I've been told that the modern Democrat party switched platforms with Republicans. That doesn't make sense to me. Can somebody explain it to me? Is it even true?
>>16834991It's a meme the modern day DNC invented to pretend the party had nothing to do with slavery or Jim Crow. Pay it no attention.
>>16834991I don't think they really switched platforms... in some ways both their platforms changed. Political parties have always been quite weak and loosey-goosey in the U.S. too -- by design. The Founding Fathers largely saw them as cancerous and the Constitution had nothing to say about them. From the perspective of many other countries, American political parties don't really exist. They developed anyways but their relationship to the state is still unclear. They're private organizations that have no membership lists, their platforms are largely built after their candidates are nominated, and the parties themselves have very little control over the nomination process. One way to think about this (although it's an oversimplification) is to think of American politics as less about parties, as tribal coalitions. Like, liberal northern whites (many of them of German and Scandinavian descent) and southern blacks which was the old Republican Party. If you look at Gretchen Whitmer for example, her name is Anglicized from the German Wittmeyer. That coalition is basically the Democrats now. Okay, Trump is of German ancestry as well, but you'll also see a lot of Italian names in the Republican Party like Giuliani and DeSantis, like an alliance between Scots-Irish whites in the south and Catholic "ethnic" whites in the north.
>During the Gilded Age, the Democratic Party had begun to separate into two groups. The conservative northern "Bourbon Democrats", along with some allies in the South, sought to limit the size and power of the federal government. Another group of Democrats, drawing its membership largely from the agrarian movements of the South and West, favored greater federal intervention to help farmers, regulate railroads, and limit the power of large corporations.[30] Bryan became affiliated with the latter group and advocated for the free coinage of silver ("free silver") and the establishment of a progressive federal income tax. That endeared him to many reformers, but Bryan's call for free silver cost him the support of Morton and some other conservative Nebraska Democrats.[31] Free silver advocates were opposed by banks and bondholders who feared the effects of inflation.[32]
>>16834991No. The economics of slavery are identical to illegal immigration so the working class whites who hate competeing with cheap imported labour and are in support of protective tariffs to promote industry have been voting for the exact same party since the inception of the Republican Party. There was even the Xenophobic Know Nothings who formed a part off their coalition although the party was embarassed about them even in 1860 so the support was on the down low.What they are trying to acheive by saying the parties switched is argue that the Republicans were "unracist" but then became the "racists" by "courting the racists" but the truth is the Republicans were always "racist" in their own unique way and nothing changed in that regard. Part of the reason for doing this is if "le racists" all switched over to the Republicans that means the Democrats are not le racists anymore, but this is based on a fundamental misunderstanding that "racism" is a singular idea where a bunch of people fester together spreading the racism, but the reality is that both parties were racist in fundamentally different ways and at most you could say is that the Democrats have gone to great lengths to purge the particular kind of racist that used to vote for Democrats, and you could argue those Democrat voting racists now vote Republican making the Republicans doubly racist, but even if that is the case Trump is NOT an expression of the Democrat kind of racism because his supporters are firmly racists of the Republican variety. If there are two groups of racists now occupying the Republican party, the Democrat racists and the Republican racists, this alliance is unnaturally as a racist House Divided cannot stand and a political party cannot live on racism alone. The racism could only have ever be ancillary to a larger platform and cannot be platform by itself. The two groups of racists even if they shared a party must fight one another for dominance as they are incompatible.
