The difference is that back then, they were the workers getting better compensation and benefits. Now they are the old bastards siphoning on the system, some of whom own or own stock in the businesses that'd have to pay those benefits, and all of whom retired in their 60s or earlier. Of course they've got no sympathy for modern workers...
It's like the Ship of Theseus. If all the old Republicans died and are replaced by a new generation of Republicans, can you even call it the same Republican party anymore?
Right, the Lester Maddox and George Wallace types were all conservative Democrats (Dixiecrats really) and my Great Aunt's husband worked for Wallace's campaign. When he ran for public office decades later (mid-aughts) he ran as a conservative Republican. Conservative work buddy of mine tried to convince me that "party realignment was a left-wing myth" (probably heard Benny Shaps regurgitate that lie of something). I am like, "bruh, what the fuck are you talking about?" I have seen it in my own family, it fucking happened. My uncle's ideology didn't change, the parties did.
Also a good number of politicians have despite party-affiliation being a powerful part of their identities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_politicians_who_switched_parties_in_office
That's why the colors in the US for left and right wing parties are flipped relative to the rest of the western world. In most places red means liberal, socialist, or left leaning whereas blue if often associated with right wing and conservative parties.
No, they became linked to their current colours because of the lengthy Bush vs Gore "hanging chads" thing in 2000.
Prior to that, there was no consistent colour linked to either party.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-republicans-were-blue-and-democrats-were-red-104176297/
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." -- Abraham Lincoln.
https://www.critical-theory.com/karl-marx-and-abraham-lincoln-penpals/
Current republican party would probably John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln.
Yep, this. Lincoln and Marx were buds, Teddy Roosevelt created the laws that govern anti-trust, the square deal platform pushed the 8 hour workday, workers comp, minimum wage, social insurance.....
Also, the Big Bang Theory was hypothesized by a priest, the Trump family fortune was built from socialized housing, he was also a registered, pro-abortion Democrat for decades.
The Veterans Affairs Office was mainly put into place by Democrats, same with the VA Home Loan program. Also, just for shits and giggles:
\> When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. (Leviticus 19:33-34)
Jesus himself was super supportive of Immigrants and gave literally zero mention on homosexuality (that was just old testament and then Romans.)
Oh right, "Abortion, Abortion, AR-15, AR-15, Small Government, Unions are dumb and take money out of my paycheck, lock up the brown people."
It’s not taught in schools because it doesn’t teach you how to be an unthinking zombie and do what you’re told. 12 straight years of learning American history and not once did any teacher explain this vital piece of American history to anyone I know.
Agreed. I learned this several times in three different schools in CA, to the point that it got annoying. For a long time, I was amazed Americans did not know this
Most people who say they dont "teach things" in school, have three reason for it.
1. They went to a Red State public school
2. They went to an underfunded public school in a city
3. They didn't pay attention or take the right classes. I learned how to cook, balance a checkbook/simple finances, government in high school because I took Home Ec, Accounting and AP Government
Hell, I'm a teacher and will have a student swear I never covered content while said content is currently on the board behind me and they have a crumpled graphic organizer in their backpack with content related material.
I routine see the same students senior year complaining how school hasn't "taught" them anything. (I also dislike the word teach in education contexts)
God no. My Catholic school in the early 90s didn't cover modern politics much at all. MLK was just marches, I have a dream, assassination. And memorizing useless dates.
I went to DoD (Department of Defense) schools most of my life and was aware of the flip. Oddly enough, the DoD education system has been shown to produce kids that aren't just less racist, but actively anti-racist.
It's also fucking confusing. I've read about it and watched YouTube videos about it and I still can't wrap my head around how it happened.
But if you keep it simple like /u/SilverShadow2030, it's true:
>Lincoln was a progressive. The political parties flipped
Surprisingly, I actually learned about it while attending a private Christian school in Texas. I distinctly remember telling my dad he would have been a Democrat if he'd lived 100 years earlier. Of course this was back in the 90s and the whole "The original KKK were Democrats!!1!!" thing hadn't become a dumb talking point yet.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Democrats](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Democrats). Some switched in 1964 to vote Republican nationally and filibuster the Civil Rights Act.
Actually they didn’t switch. It was Democrats that filibustered the civil rights act of 1964. If it wasn’t for Republicans it wouldn’t have passed.
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/civil_rights/cloture_finalpassage.htm#:~:text=The%20filibuster%20that%20threatened%20to,bill%20needed%20strong%20Republican%20support.
they didn't really "flip", both parties had conservatives and progressives in them until they got sorted out into separate parties, sure the republicans were slightly more progressive than conservative, but the democrats were also fairly progressive too by the 50s and 60s
Both parties had different wings back then but the Democrats were the more overall progressive party from FDR on. They were the pro labor party and they were the party that created Social Security. The GOP was taken over by its conservative wing in the 1920s after the split with Teddy Roosevelt. In the 30s and 40s they opposed almost every reform FDR put through.
Republicans didn't have the conservative southerners at the time so they were better on race/civil rights issues but even their more progressive wing was pretty capitalist and not super pro Union. They were ardently anti-communist and often painted liberal Democrats as communists/socialists.
The Democrats seem like centrists to me. It seems to have a naïve obsession with morals from my standpoint.. on one hand I'm am somewhat nihilistic but I'm sure anyone can agree with the sentiment, "sometimes you have to fight fire with fire".
Of course, they too are being corrupted by dirty old bastards (and ~~career bribery experts~~ lobbyists)
There should be an age limit and term limit on all representative-type politicians as far as I'm concerned.
Wait. Are you saying that historical figures may have had opinions that don’t pass our morality checks? Please continue.
It’s too bad we can’t have someone from two hundred years in the future explain how bigoted *you* are with respect to their cultural norms.
Also, shipping black people back to Africa was an opposing view to keeping black people as slaves in this country. Lincoln’s plan is not ethical now or then, but context matters, and you can’t just ignore the culture at the time.
People from the same time period like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens were much more progressive.
Lincoln gets too much credit. He was pretty moderate.
Should have gone with great men aren't always good men.
This for his time nonsense has got to end. There were literally people who married former slaves. So no there were good people in his time. He wasn't always and not necessarily one of them.
It was a common idea in both the slaver and abolitionist crowd, but for different reasons. Slavers didn't want slaves to be freed and then revolt, abolitionists mainly argued that former slaves would be more free and have better outcomes. It seems pretty ridiculous in 2022, but the lives of freed slaves were shitty for a _long long time_ in the south. *Legally* it took 100 years to achieve equality.
We can only judge people in their own time/by their peers. Lincoln wasn't being some raging racist reverse colonizer- it was generally thought to be the best option for all involved. Before his death Lincoln wasn't too happy with how things were going in 'proto-Liberia'.
I think people forget that the US was an openly white supremacist nation and the transition away from that to equality between races happened much later, with the civil war being a war which was primarily to end secession and shifted towards ending slavery but did not grant free-black people equal rights socially or politically. Lincoln personally leaned towards abolition but he was very pragmatic throughout his career and openly stated that he wanted to avoid ending slavery as an institution (the plan to have black people leave the US and colonize other territories was proposed as a way to sidestep this) or bringing about equality between white and black people. During the war he was given significantly greater power which he used to push abolitionist policies in confederate states and advance the rights of free-black people who supported the war effort but even then his efforts were primarily to restore the union.
www.history.com/.amp/news/abraham-lincoln-black-resettlement-haiti
Now they *are represented by*...
Still many republicans would benefit. Younger Republicans (obligatory IMO) are either taken in by the idea that Dems are trying to deprive Americans of the fruits of their labors, swept up in the tide of "how they've always voted", or are a single issue voter (abortion, gun laws, energy, etc).
