(07-09-2024, 04:48 PM)DISRAELI Wrote: ...
Now it seems to me, as an outsider with historical interests, that the Democrat and Republican labels have had a similar evolution, complictaed by sectionalism. At the time of the Civil War, the "establishment" was the slave-owning power, and the Republican party was formed to combine everybody else in opposition, including northern radicals and northern businessmen and the West, leaving the South to be the stronghold of the Democrats. After the Civil War, the business class became the new establishment, enabling the Democrats to rebuild as a coalition of everybody else, including radical intellectuals and the downtrodden masses in general, but still including the South. As late as the Sixties, it was still being taken for granted that the South was solid Democrat. It looks as though the rebellion of Governor George Wallace marked the break-up of that connection on the segregation issue, so that the South was turning into solid Republican from Reagan onwards.
I offer the following descrption of the post-war left-wing party which might apply in both countries. It is, essentially, a party of radical intellectuals trying to mobilise the vote of the downtrodden masses. At the same time, they have in effect become the establishment, working their way into the media, the civil service, the church, and thus controlling what is official public opinion. They have already satisfied most of the political needs of the working-class with earlier legislation (Attlee), with the accidental result that they now have little more to offer the working-class, and can attain power again only when the Conservative party falls down in some way (Wilson, Blair, Starmer; Carter, Clinton). The solution encouraged by the radical intellectuals is to extend the definition of "downtrodden masses", to include groups with whom the working-class might have little sympathy.
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Thank you for the explanation. It did help to set things in order in my mind.
Your assessment of American politics is pretty close, although I would submit that a large part of the US Civil War era politics hinged upon economic considerations - the North had a largely industrial-based economy while the South had a largely agrarian-based economy, which produced sectional and factional differences.
The Republican party was initially formed around a surface opposition to southern slavery, which was the basis for their agrarian economy, mostly cotton. The Southern Democrats saw that development as a direct threat to their own economy. Both tried to either seize or retain control of the national government in order to promote their own sectional interests and economy. For their part, the Northern faction instituted taxes and tariffs on the southern agrarian economy and cotton exports. That was solely for the benefit of Northern industrialization, bleeding off Southern money and "redistributing" it to benefit growing Norther industries. The South, in reaction, broke away and formed their own nation in order to protect their own financial interests.
The Northern interests saw the breakaway of the Southern states into their own nation as a direct threat to Northern economic interests and political power, and moved to prevent that dissolution. For the North, the issue of slavery was a ready-made wedge issue. It's not so much that those in power actually cared about the issue of slavery as it was that they saw it as a means of firing up their own base using that as an emotional issue, much like the modern-day liberals are using racial issues and sexual orientation issues as a means to fire up their own base. It's not that they actually care about those people so much as they see it as a means of firing up their political base and retaining or seizing power by using it as a wedge issue, and the people themselves as mere pawns.
On the part of the Southern factions, they saw the tariffs imposed as a power-seizure and a direct threat to their own economy, and in order to thwart that threat, broke away and formed their own nation. It was like a snake trying to swallow itself - each reaction fed into the resolve of the other faction until a point was reached that there was nothing to be done for it but throw a war.
So the North rallied around "slavery" as the issue while the South rallied around "states rights" as the issue, both of which notions were gross over-simplifications in order to hold the public mind, which has a notoriously short attention span and needs things simplified for it to be digestible. That is why we see the same justifications still being played out today among the various factions... but as has been observed, the victors write history, and that is what gives the most weight to the idea that the Civil War was all about slavery even into the modern day. That is the entrenched Northern view.
In the run-up to the American Civil War, the Republicans billed themselves as "Radicals" and called themselves "Radical Republicans", perhaps as a marketing ploy to promote their newly-formed party. When they took control of the national government in 1860, the South was painted into a corner and had no moves left other than to break away from the nation and form their own in order to maintain their economic viability.
During the Civil War, the simplified versions of issues were all the public mind could hold, and so the rally cries in the North were "slavery" and "preservation of the Union" to motivate fine young men to throw their lives away, and in the South the appeal was to "patriotism" and "defense of our way of life" to motivate young men to do the same.
The British government of the time was reluctant to formally recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation, but they were more than happy to sell the Confederacy arms and ammunition to support the war effort, which was seen here as a tacit, though not formal, recognition of Southern Independence. A lot of British weapons and ammunition crossed blockades and found it's way into the American South - Ely Brothers percussion caps, powder, "London Colt" revolvers, Kerr revolvers, 1853 Enfield Pattern Rifle Musket, etc. all found their way from Britain to U.S. Civil War battle fields.
A careful reading of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation will show that it did not actually "free" a single slave. It applied ONLY to areas of the Confederacy under actual Confederate control - which is similar to the notion of Argentina passing a law and trying to make it binding in a foreign nation - Canada, for instance. Now we know Argentina cannot make it's own law binding on Canadians, but that was the net legal effect of the Emancipation Proclamation. Carefully crafted and specific exceptions were written into it that allowed slavery to persist in every single Southern area under Northern control and occupation. From that fact, I can only presume that it was not out of concern for the slaves themselves that it was written, but as a political and psychological ploy, a brilliant piece of propaganda - it was an assertion of Union authority and control over Confederate areas - effectively a foreign nation at that time - rather than an actual decree of the end of slavery.
In the aftermath of that war, we had what was called "Reconstruction". On the face of it, that was a good idea - the North would "reconstruct" the Southern areas that it had destroyed physically, but would refrain from reconstructing the Southern economy, in order to maintain the economic and political superiority of the Northern faction. To that end, they occupied the South with Union troops as a visible reminder of subjugation , and flooded the South with Northern "carpetbaggers" to re-form and transform the South into a clone of the North. Those carpetbaggers worked in conjunction with native-born Southern "Sacalawags" who were also radicals after the northern Republican faction template. Reconstruction, I think, is where the current political divisions started.
The southern populace continued to rebel, but under cover of darkness, with organizations such as "The Red Shirts" and the Ku Klux Klans" Initially, those organizations were aimed against white Union influencers in the South, rather than the recently freed Blacks. In the immediate aftermath, it was far more dangerous to be a white Carpetbagger or Scalawag in the South than it was to be a Freedman. Laws were passed to disenfranchise white Southern males in order to re-order the political structure of the South. The only people allowed to vote were then those most likely to support a Northern-style "restructuring" of political entities in the South, and Southern white males took exception to that re-structuring and disenfranchisement. the result was night rides and attacks on the forces compelling that restructuring.
Flash forward 100 years to the 1960's, and we see that "Conservative" Democrats had become entrenched in the South, but "radical" Democrats after the former Republican mold were in control of the national government, leading to what I think of as "Reconstruction V 2.0" and the entire Civil Rights movement, which I submit merely used Southern Blacks in the same way that the pre-war slaves were used as a political tool to force compliance in a still rebellious South. It was not out of any actual concern for minorities so much as it was a means of seizing and extending political power and influence. We see that even into today, where minorities and sexual issues are being used as pawns to promote political aims.
It was some time between 1960 and 1980 that Republicans gained a majority foothold in the South by reforming themselves as "Conservatives" in counterpoint the the Democrats, who had become the "Radicals" on the national level. The roles of the two had completely flip-flopped. The landslide election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marked not the beginning of that transformation, but rather a confirmation that it had arrived.
Now we are seeing the near complete reversal of their former (pre-Civil War) alignments.
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