What Does it Mean to Be a Democrat or a Republican?

Today we look at the creation and evolution of the two major parties in the US; the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. How did they come about? How did their ideals shift over the last 200+ years? And where might they go next? These episodes originally aired in 2020, and feature Keneshia Grant, George Will, Kathryn DePalo-Gould, Heather Wagner, Paddy Riley, and William Adler. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Nick Capodice?

  Well, September has come to a close. Spirit Halloweens have started to open and recently shuttered businesses. School is in full swing, which means that our back to school series is coming to a close. And next week, we're going to get back to some new Civics 101 episodes. So for our final salvo, it is the last of our show's most used in classrooms around the country. It's all about parties. Our two parties. We're talking the R and the D. What does it mean to be a Republican? Or a Democrat? How have those labels changed over the last 150 odd years? And what might they become in the next 100 years?

• 0:44Nick Capodice?

  It is a complete breakdown of the Republican and Democratic Parties today on Civics 101. Stick around.

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• 2:25Hannah McCarthy?

  You know, Nick, I was born on an election night.

• 2:30Nick Capodice?

  Oh, you don't say. You know, I haven't heard this before, Hannah. What a surprise.

• 2:36Hannah McCarthy?

  The 1990 Massachusetts gubernatorial election between Republican Bill Weld and Democrat John Silver.

• 2:43Speaker 05

  All right, Mr. Weld, the question now for Mr. Silver.

• 2:45Speaker 06

  Can you tell us, doctor, what is your program for controlling healthcare costs in this state?

• 2:50Speaker 05

  Yes, I'm highly concerned about that and have made a consistent and steady study of it since the campaign began. I think first and foremost, we've got to stop the pressure.

• 2:58Nick Capodice?

  You know, I wonder, Hannah, if maybe, just maybe, your mom ever tells the story like, you were born and they said, it's a girl, and who's the governor?

• 3:06Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay. All right. I've told you this before.

• 3:09Nick Capodice?

  Once or twice.

• 3:10Hannah McCarthy?

  But the reason I am telling all these people.

• 3:13Nick Capodice?

  These people? These people out there listening to us?

• 3:17Hannah McCarthy?

  Yes, these people, is that I grew up being told that I was born on the night of an election between two very strong, very smart, very engaging candidates, and/or so my mother claims. She would have been content no matter who won.

• 3:38Nick Capodice?

  I, I cannot imagine anyone saying such a thing today.

• 3:42Hannah McCarthy?

  Nor can I. So today, what happened to us? Whatever happened to, I'd take either candidate happily.

• 3:50Nick Capodice?

  Wait, seriously, are you going to actually answer that question in this episode?

• 3:53Hannah McCarthy?

  I am absolutely not. I also don't necessarily believe that that ever really existed. But I did think that today, we could do a little storytelling. Because I can tell you how the Republican and Democratic Parties became the Republican and Democratic Parties. And sometimes it helps us, and maybe it only helps us for the duration of a podcast. Sometimes it helps us like each other a little more when we know each other a little better. So this is Civics 101, and we're partying down with the Republicans and the Democrats. Hello. Hello, is this Mr. George Will? This is me. Hello, this is Hannah McCarthy at New Hampshire Public Radio. How are you doing this afternoon? I thrive.

• 4:37Hannah McCarthy?

  This episode first dropped, as they say, back in 2020.

• 4:41Nick Capodice?

  Oh, 2020, you remember that?

• 4:43Hannah McCarthy?

  I honestly am not sure how clearly I do, Nick, but I do remember this man, that's for sure. George Will, conservative political commentator, writer of columns and many books, most recently, The Conservative Sensibility.

• 5:02Nick Capodice?

  Right, the thing you need to know about George Will is that this lifelong Republican is not a Republican at the current time.

• 5:09Hannah McCarthy?

  He severed ties after the 2016 election. He is now unaffiliated.

• 5:13Speaker 06

  You know, leaving the Republican political party is not leaving a church or like leaving your family. It's not a wrench to your identity. Political parties are useful until they're not. And I decided the Republican Party wasn't useful to me anymore.

