Once a liberal always a Democrat?
From KT:
I see why my Prof asked the question "have conservatives/liberals always been Republicans/Democrats"? It seems that the Republicans started out as liberals and the Democrats were conservative.
Conservatives believe in the status quo, state's rights, society over individual, and laissez-faire attitudes in economics.
Liberals believe in change, national union, protecting civil rights, and government regulation. When you look at these, I think it's clear that Lincoln, a Republican, was liberal. I mean he fought for change, keeping the union whole, and freed the slaves. The Democrats, at that time, wanted to maintain the staus quo, keep slaves, and favored the state over the nation.
I think the switch between the two began with Teddy Roosevelt. As a progressive, he wanted to regulate business, favored workers, and even seemed to want to reform civil rights. Rich Repbublicans didn't want this. So much so, that when Roosevelt ran for president again (after 4 years) they refused to nominate him.
The final turning point came because of the Great Depression. Republicans in power failed to prevent speculation and resulted in the Crash. Hoover favored letting the economy correct itself. Democrats, naturally, went the other way towards regulation and government spending to aid the needy. So we wound up with Democrats favoring regulation and civil rights in the 60s & 70s - liberal attitudes. The Republicans wanted to retain laissez-faire economics, isolationsim, and rejected radical change - conservative attitudes.
posted by TheRadicalModerate @ 9/03/2004 03:23:00 PM
12 Comments:
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Nice!
I think Roosevelt is a good place to identify the "switch" also. However, I think what was happening by way of reform during the "progressive" period was substantial disagreement between competing sectors of the business community over how best to retain control of a population that was mounting increasingly broad challenges in its own defense, calling not simply for reforms but (as in the case of the radical IWW) for direct expropriation of industry from its owners. Some of these general strikes shut down whole cities at a time, and typically ended in bloody confrontations between organizers and state (sometimes even federal) troops.
My guess is that the sectors of the business community most affected by these disruptions just wanted them to end. (Business does not like unpredictability, which accounts for a lot of the way our society is now structured.) I'm sure others didn't want to give an inch (perhaps because they still had the luxury to do so) and felt any resistance should be crushed by force, to send a clear message and so on. Maybe government was predisposed to the former since, after all, it's *their* job to govern society, and keeping people complacent is much safer than having them take matters into their own hands. True to form, Roosevelt described the lobbyists opposing the regulatory Hepburn Act as "short-sighted not to understand that to beat it means to increase the movement for government ownership of the railroads."
KT, I didn't understand how "TR was a turning point" but I think J handled it well. So the idea is that TR was a progressive but that there were two differing factions in the Republicans? Wasn't TR's party the Progressive party?
How does Wilson fit in? Wasn't he a liberal democrat? I know I'm probably being stupid but don't the liberals always favor things like the UN/League of Nations?
Keith J
PEZ says ...
This is getting to be a project for everyone. My question is why did the Southerners switch to die-hard Republcians during the 60s & 70s? Was it the race thing?
BTw, are we gonna see the finished product?
Wow, thanks J. I might steal some of your stuff but I'll defintietly check out the links. There's so much to write I don't know if I can keep it down to 5 pages (?)
Keith, I was hoping no one would mention Wilson (sigh) so I guess I might have to include him. I havne't done much research on him.
TR ran the Bull Moose party, which was known as the Progressive Party. I would love to know what happened to these progressives. Did they join the Wilson Democrats? I alays found it strange that Wilson only won the first term because the vote was split but then he won the second when it wanst'.
PEZ, it is my personal opinion, that race factors were indeed the reason for the Dixicrates switching sides. Another is what I read from a social historian who said that the Repbublicans pick things that they really don't care about but talk them up just so they can get their economics passed. At least that's whay it sounded like and it kind of makes sense. I mean there are alot of middle class people out there who support the Republicans strongly even though they don't help the middle class at all. For them its just morality, religion, etc.
KT
"So the idea is that TR was a progressive but that there were two differing factions in the Republicans? Wasn't TR's party the Progressive party?"
