Why did America's Republican Party lurch to the right, and the Democrats lurch to the centre?

Over the past 150 years, The Republican Party/Grand Old Party moved from a racially prog­res­s­ive, Northern party.. to one that that domin­ates the South and gets almost no support from non-white vot­ers. These changes are totally counter-intuitive to a non-American historian, so I have examined three historians: Annabelle Quince, Natalie Wolchover and Tim Stanley.

The Whigs formed in opposition to the policies of Democratic Pres­id­ent, Andrew Jack­son (1829–37). The Whigs supported the suprem­acy of the US Congress over the Presidency, and favoured a programme of mod­ernisation, banking and pro­tectionism for manufacturing. It appealed to entrepreneurs, planters, reformers and the growing urban middle class, but not to labourers and farmers.

Slavery was only one of many issues in the country’s politics then, usually rel­atively minor. The American South based its econ­omy on the en­slavement of non-whites, and the two major parties, Democrats and Whigs, were willing to let the Southern states be. But when most Whigs eventually quit politics or changed parties over slavery, the northern voter base moved to the new Republican Party.

America acquired a vast amount of territory from Mexico in 1848. There was a struggle between the northern and southern states over whether the new territory should be settled with slavery, and not. If slavery had expanded, it could have undercut free workers. America would have become a nation that was controlled by 1% of the very wealthy, educ­ated, white, male population. Northerners worried about America privileging equality for whites.

The Republican Party, founded 1854 in Mich­ig­an, opposed slavery. And northerners did not know if Kansas and Nebraska would enter the Union as free or slave states. They feared that the South would dominate US pol­itics, in­stituting slavery everywhere. It would also cut off opport­unity for free white labour­ers. While not abolish­ing existing slavery, the new northern Rep­ublican Party stopped it expanding.

By 1858, Republicans dominated the Northern states and es­poused “free labour, free land and free men”. The Repub­lican Party won both houses of Con­gress in 1860 and the party’s first cand­id­ate, Abraham Lincoln, became president.

Southern slaveholders still wanted to ignore the northern Republican Party. In 1861 11 states se­ceded from the Union to form a new nation, the Confederate States of America. And when Northerners would not toler­ate secession, the Civil War began. The North’s first aim was merely to restore the South to the Union, not to free slaves. But as the war dragged on, strat­egic imp­eratives pulled Lincoln and the Republicans tow­ard Abolition.

The American Civil War  of 1861-5 left hundreds of thous­ands dead and the South's infrastructure destroyed. Lincoln success­fully steered the country through the crisis and was loved by northerners. But immediately after the southern army surrendered, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

 

The Civil War was the focus of President Lincoln’s speech, 

delivered to a joint session of Congress in 1862.

Republican President Lincoln's vice president, Andrew Johnson, was a Democrat (sic) from Tenn­essee. He prohibited governments from abolishing slavery!

With the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Lincoln freed all slaves in the Confederacy. And as the war was ending in early 1865, Congress approved the 13th  anti-slavery Amendment. The GOP had abolished slavery outright in the USA, and had pres­er­ved the Union. In fact the Republicans required some Southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment, just to be readmitted to the Union.

In the 1860s, northern Republicans organised a determined ex­pan­sion of federal power, helping to fund: a] trans­continental railroad, b] state universities, c] set­tle­­ment of the West by homesteaders, and d] a national curr­ency and protective tariff. Southern Democrats opposed these measures. It was the Republicans who passed laws that advanced social justice!

Republicans supported gold standard money, high tariffs to promote economic growth, high wages, high profits and pen­sions for Union ex-servicemen. As the north­ern post-war economy boomed with heavy and light industry, railroads, mines, fast-growing cities and prosperous agriculture, the Repub­licans promoted policies to sustain the fast growth.

But when the states were readmitted to the Union in the Rec­on­struct­ion Era 1865-77, Republicans gave up on reform­ing the South and many of the gains they had made seemed impermanent. And white bus­in­essmen in the North thought they'd done enough for black South­ern­ers at this point and wanted their own inter­ests to be given priority.

