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Thinking about what I wrote here yesterday on the debate of left vs. right within the GOP, there was a very key point I left out, and that was the issue of partisanship itself. This effectively superseded ideology. We still see it today, but I personally regard it as an affliction of the weak minded/stupid, rather than that of serious discernment we should all seek to undertake when analyzing candidates.

What I’m basically saying here is that, from what I observed in research, and our resident political historian, LS, can either agree or refute me on, is that effectively from the end of the Civil War clear up for almost 100 years, with some occasional variances, you could look at a given state or Congressional district and given how it stood with respect to the Civil War, ascertain the likely party they’d vote for, be it Presidential or Congressional.

It was effectively irrelevant whether the nominee of the Republicans or the Democrats was of the left or right, in many of these districts of bedrock party affiliation, they simply voted PARTY. You could have a firebreather populist or a mild-mannered Bourbon, it didn’t matter. The South was almost inevitably going to elect a Democrat regardless of ideology, the Northeast, a Republican (with some exceptions, such as NYC or Boston, but those were different reasons - NYC because it was never fully with Lincoln during the Civil War and was run almost continuously by a corrupt urban Democrat Machine, Tammany Hall. Boston was competitive if only because it didn’t assimilate Irish Catholics into the Republican party (for a brief time in the 1850s during the dissolution of the Whigs, many joined the Know-Nothing party, which was anti-Catholic, and the Irish never forget or fully forgave the Republicans who came out of that movement. So the most urban Irish Catholic areas began to go Democrat in the 1870s and never went back to the GOP, except in rare instances).

In the case of most Southern states, especially after Jim Crow, Republicans ceased entirely to run candidates (such as in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and most especially South Carolina, which was like a one-party apartheid state). Although the Democrats didn’t cease to exist in the Northeast or New England, if you were a Democrat in Vermont, you had no chance of being elected Governor or to Congress. None (as an example, from 1851 until 2006, only on one occasion was a Democrat elected to the House, excluding Bernie Sanders, and that was on one occasion in 1958, and that man was defeated in 1960). The memories of the Civil War lingered for a long time, and you were likely to vote the way your father and grandfather did.

Now some states were unusual, like Indiana, which on some occasions, would have highly competitive races between the parties. If there was to be a close Presidential contest, Indiana would be a bellwether (in 1868 and 1872 it would go for Grant, 1876 for Tilden, 1880 for Garfield, 1884 for Cleveland, 1888 for Harrison, back to Cleveland in 1892, McKinley in 1896 & 1900, etc.).

Curiously, after a half-century had passed between Reconstruction and the 1920s, the “Solid South” was beginning to see a crack develop, even if from the top-down at the Presidential level, and some Southerners were warming up to the party of Lincoln. In 1920, my state of Tennessee went for Harding over Democrat Cox, elected a Republican Governor and 5 out of the 10 House members, the most extensive “crack” in the wall this far south for the GOP. TN was unusual that it did have a consistent Republican presence in East TN, though there again that had to do with which side it was on during the Civil War (and it was Unionist in that part of the state, with some bits here and there along the Tennessee River in West TN). The “big” casualty in the 1920 elections in my state was the defeat of Cordell Hull in a rural Democrat district (which would later elect the Gores). Hull would reclaim the seat in 1922 and go on to become FDR’s Secretary of State, but this was a big warning at that time that the GOP could and would make inroads.

Alas, because of Hoover and the mishandling of what should’ve been the “Panic of 1929”, it killed off the fledgling GOP inroads by 1932, and would not reappear again until the 1950s and 1960s (or later, indeed, as it would be not until 1994 that the GOP finally won back the Cordell Hull seat). That, of course, would set off the beginning of the national realignment of the GOP being the usual majority party from 1860 until 1932 (excepting for the 1870s/1910s), retracting and retreating only to the most bedrock of Republican areas in the Northeast (even when FDR won in 1932, most of the state preferred to stick with Hoover outside of NYC). Even Massachusetts resisted a Democrat wave, keeping at or just above a majority of Republican members even in the 1930s. Only with the advent of the Kennedys would the Republican party there collapse rapidly beginning in the 1950s.

Even when FDR was elected, he had to cater to the Southern Solons that were the real power, especially in Congress once the Democrats took a majority. Although some were fine with an expansive government (such as the infamous racist Sen. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, who was also a crook), most scarcely were far removed from their views on Blacks as their ancestors who fought the War of Northern Aggression. FDR had to navigate the new dominant Democrat party through a huge group of differing interests (urban leftists, Northern Blacks (post-1936), labor, and the old-line Southern Dems).