• 5:28Hannah McCarthy?

  George Will is discontented at the moment, which is kind of perfect because discontentment, the writing of a new political philosophy, the sloughing off of the old and no longer useful, that is where the Republican Party all started. And that is why it has changed over time.

• 5:48Speaker 06

  People ought to remember that the Republican Party started as a third party. Americans periodically say, gee, can't we break up the, the duopoly of our two-party system? Well, we did once, and that is the Whigs were there, and then suddenly they weren't there. They were replaced by this insurgent third party, the Republicans, founded in 1854 in Wisconsin.

• 6:09Hannah McCarthy?

  The Republican Party that started in Wisconsin in 1854, by the way, looked dramatically different from the party that George Will decided to leave back in 2016.

• 6:20Nick Capodice?

  Wait, before you take us to the establishment of the party, can we just talk a little bit about what the Republican Party platform is today?

• 6:31Hannah McCarthy?

  So the last time the party published an official platform was 2016. Official, meaning that it is drafted and voted on by elite party members and then unveiled and adopted during the party's respective national conventions.

• 6:45Nick Capodice?

  Wait, and the last time the Republican Party did this was 2016? It's 2023.

• 6:52Hannah McCarthy?

  It sure is. In 2020, the Republicans passed a resolution saying, look, it's 2020, you know, that 2020. And because of restrictions on gathering sizes, because not enough people could get together and vote on a new platform, and because, the party said, they quote, "would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the party's strong support for President Donald Trump and his administration," unquote, "among many other reasons. Any motion to amend the 2016 platform or adopt a new one would be ruled out of order."

• 7:27Nick Capodice?

  Wow, okay. So no new platform as of September 2023 or since 2016. Seven years.

• 7:36Hannah McCarthy?

  And keep in mind, either way, few members of the party outside of politicians and pundits actually read platforms. But lawmakers do tend to vote along the lines that platforms establish. So the Republican platform reflects social conservatism. It supports restrictions on abortion and immigration, but fewer restrictions on gun rights and corporations. It's big on states' rights as well as school choice. Fiscally, the GOP is all about low taxes and free market capitalism, which is, most basically, a system where the market regulates itself and government stays out of it.

• 8:19Nick Capodice?

  Socially conservative, generally opposed to government interference with economics and state lawmaking. And that's the brand of the GOP.

• 8:28Hannah McCarthy?

  Right.

• 8:29Nick Capodice?

  Wait, where, why do we call them the GOP?

• 8:31Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, yeah. GOP stands for Grand Old Party, which used to be a moniker used by the Democrats, but the Republicans kind of took it over following the Civil War and it just stuck.

• 8:46Nick Capodice?

  Okay, and despite them being the Grand Old Party, the Republican Party is in fact younger than the Democratic Party.

• 8:52Hannah McCarthy?

  It is, indeed. For a few decades in the 19th century, it was the Democrats and the Whigs. And they're holding down the fort, trading the presidency back and forth.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Well, the Republican Party, as we know it, formed in 1856, and it was the first time that the Republicans, as a party, had a national convention.

• 9:14Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Catherine DePalo-Gould. She's a professor of political science at Florida International University.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  And really, what had happened previous to this is the Democratic Party, created in 1828, really with the election of Andrew Jackson, had existed alongside the Whigs. And the Whig Party had competed with the Democrats up until about the 1850s.

• 9:38Hannah McCarthy?

  So mid 1850s, the Civil War is on the horizon.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  At that point, slavery became such a huge issue, and the Whig Party refused to take a stance. And by the 1850s, slavery wasn't something you could just sort of go meh. So what happened was, the Whigs split apart. And those that had supported slavery became Democrats, and those who wanted slavery abolished became the Republicans.

• 10:07Nick Capodice?

  So the Whig Party just vanishes?

• 10:09Hannah McCarthy?

  It couldn't agree on slavery, an issue powerful enough to tear the country apart. And it tore the Whigs apart as well. So the Republicans staked their platform mostly on being anti-slavery. Some of them are outright abolitionists, want to get rid of slavery entirely. Some just don't want it to expand west as the country expands west. There's a whiff of small government and states' rights in there. But fighting slavery is the great unifier for this young party. Their first presidential candidate, John C. Fremont, loses to James Buchanan. But their next candidate is Abraham Lincoln.

