http://wiki.answers.com/Q/When_did_...me_democrats_and_democrats_became_republicans
In the course of our national historical development the United States of America has in many ways exhibited the diverse traits of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The struggle between our two "selves" came most profoundly into focus a mere 85 years after the founding of this democracy "conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal"-- when we found ourselves "engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure". This Civil War had been precipitated when the author of those words, Abraham Lincoln, was elected first Republican President of the United States in the fall of 1860, and the southern bloc of slave states, which voted primarily Democratic, refused to accept this result, and instead claimed the right to secede from the Union the following spring. South Carolina, convinced that "a lady's sewing thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed" in any armed conflict with the Union (James McPherson, 'Battle Cry of Freedom'), was not only the first southern state to secede, but the first to commence hostilities as well when it fired upon the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor after it refused to surrender, and the ensuing four years of Civil War would in fact claim nearly 700,000 lives on both sides.
Today the heartland of Lincoln's electoral base then-- the densely populated northeastern states which were to make up the bulk of the Union forces, also called the North in the war-- votes staunchly Democratic. Amazingly, the states which formed the Confederacy, also known in the war as the South, contain most of the hardcore base of the current GOP, which began as Lincoln's very own Republican Party. For a physical analogy to this astonishing "turn" of events, try this experiment-- hold a magnifying lens close to your eye and gaze through it at an object across the room. No amount of effort will put the object in focus, but at least it will appear right-side-up. Now slowly move the lens away from your eye, while keeping the same object in view, and suddenly you will lose sight of it in a chaos of blur and color; continue moving the lens until your arm is near fully extended, locate the object again if you can in the field of the lens, and somehow it has emerged from the confusion, somewhat larger and still unfocused but now has completely flipped upside down! And, with a good lens and a long enough arm, the inverted object can in fact be brought into clear focus, though it will remain upside down.
Just as there are complex laws of optics and mathematics to explain this physical phenomenon, so there is a complex, convoluted-- and indeed doubly convex-- history which explains how the Republicans became Democrats and the Democrats became Republicans between the end of the Civil War and the rise of the Civil Rights Movement a hundred years later in the 1950s and 60s. Remarkably, this process is still holding the rudder of our entire ship of state a full century and a half after that Civil War ended-- and that war was in large part itself a struggle over what this nation had really meant and stood for since the foundations of the Constitution in the late 18th century. So the only explanation which makes any sense at all as to why this astonishing and crucial cross-current of American history has been left so un-studied by our academics, so un-discussed on our street corners, and so un-taught in our schools is that ideologists in both parties have good reason to be embarrassed by certain aspects of this "flip-flop" and the process whereby the parties became what they are today. Nevertheless, this process will be seen as the crucial binding "thread", the unlocking "key", which must be understood if we are to follow the many political, economic, and social twists and turns which have occurred in this nation along the way.
What follows, therefore, is an attempt at as brief a synopsis as possible of that blurry, occasionally shameful and embarrassing, often confusing, certainly bipolar and perhaps even somewhat schizophrenic century of US history-- and to bring the present into clearer focus.
On the one hand-- by day if you will-- America was born a child of The Enlightenment, and was in some ways like a brilliant, experimental scientist. As Lincoln himself observed in the brief oratorial masterpiece which he delivered following the tide-turning Battle of Gettysburg during the war, our founders had conceived this nation and dedicated it to certain Enlightenment beliefs and propositions, and the Civil War in which such bloody battles as Gettysburg were being fought was "testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure". For the first time in history, the foundations had been laid for the development of modern liberal democracy-- "government of the people, by the people, and for the people", as Lincoln described it. Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are still among the finest examples of political theory ever composed. Contained therein are the premises that all men are to be treated equally before the law, and that under this law they are to be endowed with such inalienable rights as life (and all life entails as well as the right to the means of self defense), liberty (freedom of speech and of conscience, due process before juries of our peers, freedom from unwarranted search and seizure, habeas corpus), and the pursuit of happiness (as well as the privacy and freedom to pursue it)-- but without the right to usurp the rights of others.
By night, on the other hand, the United States sometimes more closely resembled the hideously transformed Mr. Hyde-- for centuries allowing a form of vile feudalism to fester here, which utilized other humans as chattel property and draft animals based solely on the color of their skin, while at the same time using gunpowder and steel to wage what can only be described as genocide against the original Stone Age hunter/gatherer inhabitants of this continent, who were themselves armed only with carved wooden shafts fitted with chipped points of flint. And besides that, from time to time we have waged war against other nations or propped-up/imposed oppressive and brutal homegrown dictators for such purposes as controlling or even annexing their national territory or resources for our own strategic use and profit, as well.
