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.
Before the explosion of social issues in the ‘60s/’70s, there were differences on domestic issues, foreign policy, civil rights. There was the genuine fear that 2 decades of Democrat Presidents had allowed extensive Soviet infiltration of the government, institutions and culture (proven correct) and helped rapidly move the country leftward, as many other countries were in Europe, Africa, Asia, et al, were.
The “supply side”-esque tax cuts proposed by JFK from the ludicrously high confiscatory rates up to that time was one of the few “Conservative” proposals of his. The GOP hadn’t touted such tax cuts since the Harding-Coolidge era and wouldn’t again until Reagan. Nixon embraced Keynesian economics, which was why the ‘70s was such a disaster, culminating with Carter.
The crisis of illegitimacy was raised by Daniel Patrick Moynihan during the 1960s (before he was a Senator), especially focused on the rapid disintegration of the Black family in that decade. He was denounced by the left as a racist, but it didn’t change the fact he was correct. If both parties had focused on dealing with that, the slide might’ve been stopped. Unfortunately, Democrats discovered it behooved them NOT to address it and allow more and more Blacks to become slaves to welfare and dependent upon leftist policies, even if it meant sky-high illegitimacy & unemployment, crime rates, drug usage, low education rates, et al. Almost all Democrats today benefit from the dysfunction, and the CBC members (Cong. Black Caucus) especially benefit from the misery and degradation in exploiting their own people (something Booker T. Washington, a Republican, warned about in the late 19th century).
Dems, of course, complained about Quayle’s speech because it was firing a shot at their destructive, libertine policies that were toxic to the family unit. They were purveyors of the fantasy that women alone were good enough to raise children (in the case of Moynihan, he was bemoaning poor Black women having multiple out-of-wedlock births, but in the case of Quayle, his was directed at the trendy notion of middle-class career women choosing to have a child without a dad in the picture. Each were wrong, but for different reasons. Economic security, via welfare payments/guaranteed housing or a high-paying job cannot be a substitute for the need for fathers).
The drastic social split between the two parties began in earnest once previously settled social conservatism grounded in religious values, which had been set in stone from the founding of the country up until the 1960s, started to manifest itself. The left embraced the trendy issues under the false claim of freedom in a race to the bottom (frankly, it was just another phase by the left in a way to undermine our strength and core bedrock principles and completely eradicate our nation, the Alinskyite method amongst others, the Marxist revolution). The right sought to resist the decay.
Unfortunately for the right, at the same time the left had infiltrated key aspects of our society: cultural/entertainment, education, religion, law. Producing footsoldiers to carry out “the cause” of completely undoing everything that made America great. Globalism, in their next phase, to undermine our borders and flood our country with aliens whose values system were often anathema to ours. We’ve been in a pitched war against the left for the greater part of the past century.
Republicans were weak and let the commie dems rule over them like Kings, that doesn’t mean the dems were “as conservative” it means the Republicans were weak.
Kennedy’s tax cut, actually passed after his death and signed by Johnson, lowered the top-rate from a MAOIST shameful 91% to a still disgusting and un-American 70-77% (it fluctuated thought the next few years I don’t know why)%.
It also cut the corporate rate from 52%, disgusting, to a 48%, symbolical important as it allowed companies to not have to fork over the MAJORITY of their income the federal government, but hardly anything.
It passed overwhelmingly but some in both parties voted no, I don’t know why some Republicans did, a sizable minority of House Republicans voted no.
Reagan reduced the top rate to a low of 28%, acceptable for a free capitalist nation. It’s since been jacked up to 39.6%, the same level Clinton jacked it that lost him Congress.