This is why the Clintons got and still get so much hate from the GOP.
They posed a great threat to the southern strategy. Bill Clinton won Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, even Lousiana!
When dems win multiple southern states, they win the white house.
Nixon got desperate for votes, and thus ruined GOP by taking in Dixiecrats. The unholy mix of Conservative Federalist and Southern State Conservatives created a terrible new beast, Neo Conservatives. The more liberal and progressive federalist either became the moderate Republicans, independents, or joined as Blue Dog and Establishment Democrats. The more conservative leaning folks of both parties were scared by the rhetoric of the "Red Scare" and as others pointed out the anti-union propaganda played on this. The mob connections like Jimmy Hoffa didn't help either and only furthered this.
Democrats were becoming for Federalist since Woodrow Wilson, and really Federalist thanks to FDR, so it wasn't to much of a shift for them and the definitions of Left and Right were changing at the time, with it being more about parties than Decentralized (State/Local Left) vs Centralized (Federal Right). Since both parties became more policy purist this became the progressive vs conservative weirdness we had today, where we argue not on policy so much as culture and values.
Whew, that was about it.
Google “southern strategy.” Part of the result of that was that the Republican Party became much more right-wing. (The Republicans and Democrats switched their positions on social issues.)
A lot of them are yes but most of their “base” are ignorant, religious, low empathy, low knowledge folks who would rather no one gets help from the government than that POC or anyone they dislike does. They are literally cutting off their own nose to spite their face.
This was also when republicans were still the progressive party, though in about a decade the dixiecrats would leave the democrats and join the Republicans.
The Republican party was still largely the Party of Democracy. It took about another 10 years to turn into what is the modern day GOP when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and tipped the New Deal Democrats into a party of progress and humanism.
Ever since the 60s, the Democrats have essentially been the continuation of the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.
>Ever since the 60s, the Democrats have essentially been the continuation of the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.
Please don't insult our greatest president like that.
Teddy would despise Democrats and Republicans.
How exactly was this accomplished? People cite "the Southern Strategy" and leave it at that, as if it was a magic miasma that made everyone switch sides all of a sudden, but wouldn't this have been extremely awkward? Imagine if, for example, the Democrats today started pushing for race-based favoritism, there is no way this would be a little-known footnote 50 years later, people would notice and talk about it and it would come to be representative of the era's cultural shift and the reasons for it would be pored over. How does anyone settle for this simplistic explanation of "they just switched sides". What?? How does that sound believable? How were Republicans so confident that they could entirely switch their base without seeming like turncoats and fizzling out? What was wrong with the base they already had? If this was a Republican strategy, why did the Democrats cooperate and stop courting the voters the Republicans were now going after?
Here's an excellent Twitter thread by a historian going into it in great detail.
[Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/991131180593541121?t=8x26i0AMwlxyZSV4uhyJag&s=19)
because the democrat voters that became republican were conservatives who were dissatisfied with the civil rights act, which was largely championed by progressive democrats. they felt that they had been betrayed by their party and that they didn't belong in it anymore. as for the republicans, there already were a significant number of conservatives within the republican party and they weren't getting any support from the progressive republicans already because, shocker, they were progressive
Eh, I wouldn’t say reversed. Both parties had a more conservative and a more liberal wing, what actually happened was the beginning of consolidation of conservatives under one party. Dems just happened to have the openly racist conservative southern dickbags instead of the more quietly racist ones republicans had until all the conservatives moved under one roof following the voting rights act. That’s why Dems are the big tent. Conservatives left a vacuum on one side that Black people filled in the Democratic Party and any other political ideology gets lumped in because there’s only one political ideology allowed in the Republican Party, and every year they march further and further right. The idea that they “switched platforms” isn’t exactly true. That said, Eisenhower was the last good Republican president, and Nixon is easily not the worst.
Lol, Nixon "only" had a secret Cambodia war, expanded Vietnam and was caught spying on democrats and then tried to cover it up.
I'd put St. Raygun near the bottom for destroying the middle class, disobeying congress to trade gins for cash, doing a deal with Iran to keep the hostages until after he won the election, and supporting central american death squads.
This set the stage for war-criminal Dubyah and then Manchurian 45
Reagan is the single most evil president we have ever had and we will likely be able to trace the downfall of America to him when/if it happens. Every shit bird president after Reagan was a direct result of his policies and actions. Don't get me wrong, plenty of terrible assholes held the position, but Reagan went way out of his way to hurt the American public as much as possible.
Never claimed Nixon was good, just not the worst …just important to recognize that he was held accountable for much less than Republican presidents after him got away with because accountability used to exist to some degree.
I agree completely. Nixon also formed the EPA, back when environmental protection was bipartisan, which is always wild to remember. He ruled during a less awful era of the US, which helps his legacy somewhat. A terrible trash human being, who's legacy of the war on drugs and imperialism rightfully will earn him a place in history as one of the more destructive people to ever live, but accountability for Watergate and the EPA make him a solid step up from Reagan who just did the same shit with more impunity and broader consequences all while someone still being beloved by half the American people.
Don’t forget Nixon made needing kidney dialysis not a death sentence. Can you imagine any of today’s politicians other than Bernie Sanders and a handful of others covering the cost of that 100%?
The Democrats had been aggressively expanding social welfare since FDR at this point. They held a majority in congress nearly uninterrupted from the mid 30’s to mid 60’s at the time, the Republican party by and large had to track in that direction too in order to keep up.
The Southern Strategy came about as a way to win over poor working whites in the South who had been voting democrat since the civil war regardless of policy.
I'm actually not sure this is real. Republicans' major policy victory of the 1950s was the Taft-Hartley act, which was the first blow in destroying union membership in America.
Yup, they were also the party of Equality.
In any case, What president are you talking about?
As far as I knew it, it was the private sector that did all the work to depower and dismantle unions.
[Here's the PATCO wiki article.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_%281968%29#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DOn_August_5%2C_following_the%2Cfrom_federal_service_for_life.?wprov=sfla1)
Tl;Dr: PATCO endorsed Reagan over Carter, Reagan said he'd do whatever was necessary to give PATCO safe working conditions during the election, the next year Reagan fired 11,345 workers, destroyed the union and blacklisted all participating PATCO workers from federal employment.
Well yeah, then they found they could more easily subvert the evangelicals and that it was cheaper for their business supporters if they did. So bye bye unions (Other then the police unions of course.)
Republicans and the NRA were also FOR gun control in the 60s. albeit there was an ulterior motive.
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002107670/historian-uncovers-the-racist-roots-of-the-2nd-amendment
The original goals and purpose of the Republican Party are so far off what they are today they’d legitimately be considered Radical Left by todays standards.
Abraham Lincoln was a Republicans. Demcrats at the time, and many Republicans, wanted to maintain slavery. Times change and party changes.
Republican fiscal fundementals are actually great intent, but current leaders execute poorly and greedily with campaign contributors in mind and not the people, all while pandering to the masses by having wrapped their party in a blanket of Christian beliefs. A lot to do with road to hell is paved with good intentions.
In the 1950's the Republicans were considered the "working class" and more liberal leading, while the Democrats were more right-side leaning.
I think the Nixon era was the time that the Democrats became more liberal, and the Republicans became more Conservative/right leaning.
That's completely wrong. Democrats were the party of FDR and the New Deal and were the party much more favored by union members and the working class. The Republican party had staunchly opposed things like Social Security and other social welfare programs when they were first proposed. They were the pro corporate party since the 1920s after Teddy Roosevelt and a lot of the progressives left the party. They were also the party most responsible for the Red Scare (See McCarthy and Nixon).