The fact that some of the men who wrote our founding documents also owned slaves and killed natives for their land, or that our subsequent practice has not always lived up to our lofty ideals, will forever remain as black spots on our nation's history. But before throwing dirt on those founding documents themselves and the promises they hold, remember-- the US was born out of European Feudalism, not set on Earth by some Federation of Intergalactic Peacelovers from the planet Utopia. The European conquest was never intended to be anything less than colonial rape of a new world which had at first been mistaken for the rich lands of China and India, for the benefit of kings, bishops, and lords in England, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Portugal. History is a real function of human lives, human actions, human experiences, and evolving material economic conditions-- not idealistic fantasy or romantic fiction. You cannot change the past, nor force the future to come any faster than it will. This nation was born a child of it's times-- and those times were bloody, wracked by absolutism, worldwide feudalism, and ideological dictatorships of every kind-- and all of these things were present here and at the same time opposed here, from the very beginning.
It would be hard to argue that any people, nation, or empire in the long history of Mankind can put itself forward as completely blameless and pure either in terms of how its "many" have been treated by its "few", or how any "outgroup" has been treated by its ruling "ingroup". This is an issue having to do with human nature which far exceeds the scope of the question at hand, the answering of which will already involve more side-issues than many will find themselves able to entertain. Suffice it to say that the United States has been no exception to this rule. Racial, sexual, political, and economic contradictions have existed-- and continue to exist-- side-by-side here as they have existed elsewhere in human societies, the only argument can be as to degree. But since by all accounts the US-- especially since our participation in the two great World Wars of the last century and the long Cold War with totalitarianism in Soviet Russia-- has historically put itself forward as the leader among democracies, we have been held to a higher standard, as indeed we should be.
And so it is, that as our nation now stands at the doorstep of a new century, one in which our species must face and defeat many great challenges if it is to remain viable, it is all the more necessary when sorting out these contradictions in our historical practice versus our political theory that the evolution of the political landscape in the United States be understood, because it is on the political battleground where the future of those theories will be won or lost.
There was a struggle here from the outset, in fact, between those who had a vision of a future without kings and bishops under a government of, by, and for the people and those who desired to maintain the status quo of lords and serfs (or masters and slaves) for the purpose of economic exploitation to benefit a hereditary ruling class. Americans still suffer from this struggle. Today the top 2% of the US population controls upwards of 80% of the national wealth, with the vast middle and working classes continuing a decades-long slide back in the direction of servitude since WWII as their incomes decline and they struggle to stay afloat in a shrinking service sector economy because family farming and domestic manufacturing no longer remain viable economic alternatives. But while our crimes and weaknesses cannot be denied nor excused, neither can our strengths and contributions for the good be dismissed. These contradictions in our national soul were not solved by our 'Revolution' and the outward break with monarchy. They came closer to being decided at great cost in our horrific and bloody 'Civil War'. Yet we fell short even there, when victory was so tantalizingly close, because the well-entrenched class culture of racial aristocracy, which we ignored and forgave in the aftermath of war instead of rooting it out once and for all, remained in the body of our nation like a cancer, where it has bided its time, metastasizing as cancer almost always does, ready to spring forth at the first opportunity with renewed fury and sicken the nation once again nearly unto death, as it is now most assuredly doing.
Today the southern-dominated, Christian fundamentalist-controlled Republican Party represents a rogue coalition of classists, religionists, corporate/collectivists, and racists operating under the guise of "returning" America to the state in which they claim it was always meant to have been-- just as antebellum southern Democrats repeatedly justified their "peculiar institution" of slavery as "the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization" (Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, Cornerstone Speech, 1861) during those years between the American Revolution and Lincoln's election when they did indeed control the reins of national government and those of half the states, but also the greater part of the economic base. The Republican Party represents now the same forces which the Confederacy represented then, which the Democrats represented then, and have in mind the same political, economic, and social goals-- the servitude of the many for the enrichment of the few. Much has been made in the last several election cycles about the growing divide between blue Democrats and red Republicans here in these United States. But now it will be seen that blue and red should actually be blue and grey, the colors of the respective uniforms worn by North and South in that bloody Civil War 150 years ago.
con't.
