Okay folks, it’s time to clear up an issue of party identity.
The Republican and Democratic Parties have flipped over the years.
They did so in two stages, economic first, racial ideology second.
The Republican Party was formed before the Civil War as an abolitionist party. And the Democratic Party was the party of Andrew Jackson, and became the party of the Confederate South.
Today, the Democrats are removing Jackson from the $20 Bill and replacing him with a former slave; and the Republicans are defending that former slaveowner.
Jump to the 20th century.
President Theodore Roosevelt was a progressive Republican. He was the trust buster and anti-monopoly champion of the working man. He wanted to give them a Square Deal. When he decided not to run for a third term, he endorsed Taft, who won. But Taft wasn’t progressive enough, so Roosevelt formed a third party, called the Progressive Party (see a theme here?) It it often called the Bull Moose Party, after Teddy himself and an interesting story that digresses from the point of this post.
When he left the Republican Party he took most of the progressives with him. After that, the GOP was big-business conservative. But still home to many blacks and descendants of abolitionists.
The Democratic Party adopted many of the progressive platforms and picked up many of those who allied with Roosevelt. But they still had the white southern vote.
By this time Jim Crow laws had effectively nullified the southern black vote, and the Democratic Party was where you found the KKK and other white supremacist groups.
The Republicans held the Presidency from after Democrat (and racist and segregationist) Woodrow Wilson left office in 1921, until the stock market crash and onset of the Great Depression ushered in Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats. The Democratic Party won wide support throughout a country that wanted support for the working man and the poor. But southern whites were still working men, even if they were also racists. (Some, I’m sure were not.) So the white South remained loyal to the Democratic Party, while the north jumped aboard also.
This started to crack when Harry Truman began advancing a civil rights agenda. In 1948 Democratic Governor of South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, ran as President as candidate for the States Rights Democratic Party. They opposed civil rights.
Over the next couple of decades Democrats in the South, often called Dixiecrats, turned away from the party as it become more progressive on civil rights issues. During this time we had Republican Barry Goldwater win part of the core of the Deep South running against civil rights in 1964, and Alabama Governor and Democrat George Wallace form the American Independent Party to win much of the South in 1968, again, opposing civil rights.
By then the Democratic Party was fully advancing racial equality. The Republicans under Nixon campaigned for the southern votes by appealing to racial fears and prejudices.
This is where those parties are now. With The Republican Party supporting big business, Wall Street, and increasingly authoritarian government; They endorse Christian nationalism, and Euro-centric racial superiority. Though there are certainly large numbers who do not. They appeal to the idea that they are in favor of personal liberty.
And the Democratic Party is supporting racial, sexual, and gender equality, along with government focused social support programs such as health care. Though they have in recent decades also supported Wall Street, Banks, and Big Business, the trend is toward increased taxation and regulation of those entities, and more help and aid for working and poor peoples.
The Democratic Party is now progressive and multiracial, and the Republican Party is now conservative, and white. Though, of course, there are representatives of all people in both parties.
The ideological shift might best be expressed through two southern Senators. Robert Byrd and Strom Thurmond, both Southern Democrats. Both early opponents of integration and civil rights.
Byrd saw the error of his ways, and by the 1970s had publicly repudiated his previous stance on race, and remained in the Democratic Party;
Whereas Thurmond continued to oppose civil rights and integration, and left to join the Republican Party.
Thurmond is well known for the longest filibuster in Senate history when he stood and spoke for more than 24 hours in opposition to the Civil Rights Act.