• 10:48Nick Capodice?

  So a completely brand new party manages somehow to elect the guy who's later considered the greatest president of all time.

• 10:56Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, you can't discount the fact that this party bursts onto the scene in what is essentially a perfect political storm. You've got the weakening of the Whigs, there's this division in the Democratic Party, and this really strong, simple platform of being the anti-slavery party.

• 11:16Nick Capodice?

  Okay. But after the war is done, then what are the Republicans? Once slavery is eradicated, what's their new platform?

• 11:27Hannah McCarthy?

  What is interesting is the Republican Party really became this sort of civil rights party, even during Reconstruction after the Civil War. They pushed different civil rights acts to protect these newly freed slaves from their state governments for violating their rights. For a while after the war, the Republican Party remained the party on the side of African-Americans. They pushed for civil rights legislation and they started the Freedmen's Bureau to protect formerly enslaved people in the South. But the country is changing, and so the Republican Party begins to change, too.

• 12:04Nick Capodice?

  The beginning of it, I guess, would be the 20th century, the early 20th century, and maybe around 1912 or so.

• 12:13Hannah McCarthy?

  This is William Adler, Associate Professor of Political Science at Northeastern Illinois University.

• 12:19Nick Capodice?

  And this is, actually, the 1912 presidential election turns into a three-way contest between Woodrow Wilson for the Democrats, William Howard Taft, who's the president at the time, the incumbent president of the Republican Party, and then Teddy Roosevelt, who had already been president under the Republican banner, comes back in 1912, decides he wants to try to get the nomination of the Republican Party again away from Taft. Very complicated and messy drama between the two former friends. Taft ends up getting the nomination, and Roosevelt and his supporters leave the Republican Party and form a new third party that they call the Progressive Party, sometimes called

• 13:01Nick Capodice?

  the Bull Moose Party because of the insignia of the party organization. Right. This is the election where Teddy Roosevelt spoils the Republican vote by running as a strong third-party candidate.

• 13:13Hannah McCarthy?

  You have the more progressive Republicans behind Teddy Roosevelt and the more conservative Republicans behind Taft. And the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, wins. Now, the Progressive Party does not stick around, but that divide between liberal Republicans and conservative Republicans does.

• 13:34Nick Capodice?

  Wait, so is this that moment that shifts the Republican Party towards conservatism?

• 13:40Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, it's certainly part of it. But the shift takes a really long time. For decades, the Republican Party dances and vacillates on social and economic issues.

• 13:51Nick Capodice?

  It's not clean because you still do have conservative Democrats representing the South, progressive Republicans representing New England and the Northeast. But it's sort of the first move towards that process. The presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt is also a step in that process.

• 14:09Hannah McCarthy?

  Remember, the Republican Party is the party of the North, ostensibly the party of African-American rights. But as the nation is becoming more urban and more industrialized, it's also the party of northern businessmen. And both parties are reassessing who it is they want to court as voters. And a few other complications arise between the 1912 election and the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  One of the important things that happens is the Great Depression. And in the Great Depression, the parties have to make a decision about how they are going to respond. The Republican Party suggests that it wants to respond by waiting it out. It'll be OK. We have kind of downticks in our economy all the time.

• 14:56Hannah McCarthy?

  This is Kenesha Grant, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University. She also happens to be a foremost scholar on the other major shift happening in the United States at the time, the Great Migration.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Black people are flooding into the cities. The Great Migration brings about 6.5 million black people from the South into the North.

• 15:16Hannah McCarthy?

  The Republican Party is focusing on business interests and toeing a different line than the Democrats in terms of the economy.

• 15:23Nick Capodice?

  Right. And all of these African-Americans who are moving into the North, I imagine their needs don't necessarily line up with the needs of comparatively prospering northern elites, right?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  The Republican Party and the people who are making decisions in the Republican Party are suggesting that the Great Depression is not actually that bad. You know, it'll pass, it'll be fine. But they're making those statements because they are not impacted in the same way. Like, they may, may, lose money, but their losses are not going to look anything like the losses of the person who has just moved to Philadelphia, for example.

