If you prefer a YouTube video of this discussion, you can find it here.
The Democratic Party formed while George Washington was still president. If you saw Hamilton, you know that Initially it was called the Democratic Republicans. If you saw Hamilton, you also know Hamilton’s party was the liberal Federalist Party, and Jefferson’s party was the slave-owning Democratic Republican Party.
What you don’t know from the musical because it ends after Hamilton dies, is that after Hamilton died, his federalist party imploded. I won’t go into why because I promised to keep these short. But if you really want to know, I’ll tell you later. In a nutshell, the slaveowners won out here.
I’ll skip to the Civil War. The Democratic Republican Party was by then called simply the Democratic Party. It was the pro-slavery party of the Confederacy and agricultural America.
The Democrats wanted a limited federal government because they knew the North, if given the chance, would end slavery.
So Democrats vetoed federal funds for canals and highways and other infrastructure because they understood such infrastructure would strengthen the industrial north.
In 1855 the Republican Party, all called the “Freedom Party,” was born as an anti-slavery, pro-industry, pro-federal government party. It’s anti-slavery stance made it pro-labor and pro-Civil Rights. Well, as pro-labor as anyone was back then.
After the Civil War and the crushing defeat of the South, the Republicans had the power to pass pro-industry legislation including the building of infrastructure. Republicans, by the way, gave us our first income tax. As a result of the building of infrastructure, the industrial revolution boomed. Now the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful people were no longer plantation owners. Now they were railroad and business tycoons.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Republican Party split into two factions: The conservative pro-industry part and liberal civil rights part. By the 1920s, the pro-industry part took control. The Republicans dropped racial equality and labor issues from its platform and became the party of business.
Democratic Party base at the time consisted of Southern whites, agricultural America, and also factory workers.
Neither party championed racial equality.
This ushered in a long period of relative harmony between the parties—they respected each other’s “differences” because they weren’t that different. Both parties were basically ruled by white men.
President Harding (a Republican) in the 1920s deregulated business and repealed taxes. Money flowed into the pockets of business tycoons. Unregulated banks freely lent too much money. It was the age of business.
Meanwhile, laborers worked long hours in dangerous jobs at poverty wages.
Then, in 1929, it all came crashing down. First the market crashed and then came the Great Depression.
Enter, stage left, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his pro-labor New Deal.
Roosevelt drew blacks into the Democratic coalition, because they liked his pro-labor stance.
Republican, who used to want a strong federal government, now pushed back against FDR’s expansion of the federal government through the New Deal. They had the infrastructure they needed. Now they didn’t want labor rights.
The modern Civil Rights movement radically expanded the Federal government giving us the Voter Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.
Libertarians, who don’t want any government regulations, the White supremacists, and the party of business found themselves with a common goal: Dismantle the federal government. For some, the ideal is to return to the 1920s, the age of business. Others want to go back even farther.
White Evangelicals, who used to be mostly Democratic, had their own reasons for opposing strong federal government. They think that problem solving should be left to the church. White Evangelicals were also now drawn into the Republican Party.
Nixon and Reagan actively lured White Southerners and rural Democrats to the Republican Party. Nixon talked about being “tough on crime” (which was code for putting Black men in jail). Reagan talked about “welfare queens,” cynically playing into ugly stereotypes of Black women.
The divide stopped being North v. South and became urban v. rural.
And here we are.
Here’s the question.
Is America, for the first time our history, on the cusp of a true representative democracy with all adults included in “we the people?”
Or, are we on the verge of an autocratic takeover?
The answer is both, because one caused the other.
Because the modern Civil Rights movement and modern women’s rights movement brought us to the threshold of a true representative democracy, the reactionaries are pushing back hard.
I’ll wrap this one.
Next I plan to talk about what political psychologists call the authoritarian personality. I hope you’ll join me.
Sources:
- How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zblatt (2018)
- To Make Men Free, by Heather Cox Richardson (2014)
- Grand Old Party, by Lewis L. Gould (2003)
- The Democrats, from Jefferson to Clinton, by Robert Allen Rutland (1995)
- The bibliographies from the books in my Making of America series.