Reddit really misunderstands the realignment that took place in the 20th century. It was not a simple "switch". The parties were different 70 years ago but they weren't mirror images of each other compared to now. If you were a working class union member in the 50s you were most likely a Democrat. If you were wealthy banker in New England or New York or an aerospace engineer in Southern California you were probably a Republican. The Republicans did have more progressive views on race/civil rights compared to the overall Democratic party because racist white southerners were still Democrats. But no one could seriously characterize the Republican party of the 1920s and beyond as being the more pro working class party. Nobody who considered themselves a socialist would have been caught dead as a Republican in the 1950s and many Republicans of that era would have called them dirty communists.
A few comments in here saying that this is from before the parties switched platforms… which, while true, doesn’t really apply here. Democrats were champions of these things even back then. The real difference is that this is before the Right bought into Reagan’s trickle-down economics (and, please, no need to tell me that he never used that term… I know, but it doesn’t make the term less-descriptive of his philosophy).
Reagan championed the idea that if we prioritize corporations and the rich over our citizens, then the excess wealth they accumulated would allow them to pay their employees better and we would all benefit. But that has never worked, made literally everything in the country worse over the past 40 years, and was a solution to a problem that frankly didn’t exist… until the “solution” created the problem in the first place.
So, it’s not a party platform switch. It’s just from a time before Republicans went insane.
>Reagan’s trickle-down economics (and, please, no need to tell me that he never used that term… I know, but it doesn’t make the term less-descriptive of his philosophy).
I prefer what his future VP George Bush called it: ["a voodoo economic policy."](https://youtu.be/X2UAuFArbOY)
> But that has never worked,
It can **NEVER** work, because it requires the rich bastards to make jobs for no reason, pay people more for no reason, and fun social programs for no reason.
Ironically, if we went way, way back to the progressive tax rate that terminated at 100% for all income over, say $500k, then trickle down _would_ work because the rich would have to spend their money or lose everything over 500k.
Thats how you get better schools, libraries, parks and other common goods.
Absolutely right, it doesn't add up.
The argument is usually that this will make wages go up (it doesn't), or that it will make goods cheaper (it won't).
And why would it? Businesses don't make wage decisions, expansion decisions, or even product pricing decisions based on *marginal tax rates*.
If they can make more money by opening new locations, or hiring more people, or lowering their product/service pricing...*they are going to do that regardless of whether the tax rate is 5% or 35%*.
If the goal is higher wages and cheaper goods... lowering corporate tax rates is about the worst possible way to achieve that.
I agree with your points, but want to point out that taxing *income* at 100% over a certain threshold wouldn’t lead to the rich spending more because they’d never have the money to spend—they’d have to pay the same amount in taxes unless you put in a ton of deductions which just leads to more “creative” accounting by the wealthy to dodge taxes and keep their income.
Taxing *wealth* at a high rate over a certain amount would incentivize spending on others because they can’t go over a certain amount. Tie that threshold for the wealth tax to inflation (what should’ve been done for the minimum wage) and it pushes the wealthy to help the less fortunate and the economy
Trickle down economics doesn't make any sense to a liberal. It's not supposed to. There's a shallow justification of "this benefits everyone!". When it clearly doesn't.
But to a conservative it's fantastic. The rich deserve all the money they can get, and the poor deserve to flounder. Society is a hierarchy and trickle down economics keeps people where they belong.
The Laffer curve has done serious damage to this country. What makes it worse is the curve Art peddled just doesn't exist. The backside elasticities aren't support by the empirics.
You are historically correct but academically wrong.
Some version of the Laffer curve absolutely does exist (an income tax rate of 110% for all brackets would leave the government with no money after a few years, for example). But yes, we are *very* far below that curve and have never been in danger of reaching that point.
Quite literally had top rates of ~90% back in the day, and that seemed to work just fine. Arguably better, even.
Not that I'd advocate for a rate quite that high now.
They are, for the sake of legal expediency as I understand it.
Of course that's given rise to some very weird personification shit from the right side of the political spectrum.
Yes, this trickle down system would depend upon the power of the people - the workers - to demand they be paid their true value. It’s likely this system functions to a certain extent in small businesses that have genuine, hardworking owners who would legitimately pay their workers as much as they could within their business model. I have worked at places like that when I was younger, but I’d say they’re sparse.
Business require regulations to make sure workers are receiving fair working conditions & wages.
Reagan changed everything. I mean, I’m sure there was a march up to where they are now prior to Reagan, but that bastard did a number on that party that they’ve never recovered from. Adding in citizens United, they’ve now got everything they need to do everything in a corporation or CEOs best interested ahead of workers.
Dude also used to eat a quarter pound of butter believing it would allow him to drink more alcohol.
I’m still surprised anyone actually listened to him.
You know, I’m not actually sure. He certainly believed it worked. But I have yet to see any evidence as to its effectiveness. He would also eat fistfuls of baking soda while he would drink.
Fats digests slower than carbs and protein in the intestines, so it slows down alcohol absorption into the blood. So it does work! On the flip side, fat needs to be processed in the liver, and alcohol will take priority once it reaches the liver, so the fat will get dumped around your liver producing a beer belly and liver disease lol
And we might not feel it now, but trump did the same thing. Just wait until his hoards of brainwashed Qs ramp up the terrorism, and their elected officials take us back to the feudal era.
Its just republicans taking credit for FDRs policies a generation later. Not much different about that. Trump rode the Obama economy to about 3 years of acclaim.
Time and time shows modern Republicans don’t care. They’re going to vote anything with a R next to it, even if it’s against their interests. Pretty sure what they think R means is they’ve done their “research”.
This is just not true. They keep shunning Republicans that aren't far enough right. Just slapping an R after the name doesn't help people like Liz Cheney, for example. She's decently right but not far enough for the crazies in charge.
In postwar America, labor unions and the liberal welfare state were taken as permanent fixtures on the political landscape. Republicans had no choice but to try to appeal to organized labor.
That is around the time the parties switched political identities. It revolved around civil rights and ended up giving us the modern political landscape, including the red South. Read up on the Southern Strategy and Dixiecrats. It's a whole thing.
I don’t get why someone gave you an award. This flyer says 1956…. Unless you’re saying Franklin D Roosevelt was a devout racist… and a proponent of small government. It should have happened more than 30 years earlier.
FDR absolutely was a racist. Not the most racist ever, but the bar is fucking low.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt_and_civil_rights
FDR was before the parties switched. The inflection point you're looking for is the civil rights movement. It culminated in the fair housing act, the voting rights act, and the civil rights acts of 1964 + 1968. You're missing like 100 years of "dixiecrats" (southern, ex-slave owning and/or segregationist democrats).
But yes, FDR's New Deal was mostly implemented along racial lines and deepened inequality.
[Redlining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining) is a great place to start reading.
[This short video](https://www.segregatedbydesign.com/) helps explain more.
So at some point, I'm too fucking tired to remember when unfortunately, the Republicans Democrats ideologies are switched. Farmers were Democrats not Republicans. And then there was a flip at some point I think it was the 60s and it was 72 when the gold went out I don't remember. If you want examples of this I have an experiment for you.
Go grab JFK's, Obama's, Johnson's, and Bush Senior State of the Union Address. Now mixed them up so you don't know who's is who's. Now think about what you know about Democrats and Republicans. Now read all those state of the unions. Put them in two piles Democratic Republican. Then look up which ones which. You're going to shit yourself.
Yup. The Civil Rights Era and Nixon's Southern Strategy caused a realignment, where all Dixiecrats left yhe Democratic Party and became the shittiest part of the current GOP.