• 15:58Nick Capodice?

  So is this when the African-American community started to vote more Democrat? When we elected FDR?

• 16:07Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, not the first time he was elected. Actually, the 1932 election was the last one in which a Republican candidate got the majority of African-American and person-of-color votes. Things began to change after that, but, you know, again, it was slow.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  This is not a neat transition. It's a messy transition. So whether Republicans support black political participation and how, they do, varies from place to place. So I went to school in Syracuse for grad school. In Syracuse, New York, black people participated as Republicans for a long time because the Republican Party was actually friendly to black interests. So we think about Chicago, we think about New York, we think about Democrats. But there are some pockets of places where the Republican Party does kind of do the civil rights thing. And black people are thoughtful enough to go to the party that best supports their interests at the time.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  But eventually, the things that are happening and percolating at the state and local level have to be reckoned with at the national level. And I think this is where we end up with a Republican Party that's making decisions about, not necessarily, we don't want to be the party of civil rights, but we really care about business interests.

• 17:24Nick Capodice?

  So if the GOP starts focusing less and less on civil rights, that leaves this huge issue and a voter base wide open.

• 17:32Hannah McCarthy?

  Right. This is all part of that transition. And then something big happens in the mid-20th century. Here's William Adler again.

• 17:41Nick Capodice?

  And then the big shift happens after the presidency of Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, really tied into the passage of the civil rights laws, which really marks the Democrats as the party of the liberal side. And gradually, the Republicans, even though they're split on the issue of civil rights, gradually, after that point, turn in a more conservative direction. Gradually, over the course of the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, all those Southern Democrats gradually become Republicans. And so what you have today, then, is a situation where those peoples, you know, the next generation down the line, have essentially flipped their partisan loyalties as a result.

• 18:26Hannah McCarthy?

  Many Republicans, including George Will, say that this change really happened with Barry Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964. Goldwater sought to refocus the party.

• 18:38Speaker 06

  Goldwater said in his book, The Conscience of a Conservative, that we had strayed from the idea of limited government, that the founders wanted it limited for a reason, that government should be limited in its power to allocate wealth and opportunity so that we don't politicize life promiscuously. So I think, beginning with Goldwater, we began to worry about this articulately, and we began to say that the Republican Party has to rethink its connection to the founding.

• 19:12Nick Capodice?

  So Goldwater's saying the Republican Party should get back to its roots, which is about small government and the free market.

• 19:19Hannah McCarthy?

  Yeah. He was very much opposed to government interference. He was all about states' rights. He was opposed to most social programs. A lot of moderates in the GOP thought that he was too far right. But he had passionate support among voters and really served to establish the Republican Party as the party of the right. Even that, though, took decades of ideological tug-of-war between conservative and liberal Republicans.

• 19:44Speaker 06

  That lasted until Ronald Reagan came in and the parties began to sort themselves out. They really are no longer liberal Republicans, and they're no longer conservative Democrats. Whether people are happy about this remains to be seen.

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• 21:25Hannah McCarthy?

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• 22:37Nick Capodice?

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• 24:08Nick Capodice?

  Hannah, we've been talking so much about strong but limited government and free-market capitalism, but we also have social conservatism, right? We haven't talked about the, quote, "Christian right." How, how did they become such a significant part of the Republican Party's voter base?

• 24:28Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, Reagan, I mean Reagan really firmly established what the Republican Party is. He played to both the capitalist leanings and the social conservative leanings of the voter base. George Will calls this the "theory of fusion," bringing together two separate but overlapping groups of people.

• 24:48Speaker 06

  Evangelical, Christian, social conservatives, concerned with abortion, pornography, and all the rest. And on the other side, the libertarian impulses of those who believe in free-market capitalism. And what Ronald Reagan did was successfully bring those two into the Republican tent. And keeping those two in equilibrium and in amicable relations has been a sometimes challenging project, but it has been the essence of Republican success since Reagan.

