nation. The Republican Party as it is currently organized and under the "conservative" marketing brand has been largely discredited to much of the public now.
I think this explains the reversal of ideology between the Republicans and the Democrats. The three key elements were the ideology-based failure of the Republicans to deal with the economy adequately after WW I, then the decision by the government leaders of the Greatest Generation to deal with the Civil Rights issue in a progressive manner. The backlash to LBJ's Civil Rights legislation lost the Old South to the Democrats and allowed the Republicans to for a while become the dominant national party, but the demand for ideological purity in the party to maintain the TV brand has made the Republicans unfit to govern.
Anyway, that's my best guess at the moment.
My next question is what happens to the two parties next. With the TV mandated conservative brand the Republicans may be left in the permanent minority as a national party. Can they elect new leaders without that toxic ideology? Bush proved that they cannot govern within the anti-government framework, but the constraints of the ideology means they cannot budget or govern effectively when facing real problems. (They do quite well at making up problems for TV and solving them using the ideology those problems were designed for.)
On the other side of the isle, can the Democrats govern effectively long enough to dispel the notion that the problem is the government itself, and not the conservative ideology? The American Constitution creates a national government in which a significant minority can block all significant action on important issues.Will the Democrats handle that somehow?
.
The Republican Party of the early twentieth century was controlled by liberal Progressives, but part of older liberalism was the free market ideology. The Progressive Republicans were taken over by Wall Street, and Wall Street drove the total free market ideology which both created the Great Depression and intensified it. That was what discredited the Republicans nationally and put the Democratic Party into power. They essentially remained there until 1994. The Democratic leaders led recovery from the Great Depression and then led the U.S. to win WW II. This set an all new set of more realistic leaders into national office who were willing to use government to prevent economic disasters and to win wars. The free market anti-government ideology was completely discredited with most of the crop of FDR era WW II leaders in both parties. Both parties took a largely pro-government Progressive public image.
One large element of that progressive message was that segregation was clearly not practical nor was it humane. The same leaders who came in on a message of using government to resolve the Depression and win WW II also took the realistic position that segregation had to end. Truman (not a flaming liberal, but a very practical man) integrated the military because he could. The Supreme Court recognized the impracticality and the Constitutional inconsistency of legal segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement grew. The practical Democratic leaders in office joined with the progressive Republicans to end segregation. After nearly two decades of internal battling over Civil Rights, the pro-Integration Democrats under LBJ were able to get the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act passed. The Republicans, as the minority party then, acted as the opposition always does on major national issues when there is no clear outside enemy or threat. They voted lockstep against the civil rights legislation.
The ideological shift between the two parties was almost complete, except that the solid Democratic South was firmly against Integration while the national Democratic Party and the Progressive Republicans favored it. This was a real threat to the Democratic Party relative lock on national majority party status. That's the first point to consider. The second is that the apparent ideological homogeneity of the two national parties we see today is quite new. It is largely a function of the ability of national TV to elect candidates.
Taking that second point first, let's look at American national politics and political parties. Political parties in America are not innately ideologically homogeneous. They tend to be made to look that way nationally, the power of TV to elect candidates to office. The demand for ideological consistency nationally is a development since the 1960 Presidential election when Nixon, to his great surprise, narrowly lost because of his poor performance in the Presidential debate. Since then the parties have been made to look more ideologically homogeneous. It makes a better brand to sell to the public. Bill Buckley recognized this and pushed for an ideologically pure party in the National Review.
The current image of ideological homogeneity is a media creation to try to attract followers and funds, and the political leaders have spend the last five decades trying to manipulate their party to match the media image. That manipulation by the party leaders is an effort to try to win favor with enough voters to gain or build power for the party. This is not an innate characteristic of a political party. It is something the top politicians and the party leadership shape the party structure to be because it helps them get elected in the TV age. It is their TV political brand name to be identified and used to attract voters. Think about the structure and purposes of political parties.
American national politics is structured around the government, with political leaders attempting to attract sufficient voting followers to gain power. Those leaders organize political party institutions to organized blocs of voters and get them to the polls. People who want the government to act for them organize into blocs to put politicians forward to achieve the government actions they want. Those politicians communicate with and direct the voting actions of those blocs through organizations such as churches, businesses, unions, clubs, etc., and since WW II, the politicians have also communicated directly with the voters through the mass media. The power of the media becomes greater as voting day gets nearer, but the older methods of voter organization still exist.
So what you have is voters and public passions on one side, Party leaders and top party officials on the other, and the two are connected by the creation of party organizations. Those party organizations are creations of and reflections of what those politicians think will get them elected. The purpose of the party is to coordinate all the various ways politicians connect with voters and get them to vote for them.