Admission of new western states to the Union created a new voting bloc. Nev­ada and Nebraska joined the Union in the 1860s, Colorado in 1876, the Dak­otas, Montana & Washington in 1889, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah in the 1890s. Repub­lican federal expansions in the 1860s and 1870s were fav­ourable to northern businesses, especially banks, railroads and manufacturers. But small farmers who had moved out west received very little. Who would win western voters?

After 2 terms of Demo­crat Grover Cleve­land, the election of William McKinley in 1896 saw a resurgence of Repub­lican dominance. President McKinley promp­tly ended high tariffs, to help the owners of small businesses and farmers.

From 1896 on, Democrat Congressman William Jen­nings Bryan became pro­minent. Standing three times as the party's nominee for Pres­ident, he blurred party values by emphas­ising the gov­ernment's role in social justice, through expansions of fed­eral power. This had tradit­ionally been the Republican philosophy!! Re­p­ublicans didn't automatically adopt the opposite position of fav­our­ing limited govern­ment. Instead both part­ies were promising an augmented federal government, various­ly devoted to social justice values.

Republican President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-9) urged his progress­ives to take control of a united party at the state and local level. The Republicans had cemented their position as the party of big bus­iness and Roosevelt added more small business support via trust busting. Defeated by Taft in 1912, Roos­ev­elt led a third-party Progressive Party ticket.

Progressive reformers who wanted to check the power of corporations and the wealthy briefly had support from Republican President Roosevelt. When Demo­c­rat Woodrow Wilson won the presidency (1913-21), the Repub­lican Party opposed many of his progressive re­f­orms, which they came to believe expanded government’s power too much. Only grad­ual­ly did Republican rhetoric drift to the Nasty Right.

Republican presidents Warren G Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover were easily el­ected in 1920, 1924 and 1928 respect­ively - the party of big business, high tar­iffs and wealthy fam­ilies. That worked out quite well for them during the 1920s, but not so well with the Great Crash in 1929 and Depression.

Then Democratic President Frank­lin D. Roose­velt (1933–45) swept into power and expanded the size and role of the federal govern­ment. His New Deal was a set of reforms that could save ordinary families, including regul­at­ion of fin­an­cial inst­itutions, founding of welfare and pension pro­g­rammes, infra­st­ructure development etc.

Naturally Roosevelt's New Deal divided the GOP - while many Republic­ans were will­ing to accept some parts of the New Deal, other more conservative Repub­lic­ans never agreed. The Old Right sharply attacked the Second New Deal because it “rep­resented class warfare and socialism”. Nonetheless Democrat Roose­velt won in a landslide again in 1936.

The economy improved, so South­ern con­servatives and most Republicans formed a conservative coal­ition in reaction; Roosevelt won further terms (1940 and 1944) anyhow. Conservatives abolished most of the New Deal during the war, but did not attempt to reverse Social Security or the agencies that regulated business.

Domestically Repub­licans were anti New Deal, anti community-development, pro limited Federal govern­ment and pro free mar­k­et economics. Republicans had become conservative, and southerners had become Republican.

Except for Republican Dwight Eisenhower's 2 terms in 1946 and 1952, the Democrats contin­uous­ly elected majorities to Con­gress, but the Conservative Coal­it­ion blocked practically all major liberal domestic policies. After 1945, the GOP's internationalist wing cooperated with Harry Truman's Cold War foreign policy, funded the Marshall Plan and supported NATO, despite the continued isolationism of the Old Right.

A civil rights bill was designed by Democratic President John Kennedy in 1963. When President Lyndon Johnson signed that Act in July 1964, it received over­whelming bi-partisan supp­ort, except for south­ern segregationists and white supremac­ists. So those same southerners championed Republican Barry Goldwater, the Ariz­ona senator who had voted against the Civil Rights Act, for President. He was defeated by Lyndon Johnson in the Nov 1964 election.

Cities across America exploded in Race riots in 1963-65. When Republican Richard Nixon won in 1968, he focused on a Law and Order platform, lashing out against the Black Power movement. And Republican Ronald Reagan cared only that the Federal gov­ern­ment did nothing except protect business, support a strong military and protect Christianity.