• 25:24Hannah McCarthy?

  Now, limited government, limited regulation, social conservatism, these are all still elements of the Republican Party. And George Will, he left the party because he felt that it had drifted away from its serious roots and rigorous questions about wealth, and the free market, and government efficiency, and healthcare. He felt that the party had become a cult of personality. And given the fact that George Will is seeking a party recommitted to what he perceives as certain ideological roots, I asked Catherine DePalo Gould what she thought the future of the GOP looked like, given its recent past.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  I mean, what it's going to look like, I can never predict. But that is something that parties change. And I think the winning candidate who has voters who, you know, vote in the Electoral College system and this candidate's ideas go forward, really influences the party's platform. Because especially in these days where we have ideologically divided parties, they're very polarized ideologically, which we haven't really seen, frankly, since, you know, the Federalists with Hamilton and Adams, and the Democratic-Republicans with Jefferson and Madison. It's fascinating that it's almost like, what is my team doing? And I'm going to go with my team. And, you know, that kind of partisanship is something,

• 26:50Speaker 02

  again, we've only seen a few times, I would argue, in US history.

• 26:55Nick Capodice?

  So parties change constantly. The Republican Party of 2020 was never going to look like the Republican Party of 1854. We shouldn't balk at change, Hannah. But also, the divide that's going on now, between the party we're talking about and the other guys, that's notable. Everyone out there who bemoans what they see as a fairly unique gaping chasm, they are not wrong.

• 27:22Hannah McCarthy?

  They are not wrong. And speaking of the other guys, Nick, shall we call across the chasm? Ask them how they got over there?

• 27:31Nick Capodice?

  I think I can do that, Hannah. Can I just go get a glass of water?

• 27:35Hannah McCarthy?

  Sure. Let's take a quick break.

• 27:42Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. Today, we are telling the fascinating tales of party origins. And I admittedly tend to put an outsized amount of weight in knowing one's history, but darn it all, I think it's important. So Nick, do you have the story of the Dems for us?

• 28:00Nick Capodice?

  Oh, do I ever. I want to start with a pretty well-established party trait here, Hannah. What color do you associate with the Republican Party?

• 28:11Hannah McCarthy?

  Do you mean red? Like, is this, is this a trick question? It's red.

• 28:14Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, it's not a trick question. And the Democratic Party?

• 28:16Hannah McCarthy?

  Blue.

• 28:17Nick Capodice?

  And do you know how that came to be?

• 28:19Hannah McCarthy?

  No. Have we not, like, always had that? Are you gonna tell me?

• 28:26Nick Capodice?

  Buckle up, buttercup. Here, I want to play you something. This is from election night, 1980.

• 28:34Speaker 05

  And so we will put on our map in blue. For those of you who are watching in color, we'll make Florida our projected winner for Reagan.

• 28:45Hannah McCarthy?

  Blue for Reagan? And this is 1980?

• 28:48Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, hold on, check this out. We color those in now. Red across the western rim, the Pacific rim of the United States, for Bill Clinton, and just a few blue spots on that map for George Bush. That was NBC coverage of the 1992 election. Democrats used to be red. And then they sort of switched. One station switched it to red for Republicans because they said we're coloring it red for Reagan. In the 1996 election, Clinton v. Dole, that was the first year that all three major networks had red for the GOP and blue for Democrats. But the terms, red state, blue state, they did not enter our common parlance until...

• 29:28Hannah McCarthy?

  It appears that there will be a recount in the state of Florida. They still need to wait for, what is it, overseas ballots? Bush v. Gore?

• 29:39Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, because of the closeness of that race, the ensuing recount, America had been staring at a red and blue map for days. I saw a Vox video about this, actually, and it said that David Letterman was one of the first. He made a joke about blue states and red states, and the term just stuck. Here's how it's gonna go. George W. Bush will be president for the red states.

• 30:02Nick Capodice?

  Al W. Gore will be president for the blue states. And that's such a... And now Democrats embrace their blue. They put it in their campaign logos. We have terms like "blue wave" versus "red tide." And that division, that color polarity, is really new.