When FDR settled on leftism and activist government as his main cause, the party began to see fissures, although it wouldn’t begin to have national implications for some time to come. Because there was a large segment of Democrats who weren’t left-wingers, FDR saw them as an impediment to his agenda and began to launch a purge of these “problem people” by the mid to late 1930s, which led to the repudiation election of 1938, where many Republicans were able to reclaim the seats washed away with 1932. Within 8 years more, they were remarkably able to reclaim, however fleetingly, the majority in the House again, although both the 1946 and 1952 elections were the last gasp for the pre-1932 Republican majority party. When it collapsed to mid 1930s proportions in the 1958 elections, the GOP would have to build a new majority coalition from scratch nationally, which would take decades to do at the Congressional levels, not reaching fruition until 1994.

It really wasn’t until the 1950s and 1960s when many bedrock party areas of the country started to look beyond blind party loyalty and paid closer attention to ideology itself when you started to see a collapse of these formerly strong areas (Vermont, 1958; The Deep South in 1964), especially where electing Congressmembers were concerned. The districts that had elected a Republican in 1946 or 1952 may no longer be able to do so in 1960. Worse, Conservatism had gotten a black eye because of the leftist/media persecution of Sen. Joe McCarthy (nevermind he was right and vindicated by the Venona files), and suffered again in 1964 due to canonization of Jack Kennedy.

Of course, it panicked the Republican Establishment, who had been drifting leftward since FDR, and they believed the wave of the future for the party was to go left across the board (although the claim of being “socially tolerant”, “fiscal Conservative” was pure nonsense, especially in the case of the latter. These Eastern Establishment pols were spendthrifts beyond their Dem counterparts, notably Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, who spent in the vicinity of a billion dollars in money of that era, to build his ugly Empire State Plaza in Albany, NY, which looks like it should be the capitol of the Empire in Star Wars). In one of the wealthiest districts in America, the Manhattan Silk Stocking district, from 1947 until 1959, it had a Conservative Republican Congressman named Frederic René Coudert, Jr. With the left-wing Rockefellerites in charge of the party, they all but ordered Coudert to vacate his seat for the handsome, urbane, left-wing (and STD-riddled) John Vliet Lindsay in 1958. Coudert kindly obliged. Lindsay would go on to later become one of the most destructive leftist Mayors in American history during his 8 years in New York City, which would ultimately result in a million residents of the city departing (including mine). Not until Giuliani 2 decades later would the damage he created begin to be repaired. Lindsay, of course, left to become a Democrat during his 2nd term, but the national party had little use for him.

This was not just a Republican thing, but even many of the remaining Conservative Democrats were similarly forced either to leave the party or move ideologically to the left in order to keep power. Many chose to do the latter (the falsehood that Southern Conservative Dems became Republicans is one of the “big lies” perpetrated by the media). The Conservative Dems were not necessarily just in the South, either. Even in NYC, you had James Joseph Delaney, but with Watergate and the flooding in of Congress in the 1970s by McGovernite radicals, hard-core Socialists and de facto Communists, they threatened the old Solons that if they were to keep their jobs, either as party chairs or even as Congressmembers, they would have to move hard to the left. Delaney did so, as did many Southern Democrats. Former liberal Democrats who had done the opposite and moved rightward, such as Portland (Oregon)’s Edith Green ended up leaving Congress outright (Portland would then elect a string of leftist moonbats ever since her departure), and she would endorse Gerald Ford for President in 1976.

To look at their Conservative scores pre-1974/76 and after at some of these Democrats was astonishing. They were forced to become national leftist Democrats. Those that didn’t just simply quit. Referencing the New Dealer liberal Sen. Theodore Bilbo, in MS, he was replaced by John Stennis in 1947. Stennis was once regarded as a Conservative, but by the 1980s, he was closer to Ted Kennedy than any Conservative Republican in his voting habits. Many of them considered themselves Democrats first, ideology be damned. It was due to the power of incumbency that some of these folks in both parties, however out of step they were with their districts ideologically, that allowed them to stay long after they should’ve remained.

Anyway, that’s a bit of the overview of ideology vs. party since the 19th century. I hope I didn’t put you folks to sleep.