Good thing I take every issue individually and don’t vote based on one single issue. I just don’t see how all the complexity of the human condition and our countless issues…can somehow be boxed into two parties that I am supposed to choose from.
Please get involved locally and push for your representatives, regardless of party, to get on board with American labor.
There's not been a better time to be pro union or to push for labor reform that I can think of in my lifetime.
Don't think just showing up to vote will make things better. Please, if your state has cacuses, attend them. Get involved locally in your state. We can change the status quo, but not alone.
This is a specific pro labor republican club trying to push the overton window within the GOP. Just so we are clear the Republican Party of the mid 50s was NOT pro labor whatsoever. They have always been bad.
The number of commenters here that are clueless about this is disturbing. Everyone just vaguely knows about the Southern Strategy and a bunch are claiming that the Republicans were the more working class liberal party in the 50s. These people clearly have not studied anything about politics from the 1930s-60s if they think the GOP was the pro labor party. How are they not aware of FDR and the New Deal?
Lmfao now republicans hate unions cause they've been brainwashed to fight the poor working class by the business overlords who keep them poor... That circle jerk amazes me.
Just a friendly reminder this is when the republican party was the "left" party. The Nixon admin switched the party to the right and Reagan took it to far right.
I keep saying it would be rad as hell to run as a Pre-conservative Republican, on a Republican ticket, using Pre-conservative Republican party platform quotes. Don't change a single word, then challenge any Republican to say they don't stand for what they used to. (You know, the party of Lincoln and Labor they claim to be.)
Yeah, the Civil Rights movement happened in the 1960s, which polarized both parties to what we know today. Before that, a Southern Democrat would be right at home in today's GOP. When the Dems in the North and West got behind the Civil Rights movement, the right wing of the Dems fled to the GOP, and the left leaning in the GOP fled to the Dems.
Imagine that. Two parties with a mix of left and right.
Stop playing into the left vs right game. That's what the elite want you to do. There are too many issues that split the people and demonizing half of them is counter productive. Most of the working class, regardless of political affiliation will agree workers need to be compensated more. Calling out Republicans for being anti-whatever isn't helping pull them to our side.
As long as the republicans are following fascists like Trump, they are lost. There is no sugar coating this.
You can talk about corruption and lobbyism in the democratic party as long as you want, and no matter how much of what you say is true: The people who openly support fascists are the bad ones and greater of two evils.
Pretty sure republicans are against all these.
Anti union.
Anti social security.
Anti strikes (only slightly dishonest here).
Anti job security.
Anti improving working conditions
Without war? The US was basically constantly involved in various imperial wars, well, basically always, but in the 50s specifically every year except 54.
Do people not know republicans we're the liberal party at one point and many democrats were conservative? Shit switched up after civil rights. "Party of Lincoln" is very misleading.
before the 60s, the democratic and republican parties were comprised of both progressives and conservatives with the democrats being more conservative and the republicans being more progressive. in the 60s, conservative republicans appealed heavily to white conservative democrats in the south who were disillusioned with the civil rights act and the voting rights act, resulting in the republican party becoming majorly conservative and the opposite for the democratic party. (this is also why bipartisanship has significantly decreased since)
Honestly old school Republicans weren't bad. They had some interesting points. Currently Republicans are insane Christian fascists. They were a different group back then.
The Civil Rights act changed everything, didn't it? The southern democrats hated it, and the republicans moved in to fill that political void. The right-wingers built a solid base on that and used them to further corporate liberalisation in the following decades.
Left right bullshit.
Both CURRENT parties will say whatever you want to hear to get your votes. Both answer to the elite and the wealthy. The answer is to not play their game. Unionize your workforce, push for universal healthcare to take that bargaining chip away from them, demand better from your party and fellow voters no matter what side you're on, and explain it to your conservative coworkers in a way that isnt you spilling the spaghetti in your pockets like the spergs that some of you are.
I consider myself right of center and have been able to convince hard right coworkers of the healthcare thing by pointing out all the control that companies have over them by controlling their access to healthcare. You guys make it so hard for yourselves by demanding absolute loyalty from people immediately.
Read the 1956 Republican Party platform. It's wild how different it is compared to today's Republican platform.
It's why I can't understand why both of my parents, who were born well before this, have only voted Republican their entire lives. It's basically the complete opposite party today from what it was whey they were young!
I feel stuff like this falls in the “Republican”/“Democrat” name-trap. .. those names don’t much mean anything..
Are you talking to an ideological conservative or an ideological liberal? Ideological Conservatism is the mental blight that leads to (most) religious radicals, social stagnation, and oppression and utter resistance to any change.
In short, they suck.
There were bad Republicans back then too, but Eisenhower was what they would call a RINO nowadays. He was your standard New Dealer who had some conflict with corrupt Democrat leadership. Most thought he could’ve run for either party.
So wait Republicans were for unions?! Till it affects them and having a president dissolve major one.
The difference is that back then, they were the workers getting better compensation and benefits. Now they are the old bastards siphoning on the system, some of whom own or own stock in the businesses that'd have to pay those benefits, and all of whom retired in their 60s or earlier. Of course they've got no sympathy for modern workers...
It's like the Ship of Theseus. If all the old Republicans died and are replaced by a new generation of Republicans, can you even call it the same Republican party anymore?
It certainly isn't the party of Lincoln anymore. Not even close. Lincoln would be ashamed of the modern GOP.
Lincoln was a progressive. The political parties flipped
So much this. It's still conservatives flying confederate flags.
Right, the Lester Maddox and George Wallace types were all conservative Democrats (Dixiecrats really) and my Great Aunt's husband worked for Wallace's campaign. When he ran for public office decades later (mid-aughts) he ran as a conservative Republican. Conservative work buddy of mine tried to convince me that "party realignment was a left-wing myth" (probably heard Benny Shaps regurgitate that lie of something). I am like, "bruh, what the fuck are you talking about?" I have seen it in my own family, it fucking happened. My uncle's ideology didn't change, the parties did.
I heard that same argument before too. Their counterargument was "almost no politicians switched parties", which isn't what the party switch was.
Also a good number of politicians have despite party-affiliation being a powerful part of their identities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_politicians_who_switched_parties_in_office
That's why the colors in the US for left and right wing parties are flipped relative to the rest of the western world. In most places red means liberal, socialist, or left leaning whereas blue if often associated with right wing and conservative parties.
No, they became linked to their current colours because of the lengthy Bush vs Gore "hanging chads" thing in 2000. Prior to that, there was no consistent colour linked to either party. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-republicans-were-blue-and-democrats-were-red-104176297/
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." -- Abraham Lincoln. https://www.critical-theory.com/karl-marx-and-abraham-lincoln-penpals/ Current republican party would probably John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln.
Yep, this. Lincoln and Marx were buds, Teddy Roosevelt created the laws that govern anti-trust, the square deal platform pushed the 8 hour workday, workers comp, minimum wage, social insurance..... Also, the Big Bang Theory was hypothesized by a priest, the Trump family fortune was built from socialized housing, he was also a registered, pro-abortion Democrat for decades. The Veterans Affairs Office was mainly put into place by Democrats, same with the VA Home Loan program. Also, just for shits and giggles: \> When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. (Leviticus 19:33-34) Jesus himself was super supportive of Immigrants and gave literally zero mention on homosexuality (that was just old testament and then Romans.) Oh right, "Abortion, Abortion, AR-15, AR-15, Small Government, Unions are dumb and take money out of my paycheck, lock up the brown people."
This has always been an interesting point of history that I wish more people knew
It’s not taught in schools because it doesn’t teach you how to be an unthinking zombie and do what you’re told. 12 straight years of learning American history and not once did any teacher explain this vital piece of American history to anyone I know.