• 30:16Hannah McCarthy?

  It's hard for me to wrap my mind around this idea that a party can rebrand itself that quickly, based on this arbitrary choice made by a news network.

• 30:27Nick Capodice?

  You think that's strange, Hannah? Hold on to your little purple hat.

• 30:36Nick Capodice?

  You have tasked me here with telling the story of the Democratic Party, which, you know, I did, back in 2020. And if we're going to talk about how the party has evolved over the years, we have to say what they're all about today. So let's go with their own words in their 2016 Democratic platform, the planks of which included addressing economic inequality, college debt, climate change, and access to healthcare. It is also today the party of inclusivity when it comes to issues like same-sex marriage, women's rights, and immigration.

• 31:10Hannah McCarthy?

  So let's go back now, the genesis of the Democratic Party. How did it start?

• 31:16Speaker 02

  The Democratic Party, to make things really clear, began, actually, as the Republican Party.

• 31:24Hannah McCarthy?

  Oh, come on.

• 31:24Nick Capodice?

  I know. I'm sorry. I know. This is Heather Wagner, by the way. She wrote the book "The History of the Democratic Party."

• 31:30Speaker 02

  So the Democratic Party was founded by Thomas Jefferson and other men like him who were dissatisfied with the direction the country was going under George Washington and John Adams. And they felt George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton were believers in a very strong central government.

• 31:53Nick Capodice?

  And Jefferson wants a smaller federal government with more power given to the states. And he is our first Democratic president, even though he was called, sorry again, a Republican. But pretty quickly, the name gets changed by his opponents, funnily enough.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  His critics said that he and his supporters were too much like the radical French,

• 32:19Speaker 02

  who had sparked the French Revolution and led to bloodshed and violence in France. And as a critique, they were called this group of Republicans "the Democratic Republicans." It was meant to be a diss.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Jefferson and his supporters decided to adopt this, almost as a point of honor, and called themselves "the Democratic Republicans."

• 32:44Nick Capodice?

  And this was the founding of what we know today as the Democratic Party.

• 32:48Hannah McCarthy?

  And how are their beliefs related to what we think of now when we think of Democrats?

• 32:53Nick Capodice?

  OK, here's Kenesha Grant. She is a professor of political science at Howard University.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  So when we think about the Democratic Party at that time, we don't think of it anything like the Democratic Party at this time. The Democratic Party at that time is liberal with a lowercase "l," as scholars say. And that means that they don't want to see the government being very active. The government should not be involved in your life telling you what to do. The government should just kind of be around to make sure that things don't fall apart, which is different from the party as we think about it today. We think about the Democratic Party today as one who is willing to step in to try to correct some of the perceived wrongs, they might say, in the economy or some of the perceived wrongs in the way that we treat humans and these other kinds of things.

• 33:41Hannah McCarthy?

  How does it change? Because that, to me, is like 180 degrees.

• 33:47Nick Capodice?

  All right, we'll get there. And that is Kenesha's particular bailiwick. But first, there is a big shift. And it starts with Andrew Jackson in 1829.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  By the time Andrew Jackson is president, he has dropped the Republican from his affiliation. So he identifies himself as a Democratic candidate. Andrew Jackson was a Southerner. He was a slave owner. He was a war hero. He championed, even though he was a wealthy landowner, he championed the idea of sort of the ordinary man, common man around. His presidency was when white men, I should say, were given the right to vote based on age as opposed to if you had property or paid a certain amount in land-owning taxes. So it was the evolution of voting rights

• 34:40Speaker 02

  towards white men over the age of 21 as opposed to landowners.

• 34:45Nick Capodice?

