America has been dominated by a two party system for most of its history, but those parties have not always been the same. Today the Democrats, currently a center-left (relative to the rest of the world) party and Republicans, currently a right party, are the dominant parties. But this relative consistency belies the complicated inconsistency of the parties themselves. You may have heard that the Republican Party, a party that is involved with the ongoing disenfranchisement of Black Americans, was the party of Anti-Slavery and Abraham Lincoln. Likewise the Democrats, the party responsible for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the New Deal was also the party of Andrew Jackson and The Trail of Tears. This is all true. To understand how, we must have a brief look at the original two political parties of the USA.
John Adams and Alexander Hamilton were both, despite a mutual hatred of each other, members of the Federalist Party, a party concerned with a strong central government and powerful economic system. The Federalists were opposed by Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s Democratic-Republican Party. The conflict between these two groups has been dramatized in the immensely popular musical Hamilton.
By today’s standard, neither party could be mapped onto the Left-Right Spectrum cleanly. Unlike Europe, the United States had no tradition for early political parties to appeal to and thus no values for a conservative party to cling to. Though the Federalist party sought good relations with England and The Democratic-Republican Party allied itself with revolutionary France, both parties were primarily concerned with the development of a new country. The Federalists generally advocated for northern businesses and centralized power, and the Democratic-Republicans were pro-South and small-government. Both groups could be properly called liberals, in the classical sense. Though the term liberal is typically used to describe someone on the center-left in American politics (a social liberal), Liberalism is a political philosophy from the Age of Enlightenment, that concerns itself with personal liberty, equality under the law, and the legitimacy of leadership of a government. Liberalism is the centrist ideology from which various political thinkers of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries have sprung.
Though maintaining support in a few states like Delaware, the Federalist party all but collapsed after 1816 and the Democratic-Republican party splintered into the Democratic Party, headed by Andrew Jackson, and the Whig Party. To simplify both parties one may think of the Democratic Party as a populist party and the Whigs as a party interested in law and order. This divide was the beginning of a Left-Right divide in America, but not one based on modern values. While the Democrats supported slavery, the Whigs did not have a party-wide stance on the issue of slavery. This led to a number of factional parties, like the Free-Soil Party, the Liberty Party, and the Know-Nothing Party, growing in strength as the issue of slavery came to a head with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The legislation effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise and allowed for the spread of slavery into new Northern states and territories. It also spelled doom for the Whig Party. Abraham Lincoln, a member of the Whig Party, joined the Republican Party, a party dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery, but not ending it in southern states, for the 1860 presidential race and catapulted the Republican Party to the national stage.
The Civil War followed and realigned political parties entirely. Because the Democrats were the primary opponents to the Republicans, Southerners, who hated the party of Lincoln, largely supported them. They would continue to do so until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This block of support would be known as the Solid South.
However, it would be a mistake to think that either party had a monopoly on racism. Following the Civil War, both Democrats and Republicans engaged in terrible policies which had an enormous negative impact on people of color. While many Democrats continued in the tradition of Andrew Jackson’s white supremacy by terrorising Black Americans and other people of color in the Jim Crow Era, the Republicans sought to subjugate other people in imperialist efforts such as the annexation of Hawaii.
While the Democratic and Republican parties would continue to house both progressives and conservatives until the Great Depression, Teddy Roosevelt, a progressive Republican, left the Republicans over ideological disagreement with the conservative and dominant wing of the Republicans. However, by the time that his distant cousin FDR won the presidency in 1933, the Republicans had cemented themselves as the conservative party. While FDR was not a leftist himself, he was advised by socialist and labor groups that radical social policies would be the only way out of the Great Depression. For good or for ill, the Democrats became the party of social reform and progressivism.
The Republicans likewise defined themselves in the post World War II era by responding to the growth of Soviet power and influence by becoming vehemently anti-communist, anti-socialist, and anti-left. Though Eisenhower was against a large military, he was nevertheless committed to the more familiar conservative platform of limited government and free market economics.
The Civil Rights Movement was just the beginning for a new deeper divide between the Left and the Right. Issues that the New Left took on included workers rights, feminism, abortion, gay rights and prison reform. These policies were not always supported by all Democrats, but were bitterly opposed by the Republican Party. These interests coupled with the distaste for the War in Vietnam expressed by young, left-leaning people, led some to leave the Democratic Party to join the Republican Party and pursue Hawk policies and commit to traditional values. The most influential of these Neo-Conservatives was Ronald Reagan.
Next time we will take a look at what has happened in modern history to the political spectrum with special attention paid to Delaware. In the meantime, if you are a member of either political party, make sure you express your place in the political spectrum by getting out to vote today.
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