House Republicans gauging support for budget amendments

The Hill ^ | 1-1-13 | Erik Wasson, Russell Berman and Molly K. Hooper

[Tublecane]

Robert Byrd types, yes, that’s just the point. He was like 100 when he left politics, and not representative of the party since the civil rights movement and the New Left. Check out what happened to the Southern vote between ‘65 and now. They are hardly the same parties.

[niteowl77]

I'm not calling Jefferson anything. (Although I have over the space of 50 years lost much of my admiration for him.) What I am suggesting is that serious flirtation with "Citoyen Genet" (I use the term generically) was one of Jefferson's errors that unfortunately took root. Jackson (another person I liked less the more I learned about him) deftly managed to use tools forged before his ascension in an America whose institutions had changed greatly, including - as you expressed - the Republican-Democrat party.

Every year the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner press releases bring out the sarcastic jerk in me, as I know damned well that they'd actually be aghast at being connected with the freakshow that makes up today's Democrat Party... and vice-versa. Having said that, I suspect they'd both be envious of the capability of the current "machine."

Mr. niteowl77

[Tublecane]

They’ll say things like that, because, hey, Jeffersonians became Jacksonians, and both were fir agrarians and against Yankee mercantilists, and so on. But it’s false history. Jacksonian democracy was not Jeffersonian. Read “The Era of Good Feelings” by George Dangerfield, for reference. Jackson is the real foundation of the Democrat Party.

Republicans might as well claim Whigism as its true foundation, and that would be more ideologically accurate. But they don’t, and just as well. Because Republicans weren’t Whigs even if Lincoln was a Whig before he was a Republican, for instance. There are reasons the former party failed and the latter dominated Washington from Lincoln to Wilson.