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Also, the Whigs couldn't apply their founding principles to new circumstances because the Whigs didn't have any founding principles. There were principled Whigs and a Whig agenda, but there was no agreed set of Whig principles. eg, the party's embarrassed incoherence on slavery.
Republicans are different. Unlike the Whigs, unlike the Federalists, unlike the Democrats, Republicans were explicitly founded around a set of ideas rather than just an agenda or a collection of interest groups. Those ideas have both defined & disciplined the party for 160 years.
Nobody who knows the history of the Republican Party would claim that it has always been 100% faithful to its founding principles, or that it has been immune to catering to its constituent groups or pandering to baser voter sentiment. But the gravitational force of ideas matters.
The Democratic Party has veered all over the place in terms of ideology & which voters' resentments & rent-seeking it is catering to at any given time or place. But its history as a collection of interest groups nakedly pursuing their own narrow agendas is the real continuity.
Republican history is, by contrast, far more consistent over time back to the 1850s - in outlook, culture, and temperament as well as ideas - than is typically acknowledged. What is portrayed as Republican change is often simply the contrast presented by Democratic shifts.
The challenge in the Trump era is preserving the things that kept the Republican Party constrained by, even inspired by, its founding principles for a century and a half. Elements like Trump were there from the start, but the party's never been led by them.
Anybody who tells you that Lincoln's party would not have tolerated Know-Nothing nativists in its ranks is historically illiterate. The party forged a majority by doing literally that. Lincoln despised the Know-Nothings, but kept his mouth shut, had an ex-Know-Nothing as his AG.
The early Republicans believed in the Lockean right to keep the fruits of one's own labors, & that the Founding principles applied to all Americans. They were also American nationalists, Christian moralists, & riven by ferocious internal quarrels over immigration & nativism.
Lincoln was partly concern-trolling in claiming the label of "conservative," which in his era was more associated with European throne-and-altar reactionaries. But he was sincere in arguing that Burkean fealty to the tried & familiar was in the Republican bloodstream from Day 1.
And Lincoln was an originalist. His critique of Dred Scott was not that Taney shouldn't have looked to original meaning in deciding who could be a citizen, but that Taney had his history wrong: black men had fought in the Revolution, voted to ratify the Constitution.
But the same Republicans who were all but unanimous in wanting the 14th Amendment to overrule Dred Scott & secure citizenship to black Americans, were also divided over whether to extend that citizenship to, say, Chinese immigrants, & mostly opposed it for the Plains Indians.
Grant's record on moral & religious issues reflected the Midwestern Protestant moralism of his party's culture, the tensions it created with the party's universal principles, & how that moralism sometimes dovetailed with nativism. 
The small-businessman/self-employed-farmer/tradesman as icon, central to Lincoln's concept of a 'right to rise' in the world, runs as a straight line through the Homestead Act, McKinley, Coolidge, Reagan, even the 2012 Romney campaign's reaction to "you didn't build that."
Progressivism ran its course within the GOP under TR & Taft, even re-emerged as a kind of managerial ethos (Hoover, Ike, Romney). But it never attained the kind of radicalism as in the Democratic Party of Woodrow Wilson & his heirs. TR went radical only when he left in 1912.
The progressive Republicanism of the TR/Taft era, which John McCain much admired, was ultimately a small-businessman rebellion against big-business gigantism. A truly anti-business posture could not gain traction in the Republican Party of any era.
I would not go that far, but the combination of pro-business & nationalist elements in the GOP have been pro-tariff at least as often as they've been pro-free-trade. The Reagan-Bush-Bush era was the high watermark of free trade in the GOP.
Another area where the GOP has had internal tensions from the outset: Lincoln was a law-and-order guy, horrified by mobs & John Brown-style vigilantes. He was like John Adams - not Sam Adams. But the libertarian, my-land-my-gun ethos was vibrant in Bleeding Kansas.
Republicans were never really averse, even in Lincoln & Grant's day, to pandering to a variety of deplorable sentiments. But their inability to compete with Democrats on naked identity politics & urban machinery has likewise been a constant for generations.
The continuity between the Republicans' inability to crack the D unity of white Southerners between 1850s-1920s & their inabillity to crack the D unity of African-Americans in recent decades is likewise wired into the two parties' styles of addressing identity-politics issues.
"The parties flipped" is a misleading shorthand: the Democrats gradually stopped pandering to a group that was leaving the party, & started pandering to a group that was entering, while the GOP in both cases was playing catch-up. Dems didn't change tactics, just targets.
Has the influx of ex-Democrats, or more typically the children of Democrats, in the South changed the Republican Party? Sure. But the sources of continuity remain. And even Trump has more in common with the Know-Nothings, John Bell, or Andrew Johnson than he does w/1850s Dems.