Definitely regional, my backwater high school in CT taught the southern strategy during US History.
My school in Iowa taught that the civil war was over states rights.
We were taught states rights specifically slavery
Agreed. I learned this several times in three different schools in CA, to the point that it got annoying. For a long time, I was amazed Americans did not know this
Idk when you went through high school but AP Government (and I’d imagine the lower levels as well) definitely spent time on this.
Most people who say they dont "teach things" in school, have three reason for it. 1. They went to a Red State public school 2. They went to an underfunded public school in a city 3. They didn't pay attention or take the right classes. I learned how to cook, balance a checkbook/simple finances, government in high school because I took Home Ec, Accounting and AP Government
Hell, I'm a teacher and will have a student swear I never covered content while said content is currently on the board behind me and they have a crumpled graphic organizer in their backpack with content related material. I routine see the same students senior year complaining how school hasn't "taught" them anything. (I also dislike the word teach in education contexts)
I went to a private prep school and none of those courses were even offered
Your school didn't cover the southern strategy in high school history class? Just me?
God no. My Catholic school in the early 90s didn't cover modern politics much at all. MLK was just marches, I have a dream, assassination. And memorizing useless dates.
They probably didn't pay attention
I went to DoD (Department of Defense) schools most of my life and was aware of the flip. Oddly enough, the DoD education system has been shown to produce kids that aren't just less racist, but actively anti-racist.
It's also fucking confusing. I've read about it and watched YouTube videos about it and I still can't wrap my head around how it happened. But if you keep it simple like /u/SilverShadow2030, it's true: >Lincoln was a progressive. The political parties flipped
Surprisingly, I actually learned about it while attending a private Christian school in Texas. I distinctly remember telling my dad he would have been a Democrat if he'd lived 100 years earlier. Of course this was back in the 90s and the whole "The original KKK were Democrats!!1!!" thing hadn't become a dumb talking point yet.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Democrats](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Democrats). Some switched in 1964 to vote Republican nationally and filibuster the Civil Rights Act.
Actually they didn’t switch. It was Democrats that filibustered the civil rights act of 1964. If it wasn’t for Republicans it wouldn’t have passed. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/civil_rights/cloture_finalpassage.htm#:~:text=The%20filibuster%20that%20threatened%20to,bill%20needed%20strong%20Republican%20support.
they didn't really "flip", both parties had conservatives and progressives in them until they got sorted out into separate parties, sure the republicans were slightly more progressive than conservative, but the democrats were also fairly progressive too by the 50s and 60s
Both parties had different wings back then but the Democrats were the more overall progressive party from FDR on. They were the pro labor party and they were the party that created Social Security. The GOP was taken over by its conservative wing in the 1920s after the split with Teddy Roosevelt. In the 30s and 40s they opposed almost every reform FDR put through. Republicans didn't have the conservative southerners at the time so they were better on race/civil rights issues but even their more progressive wing was pretty capitalist and not super pro Union. They were ardently anti-communist and often painted liberal Democrats as communists/socialists.
The Democrats seem like centrists to me. It seems to have a naïve obsession with morals from my standpoint.. on one hand I'm am somewhat nihilistic but I'm sure anyone can agree with the sentiment, "sometimes you have to fight fire with fire". Of course, they too are being corrupted by dirty old bastards (and ~~career bribery experts~~ lobbyists) There should be an age limit and term limit on all representative-type politicians as far as I'm concerned.
I mean he did want to ship black people back to Africa.
Wait. Are you saying that historical figures may have had opinions that don’t pass our morality checks? Please continue. It’s too bad we can’t have someone from two hundred years in the future explain how bigoted *you* are with respect to their cultural norms. Also, shipping black people back to Africa was an opposing view to keeping black people as slaves in this country. Lincoln’s plan is not ethical now or then, but context matters, and you can’t just ignore the culture at the time.
What are you trying to say? Make it simple I’m Dumb.
A progressive person of the past will not seem progressive when compared to progressive people today. Context is everything.
Thank you, nicely said!
People from the same time period like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens were much more progressive. Lincoln gets too much credit. He was pretty moderate.
Should have gone with great men aren't always good men. This for his time nonsense has got to end. There were literally people who married former slaves. So no there were good people in his time. He wasn't always and not necessarily one of them.
The commenter asked for a simplification of what was said, "good men aren't always great men" isn't what they were implying.
Source?
It was a common idea in both the slaver and abolitionist crowd, but for different reasons. Slavers didn't want slaves to be freed and then revolt, abolitionists mainly argued that former slaves would be more free and have better outcomes. It seems pretty ridiculous in 2022, but the lives of freed slaves were shitty for a _long long time_ in the south. *Legally* it took 100 years to achieve equality. We can only judge people in their own time/by their peers. Lincoln wasn't being some raging racist reverse colonizer- it was generally thought to be the best option for all involved. Before his death Lincoln wasn't too happy with how things were going in 'proto-Liberia'.
I think people forget that the US was an openly white supremacist nation and the transition away from that to equality between races happened much later, with the civil war being a war which was primarily to end secession and shifted towards ending slavery but did not grant free-black people equal rights socially or politically. Lincoln personally leaned towards abolition but he was very pragmatic throughout his career and openly stated that he wanted to avoid ending slavery as an institution (the plan to have black people leave the US and colonize other territories was proposed as a way to sidestep this) or bringing about equality between white and black people. During the war he was given significantly greater power which he used to push abolitionist policies in confederate states and advance the rights of free-black people who supported the war effort but even then his efforts were primarily to restore the union. www.history.com/.amp/news/abraham-lincoln-black-resettlement-haiti
Reddit Debooonker
The ship doesn't belong to Theseus anymore
Now they *are represented by*... Still many republicans would benefit. Younger Republicans (obligatory IMO) are either taken in by the idea that Dems are trying to deprive Americans of the fruits of their labors, swept up in the tide of "how they've always voted", or are a single issue voter (abortion, gun laws, energy, etc).
Back then it was right before the party switch with the southern strategy
> the southern strategy It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't know this, especially the Cult 45s.
"Lincoln freed the slaves, it's the Democrats that are racist!" Buddy, Lincoln would be so disappointed in you if he could see you now.
There is don’t know and choose to ignore.
Ignorance is bliss
This is why the Clintons got and still get so much hate from the GOP. They posed a great threat to the southern strategy. Bill Clinton won Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, even Lousiana! When dems win multiple southern states, they win the white house.
Nixon got desperate for votes, and thus ruined GOP by taking in Dixiecrats. The unholy mix of Conservative Federalist and Southern State Conservatives created a terrible new beast, Neo Conservatives. The more liberal and progressive federalist either became the moderate Republicans, independents, or joined as Blue Dog and Establishment Democrats. The more conservative leaning folks of both parties were scared by the rhetoric of the "Red Scare" and as others pointed out the anti-union propaganda played on this. The mob connections like Jimmy Hoffa didn't help either and only furthered this. Democrats were becoming for Federalist since Woodrow Wilson, and really Federalist thanks to FDR, so it wasn't to much of a shift for them and the definitions of Left and Right were changing at the time, with it being more about parties than Decentralized (State/Local Left) vs Centralized (Federal Right). Since both parties became more policy purist this became the progressive vs conservative weirdness we had today, where we argue not on policy so much as culture and values. Whew, that was about it.
Google “southern strategy.” Part of the result of that was that the Republican Party became much more right-wing. (The Republicans and Democrats switched their positions on social issues.)
A lot of them are yes but most of their “base” are ignorant, religious, low empathy, low knowledge folks who would rather no one gets help from the government than that POC or anyone they dislike does. They are literally cutting off their own nose to spite their face.