To quote the "progressive" Milwaukee Journal from this period, conservatives "fight socialism blindly... while the Progressives fight it intelligently and seek to remedy the abuses and conditions upon which it thrives." The two (elite) factions wound up becoming the Democratic and Republican parties. Republicans, like the conservatives of the early 1900's, want people out of the way of business. Deregulation, no unions, low-wages, etc. They *are* business, they're looking at the short-term; besides, it's government's job to guarantee that everything runs smoothly. If people get out of line because they can't get by, throw them in jail, send in troops, etc. Law and order, by the numbers. The Democrats on the other hand, are the inheritors of the "progressive" legacy, which at the turn of the century realized that people could no longer be controlled by force. State troops were frequently sympathetic to striking workers, laying down their arms and joining ranks. That meant the only thing keeping these people from staging a social revolution were federal troops. "Progressives" like Teddy Roosevelt were conservatives who were afraid of losing control over the society; as such they acknowledged a need for state intervention to preclude socialism and "to remedy the abuses and conditions upon which it thrives." The same for FDR during the Great Depression: better to institute socialist initiatives like social security and welfare than to have Eugene Debs elected president. Contemporary Democrats have lost a lot of their power precisely because we're no longer at crisis proportions--although their ability to promise government aid to the majority still makes them a contender. But the right-wing knows it can push the envelope now that people are complacent. It can run huge propaganda campaigns convincing average Americans to vote their "values," not their economics, knowing full-well which ones are going to get passed, like KT says. Meanwhile people's lives get harder and harder. If Bush gets re-elected there will be a lot more taken away for the benefit of private profit; on the other hand, you'll start to see a more robust response from ordinary people, independently organizing in their own defense. Let enough time pass and business will need the state to stabilize things again, before people start getting the crazy notion that they should be running the country for themselves, and not for somebody else's profit. That's what the Democrats were made for.
Just to re-emphasize, the Progressives weren't progressive; they were conservatives who represented corporate interests by a different strategy, as Roosevelt made this explicit in personal correspondence, reassuring anxious associates. Popular mythology paints him as a populist because his administration instituted important reforms, when really power was being consolidated in the state-apparatus on behalf of business anyway. It certainly wasn't being diffused throughout the society, which is what real progressivism means.
Hi Guys,
Blogger hasn't been posting any of my comments since I tried to upload some arab cartoons to my blog yesterday. I had previously posted cartoons, but these were from different publications.
Blogger says it's published them, but then it's not theret. I can't even seem to post anonymously from my machine with a proxy server, so I am now trying from my dad's computer.
I'm really wondering if I didn't kick in some automatic filtering mechanism for censoring people who link to certain arab websites or something. If this posts ok from Dad's machine, I'm really going to be paranoid about it.
If I am getting censored for posting arab links, then you know I must be a "flaming liberal." How dare I look into the other side? That could undermine government propaganda.
Sheryl
Okay, putting Sheryl's "Big Brother" thoughts aside, I began to wonder the same thing since the two topics I attempted to post on Tuesday dealt with terrorism. Or maybe it was the link to the FBI? Or maybe it's just anything that is information?
Or maybe I was being paranoid. That sometimes happens. I emailed Blogger, and they replied later that they had been having problems with some of their servers.
It's a real bummer, because I posted some info I researched on some of the discussions in various blogs, and I don't see some of them.
But we are not entirely paranoid. When I was feeling paranoid, I went Googling and found this link. Read what Homeland Security is researching these days:
http://www.she-net.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=345 From An Online Progressive Clothing Outlet
Now if progressive clothing is considered terrorism by Homeland Security, then certainly the things we are discussing borders on treason. Or at least it does for those who work for Tom Ridge. You know that guy who want to postpone elections to save democracy because terrorist information from 2000-2001 suggests that terrorists might try to disrupt our elections.
I am also concerned that "terrorists" might try to disrupt our next elections as well, but I doubt this administration will be throwing people like Diebold's CEO Walden O'Dell in the pokey any time soon.
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Help Mommy, there are Liberals! underneath my bed!!! (No, seriously, that's the name of the book...) Don't believe me? The dang thing's on Amazon, not some hippie-press bullcrap ;) Anyway, thought you might enjoy, pinko ;)
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