Republican growth in the South didn't flip on a dime. It started rumbling in 1928 (Al Smith) & 1938 (Court-packing, 2d New Deal), grew organically outward from ancestral Republican sectors of VA, TN, TX, wasn't really completed until this decade. 1st GOP POTUS to crack it? Ike.
Some Republicans have been more welcoming to immigration than others, some did better in the Northeast. Some immigrant groups were GOP. But broadly speaking, since the mid-19th century the Democrats & not the Rs have been the party of the big cities & recent arrivals.
The fact that Democrats were simultaneously the party of big, urban machines full of immigrants *and* the party of slave plantations only makes sense once you accept the transactional rather than principled nature of the D party. The same dynamic explains Joe Biden in the 1970s.
Fernando Wood, the Tammany Hall Democrat Mayor of New York, wanted NYC to secede from the Union with the slave states, & opposed the 13th Amendment. Upstate New York was full of abolitionist Republicans like William Seward; the City remained Democratic.
Given the longstanding nature of each of the 2 parties, the answer today for frustrated Republicans is not to join the Democrats, who will never be the party that stands for the general interest or the classical liberal, Lockean principles of the American Founding.
The answer, instead, is to stay and fight for the long, proud legacy of those principle in the Republican Party. Every great Republican leader had to accept compromises of those principles & adapt them to new times, but we can always return to them. They haven't left, even now.
I have a second set of thoughts to maybe append here later, but I'll leave off here for now. Keep the faith, and never let anybody tell you it's not a faith worth keeping.
So far, an hour later, this is only one Tweet, but it seems likely from the framing of the initial Tweet that it's going to completely ignore everything I actually wrote, from the broad themes to the specific examples to the numerous caveats.
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.
I'll use R vote share rather than 2-party vote share for these purposes; both have their uses, but the challenge for Republicans for years was to get a hearing with white Southerners, even when they started abandoning Ds.
"Deep South"=FL/GA/AL/MS/LA
"Border South"=TX/TN/VA/AR
"Border States"=MD/DE/MO/KY/WV.
The two latter had mostly caught up to the nation in R vote share by Ike's time. The Border South states shifted sharply R between 1940-52.
"Border South"=TX/TN/VA/AR
"Border States"=MD/DE/MO/KY/WV.
The two latter had mostly caught up to the nation in R vote share by Ike's time. The Border South states shifted sharply R between 1940-52.
The Deep South was also trending more R by the mid-1940s, but its wild swings from 1964-80 are (unlike the Border South states) more directly attributable to the Dixiecrat 3d party vote & the Southern swing back to Carter. In 1980, the Deep South was still less R than the USA.
This, too, is an incomplete picture, however; you have to drill into downticket races like the House & state legislatures to see the long trajectory of Republicans breaking through with white Southerners, much of which was generational & tracked the region's economic progress.
I've written at more length some years ago about the seductive oversimplicity of the "Southern Strategy" mythos, which simply assumes that there are no such thing as national security issues, economic issues, or non-racial social issues. baseballcrank.com/archives2/2012…
The behavior of the various Dixiecrat politicians after 1965-68 illustrates my view of the continuities of the two parties' patterns of behavior. Dixiecrats were, as a group, pandering populists. You'd expect their behavior to track what they believed would win them votes.
Some of the Dixiecrats who stayed in the D party - the guys Biden was buddy-up with in the 70s - stayed mostly unrepentant, yet won plenty of black votes. Why? Because Democrats are a coalition party. Go back & read some of the NAACP statements in that era.
Others who stayed in the D tent, like Wallace & Byrd, made a bigger show of 'changing'. Maybe that was sincere, maybe it wasn't, but it tended to coincide with the votes they needed to chase.
Then there's guys like Strom Thurmond, who switched parties. Thurmond was, as a D, one of the nation's loudest pro-segregation voices. As an R, he mostly abandoned the kind of pro-segregation rhetoric & stances he used as a D. But neither did he do a Wallace-style apologia.
Thurmond after switching parties tended to focus on national security issues & the courts, the kinds of things that would get him 'New South' Republican votes. Some of those voters had retrograde views on race, some didn't. But all expected a Republican to talk like a Republican.
In that sense, the fact that racial appeals - which, again, some Republicans in the South have engaged in - typically had to be 'coded' when used by Republicans, where the very same people had done so openly as Democrats, reflects the gravitational pull of the two party styles.
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.
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.
Sorry, the graph includes SC in the Deep South line, NC in the Border South line. Forgot to add those to the Tweet.
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 inaugural
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.
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.
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.
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.
Offer better leadership to today's Republican voters.
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.
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.
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
BTW, this is still true