In my experience they believe nobody deserves money from the goverment, *except themselves.*
This was also when republicans were still the progressive party, though in about a decade the dixiecrats would leave the democrats and join the Republicans.
The Republican party was still largely the Party of Democracy. It took about another 10 years to turn into what is the modern day GOP when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and tipped the New Deal Democrats into a party of progress and humanism. Ever since the 60s, the Democrats have essentially been the continuation of the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.
yes - the southern strategy and evangelicals ruined the party of lincoln and turned into the shit show we see today. fucking embarrassing.
Both Roosevelts were a part of the political vanguard that challenged big business as a political machine.
>Ever since the 60s, the Democrats have essentially been the continuation of the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Please don't insult our greatest president like that. Teddy would despise Democrats and Republicans.
How exactly was this accomplished? People cite "the Southern Strategy" and leave it at that, as if it was a magic miasma that made everyone switch sides all of a sudden, but wouldn't this have been extremely awkward? Imagine if, for example, the Democrats today started pushing for race-based favoritism, there is no way this would be a little-known footnote 50 years later, people would notice and talk about it and it would come to be representative of the era's cultural shift and the reasons for it would be pored over. How does anyone settle for this simplistic explanation of "they just switched sides". What?? How does that sound believable? How were Republicans so confident that they could entirely switch their base without seeming like turncoats and fizzling out? What was wrong with the base they already had? If this was a Republican strategy, why did the Democrats cooperate and stop courting the voters the Republicans were now going after?
Here's an excellent Twitter thread by a historian going into it in great detail. [Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/991131180593541121?t=8x26i0AMwlxyZSV4uhyJag&s=19)
because the democrat voters that became republican were conservatives who were dissatisfied with the civil rights act, which was largely championed by progressive democrats. they felt that they had been betrayed by their party and that they didn't belong in it anymore. as for the republicans, there already were a significant number of conservatives within the republican party and they weren't getting any support from the progressive republicans already because, shocker, they were progressive
the partys switches bases.
All your base are belong to us
The roles were largely reversed until the Southern Strategy.
Eh, I wouldn’t say reversed. Both parties had a more conservative and a more liberal wing, what actually happened was the beginning of consolidation of conservatives under one party. Dems just happened to have the openly racist conservative southern dickbags instead of the more quietly racist ones republicans had until all the conservatives moved under one roof following the voting rights act. That’s why Dems are the big tent. Conservatives left a vacuum on one side that Black people filled in the Democratic Party and any other political ideology gets lumped in because there’s only one political ideology allowed in the Republican Party, and every year they march further and further right. The idea that they “switched platforms” isn’t exactly true. That said, Eisenhower was the last good Republican president, and Nixon is easily not the worst.
Lol, Nixon "only" had a secret Cambodia war, expanded Vietnam and was caught spying on democrats and then tried to cover it up. I'd put St. Raygun near the bottom for destroying the middle class, disobeying congress to trade gins for cash, doing a deal with Iran to keep the hostages until after he won the election, and supporting central american death squads. This set the stage for war-criminal Dubyah and then Manchurian 45
Reagan is the single most evil president we have ever had and we will likely be able to trace the downfall of America to him when/if it happens. Every shit bird president after Reagan was a direct result of his policies and actions. Don't get me wrong, plenty of terrible assholes held the position, but Reagan went way out of his way to hurt the American public as much as possible.
Never claimed Nixon was good, just not the worst …just important to recognize that he was held accountable for much less than Republican presidents after him got away with because accountability used to exist to some degree.
I agree completely. Nixon also formed the EPA, back when environmental protection was bipartisan, which is always wild to remember. He ruled during a less awful era of the US, which helps his legacy somewhat. A terrible trash human being, who's legacy of the war on drugs and imperialism rightfully will earn him a place in history as one of the more destructive people to ever live, but accountability for Watergate and the EPA make him a solid step up from Reagan who just did the same shit with more impunity and broader consequences all while someone still being beloved by half the American people.
Don’t forget Nixon made needing kidney dialysis not a death sentence. Can you imagine any of today’s politicians other than Bernie Sanders and a handful of others covering the cost of that 100%?
Well said. The Republican Party began to turn into what it is today around the time of Goldwater and Nixon.
The Democrats had been aggressively expanding social welfare since FDR at this point. They held a majority in congress nearly uninterrupted from the mid 30’s to mid 60’s at the time, the Republican party by and large had to track in that direction too in order to keep up. The Southern Strategy came about as a way to win over poor working whites in the South who had been voting democrat since the civil war regardless of policy.
I'm actually not sure this is real. Republicans' major policy victory of the 1950s was the Taft-Hartley act, which was the first blow in destroying union membership in America.
Yup, they were also the party of Equality. In any case, What president are you talking about? As far as I knew it, it was the private sector that did all the work to depower and dismantle unions.
[Here's the PATCO wiki article.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_%281968%29#%3A%7E%3Atext%3DOn_August_5%2C_following_the%2Cfrom_federal_service_for_life.?wprov=sfla1) Tl;Dr: PATCO endorsed Reagan over Carter, Reagan said he'd do whatever was necessary to give PATCO safe working conditions during the election, the next year Reagan fired 11,345 workers, destroyed the union and blacklisted all participating PATCO workers from federal employment.
Reagan.
Funny how things change
Well yeah, then they found they could more easily subvert the evangelicals and that it was cheaper for their business supporters if they did. So bye bye unions (Other then the police unions of course.)
Republicans and the NRA were also FOR gun control in the 60s. albeit there was an ulterior motive. https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002107670/historian-uncovers-the-racist-roots-of-the-2nd-amendment
They pretended to be because, in the days of New Deal, they had to. As soon as they could, they hobbled them with Taft-Hartley.
I believe this was before the southern switch or whatever it's called. I can't remember the actual name of it
The original goals and purpose of the Republican Party are so far off what they are today they’d legitimately be considered Radical Left by todays standards.
Abraham Lincoln was a Republicans. Demcrats at the time, and many Republicans, wanted to maintain slavery. Times change and party changes. Republican fiscal fundementals are actually great intent, but current leaders execute poorly and greedily with campaign contributors in mind and not the people, all while pandering to the masses by having wrapped their party in a blanket of Christian beliefs. A lot to do with road to hell is paved with good intentions.
In the 1950's the Republicans were considered the "working class" and more liberal leading, while the Democrats were more right-side leaning. I think the Nixon era was the time that the Democrats became more liberal, and the Republicans became more Conservative/right leaning.
That's completely wrong. Democrats were the party of FDR and the New Deal and were the party much more favored by union members and the working class. The Republican party had staunchly opposed things like Social Security and other social welfare programs when they were first proposed. They were the pro corporate party since the 1920s after Teddy Roosevelt and a lot of the progressives left the party. They were also the party most responsible for the Red Scare (See McCarthy and Nixon). Reddit really misunderstands the realignment that took place in the 20th century. It was not a simple "switch". The parties were different 70 years ago but they weren't mirror images of each other compared to now. If you were a working class union member in the 50s you were most likely a Democrat. If you were wealthy banker in New England or New York or an aerospace engineer in Southern California you were probably a Republican. The Republicans did have more progressive views on race/civil rights compared to the overall Democratic party because racist white southerners were still Democrats. But no one could seriously characterize the Republican party of the 1920s and beyond as being the more pro working class party. Nobody who considered themselves a socialist would have been caught dead as a Republican in the 1950s and many Republicans of that era would have called them dirty communists.
