Nearly all of the focus of "the parties switched" narrative is on the South, & there are reasons for that, but it impoverishes history to just ignore the whole rest of the country. Moreover, even the South is not a monolith. Let's look at the presidential vote in the South.
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The politics of racial & other tribal resentments (ethnic, religious, etc) never goes away, & Democrats who claim today that their party is immune now to such things are typically lying to themselves. But the historic principles & styles of the parties affect how those manifest.
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Republicans who want to constrain the role of resentments & identity politics within their coalition can, to this day, draw on a long, rich GOP tradition of neutral, classical-liberal principles. Democrats, by contrast, can only offer age-old cynicism that such principles exist.
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Sorry, the graph includes SC in the Deep South line, NC in the Border South line. Forgot to add those to the Tweet.https://twitter.com/beachboyhhi/status/1152303487830691840 …
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I see this thread has resumed. This is wrong, Dred Scott was decided in 1857, *after* the 1856 election & inauguration of James Buchanan. The chronology is important, given Buchanan's lobbying behind the scenes in advance of his inauguralhttps://twitter.com/HC_Richardson/status/1152261965718458368 …
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This, OTOH, is exactly the kind of Lincoln 'right to rise' rhetoric I'm talking about, which remains central to Republican ideology about self-reliance & upward mobility to this day.https://twitter.com/HC_Richardson/status/1152261973389840390 …
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This is also wrong. Harrison did not win the popular vote in 1888, and all sorts of shady stuff happened in voting in the 1870s-1880s (Cleveland relied on disenfranchising blacks in the South), but he won enough states to carry the Electoral College.https://twitter.com/HC_Richardson/status/1152288804977467392 …
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OK, now that this thread has moved on to "Congressional Republicans made the Panic of 1893 happen on purpose to sabotage Grover Cleveland," I'm gonna move on to better uses of my time.https://twitter.com/HC_Richardson/status/1152288810102861824 …
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Yes. Leadership absolutely matters. Strong leaders can get people to follow, but even Lincoln understood that you also have to listen & not just impose elite ideas on the common man. Offer better leadership to today's Republican voters.https://twitter.com/JosephConKarne/status/1152286406267604992 …
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The early Republicans were not doctrinaire libertarians, but the Homestead Act was exemplary of Lincoln's Lockean self-reliance ideal: give a man a plot of wilderness, let him reclaim it from nature by sweat of his brow & keep the fruits of his labors.https://twitter.com/JohnCraiHammond/status/1152354742468775938 …
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Also, the land grant colleges established under the Morrill Act were funded by the sale of federal land, not perpetual taxpayer exactions, and their focus was on practical education in agriculture.
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Polygamy was a new innovation - it had never been legal in America, nor sanctioned by Christian churches. 19th century Republicans were resisting an effort to redefine marriage. Lincoln argued as well that the Founders had intended slavery to die off https://twitter.com/higgins_ke/status/1152372896351825920 …
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BTW, this is still truehttps://twitter.com/baseballcrank/status/1024340373018210304 …
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The idea that this is a killer rejoinder misses the point. Lincoln himself stood for leniency & charity towards the defeated Confederates. Grant befriended some of them. Lincoln would likely have said, "let them have their monuments" & focused on policy. https://twitter.com/ASFleischman/status/1153701921099849728 …
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The hard question of Reconstruction, which has never been satisfactorily answered, is how you reconciled Lincoln's view of leniency towards the vanquished white South with vigorous protection of the freed black South.
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But neither Lincoln nor Grant ever started from the position that you should not want to appeal to white Southerners - as a partisan matter, as a matter of personal friendship, as a matter of the American nation. Very much the contrary.
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And yet, much of the "Lincoln's Republicans were not like this" shtick takes as its premise that Lincoln's party would not have wanted *those* people in its ranks.
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Now, where you see the greatest continuity between the GOP of 1856, 1896, 1924, 1956, 1980, 2004, & 2014, is in the Midwest, the real heart of the original party & of revived importance since 2010. Many of the Midwestern Republicans of the past two decades fit that bill.
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Now, as I've noted upthread & many places elsewhere, maintaining the Lincoln-Grant-McKinley-Coolidge-Eisenhower-Reagan line of the party is, in fact, a real challenge in the Age of Trump. The party has had factions like Trump before, but never as leader of the party.
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But it would be useful for historian-written columns like this one to grapple with more of the history & in particular the philosophy of the GOP over time, & not reduce both the Lincoln & Trump era parties to caricature.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/opinion/lincoln-republican-party-trump.html …
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End of conversation
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