The small-businessman/self-employed-farmer/tradesman as icon, central to Lincoln's concept of a 'right to rise' in the world, runs as a straight line through the Homestead Act, McKinley, Coolidge, Reagan, even the 2012 Romney campaign's reaction to "you didn't build that."
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Progressivism ran its course within the GOP under TR & Taft, even re-emerged as a kind of managerial ethos (Hoover, Ike, Romney). But it never attained the kind of radicalism as in the Democratic Party of Woodrow Wilson & his heirs. TR went radical only when he left in 1912.
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The progressive Republicanism of the TR/Taft era, which John McCain much admired, was ultimately a small-businessman rebellion against big-business gigantism. A truly anti-business posture could not gain traction in the Republican Party of any era.
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Dan McLaughlin Retweeted Josiah Neeley 🤔
I would not go that far, but the combination of pro-business & nationalist elements in the GOP have been pro-tariff at least as often as they've been pro-free-trade. The Reagan-Bush-Bush era was the high watermark of free trade in the GOP.https://twitter.com/jneeley78/status/1152226718649868289 …
Dan McLaughlin added,
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Another area where the GOP has had internal tensions from the outset: Lincoln was a law-and-order guy, horrified by mobs & John Brown-style vigilantes. He was like John Adams - not Sam Adams. But the libertarian, my-land-my-gun ethos was vibrant in Bleeding Kansas.
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Republicans were never really averse, even in Lincoln & Grant's day, to pandering to a variety of deplorable sentiments. But their inability to compete with Democrats on naked identity politics & urban machinery has likewise been a constant for generations.
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The continuity between the Republicans' inability to crack the D unity of white Southerners between 1850s-1920s & their inabillity to crack the D unity of African-Americans in recent decades is likewise wired into the two parties' styles of addressing identity-politics issues.
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"The parties flipped" is a misleading shorthand: the Democrats gradually stopped pandering to a group that was leaving the party, & started pandering to a group that was entering, while the GOP in both cases was playing catch-up. Dems didn't change tactics, just targets.
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Has the influx of ex-Democrats, or more typically the children of Democrats, in the South changed the Republican Party? Sure. But the sources of continuity remain. And even Trump has more in common with the Know-Nothings, John Bell, or Andrew Johnson than he does w/1850s Dems.
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Who nonetheless ran on a Republican presidential ticket.
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