The process of organizing public groups into voting blocs is played out inside organizations (churches, unions, big businesses, and others) and other media channels. When the time comes down towards the election the mass media become the key media channels, so that the elections themselves are played out most visibly in a mass media landscape. It's that mass media landscape that we are most familiar with because it is the most broadly visible. It is the political leaders and the party structures they create that coordinates all of the communications between politicians and voters other than direct personal contacts that occasionally occur. If the question is "why did the two political parties switch ideologies during the twentieth century ?", then the answer is that the switch was a series of steps, each taken by the party leaders, in order to win the next election. The political party is the key tool used by the existing political leaders to work for reelection and expand their power over government.
Earlier I stopped the narrative to look at the structure of political parties. When I stopped, the Democrats had been the dominant national political party since the Depression and they had developed a crop of experienced realistic leaders who, along with using government to control the vagaries of the economy, also took the progressive steps to resolve America's largest and longest lasting social problem, Race. This put the Democratic Party out of step with the Old South, which had been the single most reliable bloc of national Democratic votes. The crop of Depression and WW II era leaders were running out. Goldwater showed the first real national effort to replace the relatively progressive national leadership. The Goldwater movement failed, but then LBJ gave away the solid South, and as we now know, he knew what he was doing when it did it.
Nixon (another of the WW II era leaders, but always an outsider) took advantage of the Democratic weakness in the South with his "Southern Strategy." Nixon's resignation set up the situation for Jimmy Carter to come out of nowhere and take the Democratic nomination in a year that was going to be a dead-certain Democratic win, but Jimmy Carter thought like an engineer, not a politician. That set up the situation for Reagan - the conservative candidate made for TV - to come out of the West and take the Presidency from the Democrats. I am told that Carter did not believe in Party Politics, and I believe it. The Conservative Republican Party machine ran over him, and he had done nothing to build the Democratic Party to deal with such opposition. Carter was an Engineer by training, not a politician. Thinking like an engineer, Carter solved problems and ignored the political power situation those problems existed in. Where a politician would have strengthened the party for the Presidential battle, Carter solved problems in many ways that weakened the party (the Panama Canal giveaway, for example. That was handled in a totally non-political manner.)
Nixon's Southern Strategy solidified the identity of the Republican Party as the States Rights anti-integration party. The States Rights anti-government message worked well along with the Wall Street Republicans. Nixon's Southern Strategy solidified the identity of the Republican Party as the States Rights anti-integration party, and the demand by Bill Buckley and his National Review conservatives to create an ideologically unified party worked to drive all the progressives in politics towards the Democrats. The political power of the TV media solidified the new ideological image. The constant demand by Bill Buckley and his National Review conservatives to create an ideologically unified party worked to drive all the progressives in politics out of the Republican Party structure and towards the Democrats.
Nixon and Reagan were the last of the real WW II era Presidents. Both were outsiders and represented a rebellion against the more progressive leadership of the Greatest Generation. Bush 41 was made a national politician by Nixon based on his blue-blood Republican credentials, and then was made President because Reagan could not run for reelection. That was the transition to the younger generation. They were all a reaction to the progressive imposition of Civil Rights legislation on the nation along with the development of TV as a key element of winning national elections.
Unfortunately, the conservative movement that grew up to exploit TV images for political use carried with it a toxic ideology as its political brand. That toxic ideology carried the anti-modernist idea that unrestrained free markets could work and that government could not. The demand that slavish adherence to the Republican TV brand should control every action the party takes created a group of party politicians and leaders unable to govern a modern industrial nation. It has taken the multiple disasters of the Bush 43 administration to prove to a majority of the voting public that the conservative ideology simply does not work.
The Republican anti-government message and behavior, reminiscent of Hoover's reaction to the Depression and again demonstrated in the failed reaction to Katrina, totally unsuits them to run a national government of a modern industrial nation. The Republican Party as it is currently organized and under the "conservative" marketing brand has been largely discredited to much of the public now.
I think this explains the reversal of ideology between the Republicans and the Democrats. The three key elements were the ideology-based failure of the Republicans to deal with the economy adequately after WW I, then the decision by the government leaders of the Greatest Generation to deal with the Civil Rights issue in a progressive manner. The backlash to LBJ's Civil Rights legislation lost the Old South to the Democrats and allowed the Republicans to for a while become the dominant national party, but the demand for ideological purity in the party to maintain the TV brand has made the Republicans unfit to govern.
Anyway, that's my best guess at the moment.
My next question is what happens to the two parties next. With the TV mandated conservative brand the Republicans may be left in the permanent minority as a national party. Can they elect new leaders without that toxic ideology? Bush proved that they cannot govern within the anti-government framework, but the constraints of the ideology means they cannot budget or govern effectively when facing real problems. (They do quite well at making up problems for TV and solving them using the ideology those problems were designed for.)
On the other side of the isle, can the Democrats govern effectively long enough to dispel the notion that the problem is the government itself, and not the conservative ideology? The American Constitution creates a national government in which a significant minority can block all significant action on important issues.Will the Democrats handle that somehow?
.
