Given all the discussions focused around American political parties and what ideology they should or shouldn't have (what makes a "real" Republican seems to come up a lot, for one), i'll endeavor to shed a bit of light on what has driven the divide in American politics over the years
In the beginning, there were two parties: The Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists. In simplest terms, they were the Small Government party, the party that gave us the Bill of Rights, and the big government party, the party that gave us the rest of the Constitution. There was another important point: The Democratic-Republicans had their support centered primarily in landholding farmers, while Federalists were centered in the industrial (as primitive as American industry was at the time) and trade points.
Farmer versus Not Farmer was the basis for American politics from that point forward, up until the 1890s or so, even as the ideological basis of the parties changed. For the successor to the Democratic-Republicans was the Democrats, who, led by Jackson, did all sorts of delightful things in defiance of States' Rights and the Constitution in general, different from the Bill of Rights-focused Democratic-Republicans. The National Republicans, a shortlived party, were the first successors of the Federalists, and centered on the power of Yankee merchants.
The Democratic party was the Agricultural party, and this explains the ideological evolution of the Democrats ever since:
In Jackson's day, they were populist (majoritarian) since the vast majority of the newly-enfranchised voters (white men, regardless of landholding status) were farmers.
The Democrats supported the war with Mexico, because it would open up the West, for who? Pioneer farmers
The Democrats supported the agriculturally-founded Slave states when the divide between the South's colonial-agricultural lifestyle and growing industrialism in the North became too severe
The Democrats were thus very weak from after the Civil War and up until the 1890s, as Industry began to really take off.
In the 1890s, there was a bit of a resurgence with the Populists, but the Democratic base began to broaden. The Populist roots of the Democratic party meant that they were the party that the poor, underprivileged immigrants often migrated to. Irish-Americans supported the Democrats even during the civil-war, for instance (though not the pro-secession wing of the party). As the urban poor began to balloon and the Farmer began to decline in his status and prestige in the country, with even the Southern Gentleman, for all his wealth, not having much of a say on the national arena, and so an odd alliance of the "Have-nots" was forged, with poor immigrants, poor farmers, and the bastions of the racist Old South all coming together to make the Democrats from the 1890s until about the 1940s.
In the 1940s a migration began. The liberal policies of Franklin Roosevelt, which were founded in his efforts to alleviate the suffering of the "Have-not" political base of the party, began to become the gospel of the party itself. The Welfare State which people saw as saving so many from the grasp of the Great Depression became a good thing, worthy of support, and so what we see as modern Liberalism reached into the party, and Social Liberal ideals started to take root as well as the Keynesian/quasi-Socialist ideals, and that was how the Democrats eventually latched onto Civil Rights, which had long been a Republican plank, causing the last schism with the Old South, and the party liberalized continuously to what we find today.
The National Republicans, from their power base among the Yankees, evolved into the Whigs, a party more broadly concerned with economic modernization and the beginnings of industrialization from the 1830s to the early 1850s. The Whigs were a more truly national party instead of the National Republicans, which were almost a strictly New England phenomenon.
The broadly economically-oriented Whigs collapsed under the weight of Slavery, as the economic power-players that drove the Whigs could not decide whether slavery was a good idea economically, or whether it was a good idea morally. There were abolitionists in both parties at the time,
but with the Whigs collapsing over the slavery question, anti-slavery groups, who were disenfranchised in the Democrats because of the party's agricultural orientation, and the anti-slavery elements of the old Whigs, came together to make the Republicans, who were a liberal party in the more European sense, committed to ending slavery not just for moral reasons, but for economic ones. Thus was the party of Lincoln, which was not necessarily pro-black, but even the Republicans who weren't concerned over the plight of the slaves at least liked to see America advance economicaly.
With the slavery question resolved, the liberal spirit faded out of the Republicans and they went on to focus entirely on industrialization. They were the party of tariffs, beliving what was good for business was good for the country. They were still oriented with modernization and the idea of Progress, however (because Industry, science, and Progress were all aligned together) which cultivated a Progressive wing that came to the fore with Theodore Roosevelt, but later faded as Woodrow Wilson incorporated certain Progressive ideals with his failed push to get America in on the League of Nations.
In the 1920s, the Republicans thus reverted to their focus on being a party of the "Haves" as opposed to the "Have nots" of the Democrats, the party of the upwardly-mobile, so not only of the wealthy or of the middle class, but of certain elements of the industrial underclass, whose lives were being enriched by enterprise.
The Republicans thus stood opposed to the Keynesian/socialist efforts of Franklin Roosevelt, who they saw as punishing the rich and dismantling free enterprise, and this was when the party began to gravitate towards Conservatism. The Republicans, who had favored the upper class, became the picture of Norman Rockwell's America, white-bread, prosperous suburbia, and this is how they won over the farmers, the white Southerners, Christians, and others, as the industrial class that the Republicans had long favored finally became the "establishment."
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