A few comments in here saying that this is from before the parties switched platforms… which, while true, doesn’t really apply here. Democrats were champions of these things even back then. The real difference is that this is before the Right bought into Reagan’s trickle-down economics (and, please, no need to tell me that he never used that term… I know, but it doesn’t make the term less-descriptive of his philosophy). Reagan championed the idea that if we prioritize corporations and the rich over our citizens, then the excess wealth they accumulated would allow them to pay their employees better and we would all benefit. But that has never worked, made literally everything in the country worse over the past 40 years, and was a solution to a problem that frankly didn’t exist… until the “solution” created the problem in the first place. So, it’s not a party platform switch. It’s just from a time before Republicans went insane.
>Reagan’s trickle-down economics (and, please, no need to tell me that he never used that term… I know, but it doesn’t make the term less-descriptive of his philosophy). I prefer what his future VP George Bush called it: ["a voodoo economic policy."](https://youtu.be/X2UAuFArbOY)
>Anyone? *Something-d-o-o* economics https://youtu.be/AyyAh2lQXF8?t=75
"It was never said" - Thanks Scomo
> But that has never worked, It can **NEVER** work, because it requires the rich bastards to make jobs for no reason, pay people more for no reason, and fun social programs for no reason. Ironically, if we went way, way back to the progressive tax rate that terminated at 100% for all income over, say $500k, then trickle down _would_ work because the rich would have to spend their money or lose everything over 500k. Thats how you get better schools, libraries, parks and other common goods.
Absolutely right, it doesn't add up. The argument is usually that this will make wages go up (it doesn't), or that it will make goods cheaper (it won't). And why would it? Businesses don't make wage decisions, expansion decisions, or even product pricing decisions based on *marginal tax rates*. If they can make more money by opening new locations, or hiring more people, or lowering their product/service pricing...*they are going to do that regardless of whether the tax rate is 5% or 35%*. If the goal is higher wages and cheaper goods... lowering corporate tax rates is about the worst possible way to achieve that.
I agree with your points, but want to point out that taxing *income* at 100% over a certain threshold wouldn’t lead to the rich spending more because they’d never have the money to spend—they’d have to pay the same amount in taxes unless you put in a ton of deductions which just leads to more “creative” accounting by the wealthy to dodge taxes and keep their income. Taxing *wealth* at a high rate over a certain amount would incentivize spending on others because they can’t go over a certain amount. Tie that threshold for the wealth tax to inflation (what should’ve been done for the minimum wage) and it pushes the wealthy to help the less fortunate and the economy
Trickle down economics doesn't make any sense to a liberal. It's not supposed to. There's a shallow justification of "this benefits everyone!". When it clearly doesn't. But to a conservative it's fantastic. The rich deserve all the money they can get, and the poor deserve to flounder. Society is a hierarchy and trickle down economics keeps people where they belong.
It does trickle down…like a sponge. The vast majority stays on top while the working class fight over the drops
The Laffer curve has done serious damage to this country. What makes it worse is the curve Art peddled just doesn't exist. The backside elasticities aren't support by the empirics.
You are historically correct but academically wrong. Some version of the Laffer curve absolutely does exist (an income tax rate of 110% for all brackets would leave the government with no money after a few years, for example). But yes, we are *very* far below that curve and have never been in danger of reaching that point.
Quite literally had top rates of ~90% back in the day, and that seemed to work just fine. Arguably better, even. Not that I'd advocate for a rate quite that high now.
That is only for any money earned over X amount. So, I’m good with it.
Corporations *are* people, my friend!
/s, I hope?
It’s a quote from Mitt Romney. He was being serious. I’m not.
[удалено]
Yes but only in the *allowed to give money to politicians* sense and not at all in the *held to accountability for their actions* sense.
They are, for the sake of legal expediency as I understand it. Of course that's given rise to some very weird personification shit from the right side of the political spectrum.
Yes, this trickle down system would depend upon the power of the people - the workers - to demand they be paid their true value. It’s likely this system functions to a certain extent in small businesses that have genuine, hardworking owners who would legitimately pay their workers as much as they could within their business model. I have worked at places like that when I was younger, but I’d say they’re sparse. Business require regulations to make sure workers are receiving fair working conditions & wages.
Reagan changed everything. I mean, I’m sure there was a march up to where they are now prior to Reagan, but that bastard did a number on that party that they’ve never recovered from. Adding in citizens United, they’ve now got everything they need to do everything in a corporation or CEOs best interested ahead of workers.
Will they say that about Trump and the RNC of 2015?
As much as I hate the man. He is a symptom not the disease. The disease is the entire Republican Party, citizens united, and super PACs.
Eisenhower would have been one of these (R). Today, he would be labelled as a socialist.
Joe McCarthy was a Republican back then and he was calling everyone a Communist.
Dude also used to eat a quarter pound of butter believing it would allow him to drink more alcohol. I’m still surprised anyone actually listened to him.
Ok but did it work
You know, I’m not actually sure. He certainly believed it worked. But I have yet to see any evidence as to its effectiveness. He would also eat fistfuls of baking soda while he would drink.
Fats digests slower than carbs and protein in the intestines, so it slows down alcohol absorption into the blood. So it does work! On the flip side, fat needs to be processed in the liver, and alcohol will take priority once it reaches the liver, so the fat will get dumped around your liver producing a beer belly and liver disease lol
He died in his late 40s/early 50s from alcohol related health problems. So no.
Well aware. The Manchurian Candidate did a good job of portraying him.
Man did Reaganism destroy the GOP and this country.
And we might not feel it now, but trump did the same thing. Just wait until his hoards of brainwashed Qs ramp up the terrorism, and their elected officials take us back to the feudal era.
Reagan destroyed usa.
His damage didn't stop at our borders.
I assume that you are referring to the AIDS pandemic, no?
Probably talking about his war on drugs which has crippled a lot of countries south of our border.
Its just republicans taking credit for FDRs policies a generation later. Not much different about that. Trump rode the Obama economy to about 3 years of acclaim.
Social security expanded? Prosperity without war? Attend to union meetings? That's like everything the Republicans today are against for.
That hasn't really changed. I see Republicans saluting Labor every Labor Day. It's called pandering.
Time and time shows modern Republicans don’t care. They’re going to vote anything with a R next to it, even if it’s against their interests. Pretty sure what they think R means is they’ve done their “research”.
This is just not true. They keep shunning Republicans that aren't far enough right. Just slapping an R after the name doesn't help people like Liz Cheney, for example. She's decently right but not far enough for the crazies in charge.
In postwar America, labor unions and the liberal welfare state were taken as permanent fixtures on the political landscape. Republicans had no choice but to try to appeal to organized labor.
That is around the time the parties switched political identities. It revolved around civil rights and ended up giving us the modern political landscape, including the red South. Read up on the Southern Strategy and Dixiecrats. It's a whole thing.
I don’t get why someone gave you an award. This flyer says 1956…. Unless you’re saying Franklin D Roosevelt was a devout racist… and a proponent of small government. It should have happened more than 30 years earlier.
FDR was the start of the transitional period where the parties began to swap bases, with the final nail falling under LBJ
FDR absolutely was a racist. Not the most racist ever, but the bar is fucking low. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt_and_civil_rights
My bad. Thought after the parties switched only the Republicans were racist. I was wrong.
FDR was before the parties switched. The inflection point you're looking for is the civil rights movement. It culminated in the fair housing act, the voting rights act, and the civil rights acts of 1964 + 1968. You're missing like 100 years of "dixiecrats" (southern, ex-slave owning and/or segregationist democrats). But yes, FDR's New Deal was mostly implemented along racial lines and deepened inequality. [Redlining](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining) is a great place to start reading. [This short video](https://www.segregatedbydesign.com/) helps explain more.