  Quick side note. Opponents of Jackson during the 1828 election called him "a word that means donkey." But it was an epithet that Jackson embraced. He even put images of donkeys on his campaign posters. And that is when that all started. And the party that went up against Jackson was the National Republican Party. But they were just as often known as the Anti-Jacksonians. They did not like what Jackson had done to the role of president.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  He took steps to concentrate power and to make sure that he was a very powerful executive. He had taken certain policies that really infringed on the rights of Native Americans and the rights of states. And this sort of sowed the seeds of what would gradually flare up into the start of the modern Republican Party and also the disagreements that flared out into the Civil War. So remember, part of the story is that the parties want to maintain cohesion. They understand that it's difficult for minor parties, third parties, or smaller parties

• 35:56Speaker 02

  to win the presidency. It's difficult for them to win Senate seats or seats in the House of Representatives and be appointed to Senate seats. And because they are worried about splitting their power, they are trying to do everything they can to remain together. And one of the things that splits them up more than anything else, kind of, I would say, the thing that stresses the party the most, is a conversation about slavery. And if we want to have a party that is unified in the North and in the South, we can't have this conversation about slavery because people in the North are going to disagree from people in the South. So we end up with these parties that exist in different ways because the one thing that they probably should be talking about,

• 36:41Speaker 02

  they are not talking about. So we end up with these cleavages, kind of for that reason, where we have a Northern Democratic Party that looks different from a Southern Democratic Party. But eventually, they do have that conversation. And we end up with a Republican Party that's more dominant in the North because they have had the conversation to come down on the side of black people, come down against slavery for various reasons, again. Not all of them on the up and up. Settle where we have a party, again, Republican Party in the North, a Democratic Party that's kind of dominant in the South. And then we have some kind of debate about who's going to win the West and what the farmers want and whether or not the parties will be willing to bend to the demands of the people who are in the West and who now have the ability to vote and influence politics, too.

• 37:27Hannah McCarthy?

  All right, now I want to learn about that shift. How does the party that is the party of slavery, the party of the Ku Klux Klan, become the party of the civil rights movement, the party that gives us our first African-American president?

• 37:45Speaker 02

  So if you want to sound really smart with your friends, if you, like, know a political scientist and you want to get their gears going, you just say "realignment." Because that is the one-word answer to that question. Realignment happens, and the parties change. And so the political scientists argue about how realignment happens. I'm in the camp of people who think realignment is a slow and gradual process. The short version is that America changes. So in the story that we've been telling up to this point, there are folks who live in the South. There are folks who live in the North. We don't yet have, like, a large wave of immigrants coming into the United States. So we get an industrial revolution. We get a world war. We get immigrants coming into the United States.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  And we don't yet in the nation have rules that are structured to prevent them from participating in the ways that we try to prevent them from participating now. And so it's kind of easier to get to citizenship, easier to get to participation in politics. And so a part of the answer about how the Democratic Party in particular becomes the party of the people as opposed to the party of the slave owners or the party of Southern business interests has to do with their decisions to or attempts to win elections, particularly, I would say, at the state and local level, and to speak to the needs of immigrants.

• 39:09Nick Capodice?

  Now, I do want to step in here and say that the North and the South are not just one unified thing. That's unfair. There were people who opposed slavery in the South, people who supported it in the North. Whites-only signs, other forms of segregation in schools, businesses, housing, those existed in the North as well as the South. And as Kenesha told me, African-American voters are a huge part of the story.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  It's not just immigrants who are flooding into the cities. Black people are flooding into the cities. The Great Migration brings about 6.5 million black people from the South into the North. And parties on the ground, local party leaders, mayors, aldermen, governors, have to contend with how they might get this block of voters to support them as well, which makes them take kind of steps towards civil rights that they might not otherwise take.

• 40:02Nick Capodice?

  And then we have the Great Depression in the 1930s. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his party, the Democrats, said, "People are suffering. We need to do something." And what they did was the New Deal. Relief, reform, recovery. This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms. What this did was further cement the notion that the Democratic Party is the party of big government spending on domestic programs and social welfare programs. But the civil rights movement, that initially was more allied by geography than by party. Almost 100% of Northern Democrats in Congress supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

• 40:46Nick Capodice?

  But so too did 85% of Northern Republicans. Just 9% of Southern Dems and zero Southern Republicans supported it in Congress. So here's Patty Riley. He's a professor of history and humanities at Reed College.

• 40:59Hannah McCarthy?

