Why Democrats Are not the Party of Slavery and Republicans Are not the Party of Lincoln

The man I inherited it from was not the real Dread Pirate Roberts either — his name was Cumberbun. The real Roberts had been retired 15 years and was living like a king in Patagonia. Then he explained the name was the important for inspiring the necessary fear. You see, no one would surrender to the Dread Pirate Westley. So we sailed ashore, took on an entirely new crew and he stayed aboard for awhile as first mate, all the time calling me Roberts. Once the crew believed, he left the ship and I have been Roberts ever since. — Westley in The Princess Bride

House majority leader Kevin McCarthy has suggested that the Democratic Party should change its name because of its association with slavery. The same day, the Washington Times opinion section lead with the headline: Liberal media and Democrats fan the flames of civil rights ignorance: Party of slavery, Jim Crow, Ku Klux Klan and segregation has a short memory. The study of history, it seems, is making a comeback.

This is a rhetorical move that has become common in the Trump Era: the argument that African-Americans should give their allegiance to the Republican Party that abolished slavery and not to the Democratic Party that supported it. This is a very bad argument. It fundamentally ignores the way that both political parties and history actually work.

Historically speaking, the terms “Republican” and “Democrat” represent no core ideologies or political principles. They are brand names, like “Jell-O” or “the Dread Pirate Roberts.” Over the years, they have been used by different organizations with different goals, principles, and characteristics. Today’s Republicans and Democrats have very little in common with Democrats and Republicans in 1860, or even in 1936. It makes no sense for anyone to give credit, or blame, to any modern party for anything that happened in the Civil War.

To understand this, we have to understand that American History has had at least six separate party systems, or periods in which two sets of interests and concerns coalesced into two relatively stable political parties. Scholars differ on exactly when these systems began and ended, but there is broad consensus that the six party systems include the following:

• 1789–1820: The Federalist Era: America’s Founders were universally against political parties, or “factions,” but that didn’t stop them from forming them as soon as the first president was inaugurated. During Washington’s first term, two factions developed around his two most famous cabinet members. Those who supported Alexander Hamilton called themselves “Federalists,” and those who supported Thomas Jefferson called themselves “Republicans. We can see some features of Modern Democrats and Republicans in both of these factions. Like Modern Republicans, the Federalists favored the interests of business, expansion of the military, and a global economy; but they also favored high taxes, public works projects, and a strong federal government. Jefferson and the Republicans resemble today’s Democrats in some ways: they favored unlimited immigration, secular government, and decreased military spending; but they also favored strong states’ rights and limited government spending — and they despised the very idea of taxation.
• 1828–1856: Whigs and Democratic-Republicans: After Washington and Adams, the Federalists never won another presidential election, and, over time, nearly everybody in the country became a Republican. James Monroe ran unopposed for his second presidential term, and the press declared an “Era of Good Feelings.” But it didn’t last. Once everybody became a Republican, the Republicans divided into two parties: the Democratic-Republicans remained true to Jeffersonian principles of small government and state sovereignty. The National-Republicans argued that the government should spend money building infrastructure: banks, roads, bridges, etc. They saw these things as necessary to the prosperity of the nation. The Democratic-Republicans became simply the Democrats. The National Republicans adopted the nickname “Whigs” — originally the name of the British anti-Monarchy party — in order to portray Andrew Jackson as a would-be King.
• 1860–1896: Slavery and the Civil War: For a generation, both the Democrats and the Whigs were national parties. There were pro-Slavery Southerners and anti-Slavery Northerners in both parties. The main party fault line was infrastructure spending, not slavery. But this became untenable when the issue of Slavery arose as the most important issue in the country. In 1856, the Whig party broke up and former Whigs joined with anti-Slavery Democrats to form a new Republican Party (picking up on an earlier brand name that had been discarded). By 1860, the Republican Party was the anti-Slavery, pro-Union party — and these were the only issues that mattered. The Democratic Party fractured into three parties in the 1860 election, and, after Lincoln won, seven states seceded before he took office (four more joined after he took over). After the War, Northern Republicans dominated the national government for most of the rest of the century, with only Grover Cleveland’s bifurcated presidency intervening.
• 1900–1932: The Progressive Era and the Great Depression: A major recession, bordering on a depression, hit the United States in 1893 and dramatically altered the political landscape. Unemployment was high, and the money supply tightened, leading to deflation that put a huge burden on farmers, whose rents remained the same while the prices for produce plummeted. The Progressive Party became a major player in Western states and, in 1896, William Jennings Bryan ran as both the Progressive and the Democratic candidate. He lost to William McKinley, but this election realigned the political spectrum from a North-South to an East-West axis. Republicans at the time largely supported financial interests in the more established East, while Democrats aligned with the newer Western states and agrarian interests. Bryan’s Progressive movement was based on eliminating the gold standard (thereby loosening the money supply and allowing modest inflation). He did not win that fight, but the Progressive movement in the early 20th century won a number of victories, including four Constitutional amendments that re-shaped the way that the federal government interacted with the people.
• 1936–1994: The Great Accommodation: The next big financial crisis — the Great Depression — caused the next big political realignment. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt swept into power in a landslide by combining two very different constituencies: Eastern and Western Democrats, who were still largely populist and progressive, and Southern Democrats, who still hated Republicans, but who had developed a restrictive, racist regime to prevent African-Americans from voting or participating in government and society. This is the time that most people refer to when they talk about “civility” in politics. There were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, and people in Congress got along with each other and treated each other with respect. However, this civility came at a huge price. In order to enact a progressive political agenda, Roosevelt’s Democratic Party had to turn a blind eye to segregation. The Southern Democrats were one-issue voters, and the one issue was segregation. As long as Northern Democrats were willing to let them maintain an oppressive, racist regime in their own states, they would happily vote for New Deal economic programs and support the national party on any other issue. This worked until the progressive issue became Civil Rights.
• 1994–2020: Where We Are Now: When the Democratic Party under Kennedy and Johnson took on the project of Civil Rights reform, Southern Democrats started to abandon them — and the Republicans created the infamous Southern Strategy designed to break the Democratic hold on the South. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Southerners regularly supported Republican presidential candidates. And, in the Congressional election of 1994, the Southern Democratic block collapsed, and the South became fervently and reliably Republican. Since then, the parties have continued to sort, with Republicans getting more conservative and Democrats getting more liberal, leading to the Red-Blue maps that we now see showing solid Republican support throughout the South and the Mountain West, and solid Democratic support on the coasts and in most large metropolitan areas.

Where do we go now? There are some signs that 2020 will be a realigning election, with Republicans under Trump becoming the populist party and Democrats under Biden becoming the establishment party. That would be an almost complete reversal from the McKinley-Bryan dynamic in 1896, but that’s how parties work across historical time spans.

But let’s be very clear: whatever Democrats and Republicans eventually become, they will be different things than the parties of Lincoln, Douglas, and Calhoun. We are dealing with a very different set of issues than they were, and the parties have divided up the available ideological landscape in very different ways. The fact that the names remain the same has everything to do with branding and nothing to do with any kind of coherent ideology that anybody alive can take the credit, or the blame, for having held in the past.