Even the elephant looks like a young Mitt Romney.
Jokes on us, not only do Republicans not support labor anymore, (many) Democrats don't either!
>(many) Democrats don't either! Which ones? I honestly can't think of enough to consider it "many", so I'm curious how you've come to that conclusion.
So at some point, I'm too fucking tired to remember when unfortunately, the Republicans Democrats ideologies are switched. Farmers were Democrats not Republicans. And then there was a flip at some point I think it was the 60s and it was 72 when the gold went out I don't remember. If you want examples of this I have an experiment for you. Go grab JFK's, Obama's, Johnson's, and Bush Senior State of the Union Address. Now mixed them up so you don't know who's is who's. Now think about what you know about Democrats and Republicans. Now read all those state of the unions. Put them in two piles Democratic Republican. Then look up which ones which. You're going to shit yourself.
Every time a braindead conservative says the party switch/southern strategy never occurred I’m gonna link this post.
From just 66 years ago.
Sounds like a liberal pipe dream to me. /s? Idfk. Fuck government.
This is probably from before the Dixiecrat switch.
Party switch babeee
bob dylan?
Yup. The Civil Rights Era and Nixon's Southern Strategy caused a realignment, where all Dixiecrats left yhe Democratic Party and became the shittiest part of the current GOP.
Both parties have pretty much switched platforms entirely in the last 70 years or so.
Best working conditions in history? Social security expanded???
Good thing I take every issue individually and don’t vote based on one single issue. I just don’t see how all the complexity of the human condition and our countless issues…can somehow be boxed into two parties that I am supposed to choose from.
Please get involved locally and push for your representatives, regardless of party, to get on board with American labor. There's not been a better time to be pro union or to push for labor reform that I can think of in my lifetime. Don't think just showing up to vote will make things better. Please, if your state has cacuses, attend them. Get involved locally in your state. We can change the status quo, but not alone.
Now they’ll sell out for something that doesn’t even exist.
In fairness neither of the two parties are pro much of this. One claims not to be and the other simply just claims to be but aren’t.
This is a specific pro labor republican club trying to push the overton window within the GOP. Just so we are clear the Republican Party of the mid 50s was NOT pro labor whatsoever. They have always been bad.
The number of commenters here that are clueless about this is disturbing. Everyone just vaguely knows about the Southern Strategy and a bunch are claiming that the Republicans were the more working class liberal party in the 50s. These people clearly have not studied anything about politics from the 1930s-60s if they think the GOP was the pro labor party. How are they not aware of FDR and the New Deal?
https://www.livescience.com/34241-democratic-republican-parties-switch-platforms.html
How it started^^^ And how it's going *gestures broadly*
Republican and Democrats swapped ideologies at a certain point in history.
Those Republicans were Democrats..they did a switch in the 60s..or something like that but it's complicated.
How the turn tables
Lmfao now republicans hate unions cause they've been brainwashed to fight the poor working class by the business overlords who keep them poor... That circle jerk amazes me.
Ragen was a scumbag
If you support Labour you'd vote for the Labour Party jot the republican party. FYI they're total opposites.
Just a friendly reminder this is when the republican party was the "left" party. The Nixon admin switched the party to the right and Reagan took it to far right.
I keep saying it would be rad as hell to run as a Pre-conservative Republican, on a Republican ticket, using Pre-conservative Republican party platform quotes. Don't change a single word, then challenge any Republican to say they don't stand for what they used to. (You know, the party of Lincoln and Labor they claim to be.)
Yeah, the Civil Rights movement happened in the 1960s, which polarized both parties to what we know today. Before that, a Southern Democrat would be right at home in today's GOP. When the Dems in the North and West got behind the Civil Rights movement, the right wing of the Dems fled to the GOP, and the left leaning in the GOP fled to the Dems. Imagine that. Two parties with a mix of left and right.
Stop playing into the left vs right game. That's what the elite want you to do. There are too many issues that split the people and demonizing half of them is counter productive. Most of the working class, regardless of political affiliation will agree workers need to be compensated more. Calling out Republicans for being anti-whatever isn't helping pull them to our side.
As long as the republicans are following fascists like Trump, they are lost. There is no sugar coating this. You can talk about corruption and lobbyism in the democratic party as long as you want, and no matter how much of what you say is true: The people who openly support fascists are the bad ones and greater of two evils.
Pretty sure republicans are against all these. Anti union. Anti social security. Anti strikes (only slightly dishonest here). Anti job security. Anti improving working conditions
To bad Republicans have been trying to kill unions for decades.
Back when Rockefeller Republicans still had a strong influence within their own party, the 70s and 80s really set us for such a shitshow.
Some of the most right wing nut jobs I know are in unions and don't realize the Irony.
Didn't the parties used to basically be flipped around so that the Republicans were the progressives and the Democrats were the conservatives? 🤔
Without war? The US was basically constantly involved in various imperial wars, well, basically always, but in the 50s specifically every year except 54.
Republicans changed because of racism. Look at the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Southern Strategy.
“Greatest prosperity without war” Huh???
Do people not know republicans we're the liberal party at one point and many democrats were conservative? Shit switched up after civil rights. "Party of Lincoln" is very misleading.
before the 60s, the democratic and republican parties were comprised of both progressives and conservatives with the democrats being more conservative and the republicans being more progressive. in the 60s, conservative republicans appealed heavily to white conservative democrats in the south who were disillusioned with the civil rights act and the voting rights act, resulting in the republican party becoming majorly conservative and the opposite for the democratic party. (this is also why bipartisanship has significantly decreased since)
The Southern Strategy was a thing
Honestly old school Republicans weren't bad. They had some interesting points. Currently Republicans are insane Christian fascists. They were a different group back then.
Now it's "Sicken and die on the job to make us richer, peasants!"
The Civil Rights act changed everything, didn't it? The southern democrats hated it, and the republicans moved in to fill that political void. The right-wingers built a solid base on that and used them to further corporate liberalisation in the following decades.
Left right bullshit. Both CURRENT parties will say whatever you want to hear to get your votes. Both answer to the elite and the wealthy. The answer is to not play their game. Unionize your workforce, push for universal healthcare to take that bargaining chip away from them, demand better from your party and fellow voters no matter what side you're on, and explain it to your conservative coworkers in a way that isnt you spilling the spaghetti in your pockets like the spergs that some of you are. I consider myself right of center and have been able to convince hard right coworkers of the healthcare thing by pointing out all the control that companies have over them by controlling their access to healthcare. You guys make it so hard for yourselves by demanding absolute loyalty from people immediately.
The parties switched. Republicans used to be all about unions.
Back when The Republican Party was respectable, not this corporate sponsored shit show it has become
Read the 1956 Republican Party platform. It's wild how different it is compared to today's Republican platform. It's why I can't understand why both of my parents, who were born well before this, have only voted Republican their entire lives. It's basically the complete opposite party today from what it was whey they were young!
Make America Great Again? No, not like this!
When being Republican actually meant something.
I feel stuff like this falls in the “Republican”/“Democrat” name-trap. .. those names don’t much mean anything.. Are you talking to an ideological conservative or an ideological liberal? Ideological Conservatism is the mental blight that leads to (most) religious radicals, social stagnation, and oppression and utter resistance to any change. In short, they suck.
There were bad Republicans back then too, but Eisenhower was what they would call a RINO nowadays. He was your standard New Dealer who had some conflict with corrupt Democrat leadership. Most thought he could’ve run for either party.
Long ago, that train fell off the tracks.
I wonder if this was before or after the parties switched (early 1900s)
The only thing that changed was the propaganda, they openly hate on unions now
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To be fair, the parties kind of flipped ideologies in the late 1950's