As Impy pointed out, that is an incorrect conclusion regarding the GOP as the “more liberal party” until the New Deal. With the purge of the Bourbons under Cleveland in 1896, the Democrats’ main focus was modern leftism (it’s harder to judge right vs. left in our present understanding prior to the 1890s, which was more economic philosophies as opposed to necessarily social). Obviously, both parties had their left wingers and right for many decades, but the center-right was already the dominant force in the Republicans by 1896.
However, you do have a point regarding an aspect of the Republicans post-1930. Many of the Conservative GOP anti-New Dealers were defeated en masse throughout the period, leaving a small rump of Republicans who were left wing (whereas the Dems, which had huge majorities in the period, still had substantial numbers of center-right members, some of whom were already in office for a time, others defeating Republicans solely because of the unpopularity of the party).
The Republican party “establishment” started to move to the left and began to take on the unfortunate traits we’ve seen to this day of presenting a false front of opposing Democrat/Socialist big government expansion, while doing nothing to restrict it once back in power, feeling more comfortable in “managing” leftist programs (or even claiming they’re better suited to manage the Dem programs than the Dems are). This was never more clear than when Eisenhower, the preferred candidate of the party establishment left (over Conservative Taft), when given a majority in Congress at the start of his term, did absolutely nothing to begin to roll back 2 decades of big government. He could’ve served as a Democrat with very little difference. Ultimately, Ike and a statist GOP collapsed by the end of the 1950s, by 1958 returning to 1930s-level numbers in office (Dems getting 2/3rds of Congress).
The GOP would’ve continued to remain statist to near-irrelevant if it did not make aggressive attempts to appeal to the right (1966, 1980, 1994, 2010, 2016) in reaction to leftist Dem overreaches. As “Conservative” as Mr. Michel was in voting, he was not suited personality-wise to leading a fight to win a majority. He “accepted” that the Dems were the majority party and gratefully worked out private deals to achieve crumbs for not making a fuss. It’s no wonder the media at present loves to cite this era as their favorite, with the dominant left wing never challenged in their supremacy.
Michel, of course, should never have risen past a backbencher, but such was the situation in a very statist GOP that he would rise to leader, and would exit just as the party discovered its backbone and would fight for power.
Your post-1930 analysis strikes me as very sound.
However, I am not so sure that I see that:
the center-right was already the dominant force in the Republicans by 1896.
The Spanish-American war does not strike me as conservative, and Theodore Roosevelt doesn’t seem to me conservative at all. That Roosevelt was able to strip so much support away from Taft, a sitting president, and carry a higher percentage of the vote than Taft (who finished 3rd, four percentage points behind Roosevelt) says to me that the centre-right was not yet dominant.
RIP. Seemed like a good guy.
But a good guy that was satisfied being the leader of the permanent underling party.
What were at least three issues on which Republicans and Democrats usually disagreed between 1950 & ‘70? I wonder that because I heard that, in 1962, Kennedy proposed large tax rate cuts that were similar to the cuts that Reagan proposed in 1981, and few Democrats complained, when Kennedy said it. In 1968, then-VP Humphrey said that fewer Americans should have babies out of wedlock. Few Democrats complained about that speech, but many Democrats complained when then-VP Quayle said the same thing in his 1992 Murphy Brown speech.
Because of those issues, I think that, in the 1960’s, many Democrats were almost as conservative as the Republicans, but they became more liberal. When and why did they become more liberal? I used google, to find that information, but that didn’t help.