  But, I mean, I think the key thing is that the Democratic Party has just, it's no longer become possible for Southern white supremacists to remain in the party because the National Party has moved so hard on civil rights. I mean, that's Lyndon Johnson's famous line. "We lost the South for a generation." I mean, it turns out to be true. A generation and more at this point.

• 41:22Speaker 05

  I think effectively, the South kind of becomes up for grabs because they're not going to remain in the Democratic Party. So is someone going to capitalize on them? And the Republicans do. I mean, that's just what happens.

• 41:34Hannah McCarthy?

  I don't want to sound cynical here.

• 41:36Speaker 05

  Go ahead, go ahead.

• 41:37Hannah McCarthy?

  It just kind of sounds like a big part of the reason that the Democrats completely reversed their positions on just about everything was not purely because of ideals, but to court voters?

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I'm a political scientist, so I think everything is about political strategy, political expediency. But yes, I think that one of the kind of biggest, broadest ways of understanding party history is that parties are trying to, one, maintain themselves. And then parties as groups who are willing to court coalitions in order to keep or maintain power. Black people are here. They want to have some kind of intervention on civil rights. We're not opposed to that. That seems like it could be OK for us. We think that they would help us win these local and state elections. We think that because they live in these states with large Electoral College votes, they could help us win the presidential

• 42:36Speaker 02

  election. Let's test out a coalition between Black people and the Democratic Party. So it's the same kind of thing. Parties kind of moving and shape shifting as they encounter groups so that they can maintain dominance.

• 42:56Hannah McCarthy?

  So thinking about like the party today versus the party then, there's a lot of arguing going on on social media about the problematic history of both parties, right? And I'm just wondering, like, given how different the parties are today from how they were at their genesis, is that even fair to do?

• 43:16Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, people taking the Democratic Party to task for being the party of the KKK. I asked Patty about that specifically.

• 43:23Speaker 05

  That accusation, in some sense, it seems like it has power partly because maybe we are just not open in public enough about just how deep and powerful the history of white supremacy is in the United States, you know? It shouldn't be possible for us to continue to like romanticize the past. So, you know, those accusations seem to have power just because we need to be more open.

• 43:48Nick Capodice?

  So finally, with all that history under our belt, I asked Kenesha about the party going forward, if she thinks there might be another realignment.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  The Democratic Party is a big tent party. Keep these coalitions in mind. The Democratic Party has to please immigrants, Black people, gay people, progressive white people. Like, they just, it's just business interest for some people. Like, people, there's just so many groups of people they have to be worried about. When you think about the Democratic Party or any party, particularly in a national election, they have to get in a room and fight it out. A party platforms only so long. And, you know, not everybody's going to read it, but it matters a lot to the party and it matters a lot to the messaging of the party. And so how do I say I really care about urban development and I really don't

• 44:44Speaker 02

  like displacement of people as a result of gentrification? In some instances, that stuff is going to be in conflict. And so the Democratic Party has this difficult road to travel because they have to please all these different groups of people. And these different groups of people have different interests.

• 45:02Nick Capodice?

  So the Democratic Party has come a long way. Changing names, switching positions on the way to the blue party we think of today. And that's the thing. These parties are always changing. So it's really hard to say what a Democrat is because there's not one answer and it depends on a ton of other things.

• 45:25Nick Capodice?

  Well, we did it, Hannah. We laid down some historical truths.

• 45:29Hannah McCarthy?

  Yep.

• 45:31Nick Capodice?

  You think it'll help anybody?

• 45:33Hannah McCarthy?

  I think knowing where someone's from and what bananas stuff happened in their family and community over the years never hurts. So basically, yeah, I think we solved potentially destructive partisanship.

• 45:47Nick Capodice?

  You're dreaming, McCarthy.

• 45:55Nick Capodice?

  That's it for this one, and that's it for Back to School. We got some great new episodes coming your way next week. This episode was made by me, Nick Cappadicia, and Hannah McCarthy. We each did half of it. Civics 101's staff includes Rebecca Lavoy, Marina Henke, Taylor Quimby, and Dana Cataldo. Music in this episode from Blue Dot Sessions, Epidemic Sound, and Chris Sabriski. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 46:25Speaker 07

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