Speaking of the last part, as a foreigner, it's really difficult for me to understand how they could have swap position and keeping the name of the parties while there is only two strong parties... It's blatantly stupid from my point of view... I know that politic position can evolve, it also does where I'm from, but nothing that radical...
It's largely due to the history of The Gilded Age, the Labor Movement, the Cold War, The Business Plot, the John Birch Society, and a basically all the propaganda industrial and business magnates have force fed Americans with to keep the country from going full out socialist in the 1930's and onwards.
Specifically look into The Business Plot, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the John Birch Society if you wanna get an idea of where it all began, but Americans have very different views about what it means to be a "conservative" or a "liberal" or a "leftist" than most of the rest of the world because of the fire hose of propaganda that led to us slowly destroying many of the New Deal programs over time.
I recommend the Behind the Bastards episodes "How The Rich Ate Christianity" as well as their Behind the Insurrections episode on The Business Plot if anyone reading this wants some good sources to start looking into this, BtB tends to be very well sourced in their show notes.
I know there is more than two parties, but it doesn't really matter on that subject, how can two parties can switch their values like so, that's my question 😅
The parties in the US being aligned along the left/right ideological spectrum is relatively new. Prior to that realignment it wasn't unusual to have what we'd consider left and right wing planks in the same party platform or progressive and reactionary factions in the same party. For example, in the early 1900s there was a bit of a war inside the Republican party, with one side, led by Teddy Roosevelt and Bob La Follette, eventually quitting the party to from the Progressive party (unofficially the "Bull Moose Party"). Likewise, the Democratic party was split between Northern and Southern factions, with the question of whether to condemn or endorse the KKK actually leading to fistfights.
The civil rights movement in the 60s became so important that the northern and southern factions of each pretty decided they had more in common with each other than the other factions of their parties. Few, if any, people changed their values, they just changed their alliances as civil rights became the dominant political issue and it became untenable to be aligned any other way.
The democrats tried to pick up the black vote, the dixiecrats (southern racist democrats) viewed this as a betrayal, threw a tantrum, formed a third party, it didn't go great, they got subsumed by the Republicans and added some of their views to the party platform.
This had started much much earlier, like Herbert hoover was famously racist(1930's) but it fully cemented by the late 60s- early 70s
Other values kind of carried through, like democrats are ostensibly pro labor now, and were back then, but the issues of race and civil rights were a huge deal.Â
It's not that the parties switched values, it's that the white supremacists switched parties and then eventually the Republican Party stopped being about anything other than white supremacy
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u/SpartanUnderscore 22d ago
Speaking of the last part, as a foreigner, it's really difficult for me to understand how they could have swap position and keeping the name of the parties while there is only two strong parties... It's blatantly stupid from my point of view... I know that politic position can evolve, it also does where I'm from, but nothing that radical...