"The Juggler in Trouble" (1848), from the John-Donkey/Picture History
Zachary Taylor, Whig Party candidate for president, portrayed as a Chinese juggler.
"The Juggler in Trouble" (1848), from the John-Donkey/Picture History
Zachary Taylor, Whig Party candidate for president, portrayed as a Chinese juggler.
Why revise history, when you came make it out of whole cloth.
Represents the complete failure of the Liberal pseudo Intelligence to look beyond their own ideological blinders to deal with the fundamental reality of WHO the Conservatives really are. Funny how the Dems consistently refuse to deal with reality and cling instead to their bigoted vision of who Conservatives are. You would figure after being slapped repeatedly by the Voters, the Dems would finally wake up to the fact that it's their rabidly anti-American, Neo-Socialist "you are all too stupid to live your lives without we enlighten ones to manage everything, but your sex life, for you" vision that most Americans, especially Conservatives, object too. Most of us are "Conservatives" because we are part of the "leave us the hell alone" coalition who nether want, not desire, the Political Left's "help" in living our lives.
The: 'governs least, governs best' viewpoint of Jefferson has always been my conservative rallying point.
"Wherever you find a bitter, blasphemous Atheist and an enemy of Marriage, Morality, and Social Order," The New-York Daily Tribune under Greeley charged, "there you may be certain of one vote for [the Jacksonians]."
For Jacksonians, read Democrats, and realize that some things never change!
Great post, neverdem. Very interesting little history on the ill-fated Whigs.
Bad luck aside, sectional tensions between Northern anti-slavery Whigs and Southern Whig slaveholders finally proved the party's undoing. And even at their high tide, the Whigs had to paper over conflicts between the party's hard-drinking populists and its teetotaling moralists, its moss-backed bluenoses and its more flexible officeholders and party managers. Thurlow Weed's closest political friend, the New York Whig (and later Republican) William Henry Seward, despaired in the early 1840's that "my principles are too liberal, too philanthropic, if it not be vain to say so, for my party."
The Whigs died because they were "pro-choice" on the subject of slavery. The Republicans were born out of a church-based movement to end slavery, which against all odds happened only a decade after they were born as a party.
The Whig alliance with southern Whig slaveholders which the writer mentions, had nothing to do with Republicans, since Republicans were the anti-slavery party from day one. Democrats were the slavery party until after the Civil War, and they were the Jim Crow and Ku Klux Klan party after that for a century.
Seward's remark that he was "too liberal" for the Whigs was just that, a reference to the Whigs. Not the Republicans. A lot of people left the Whigs behind, obviously, since it evaporated with the birth of the Republicans.
You have to be careful with the word "liberal" in discussing the 19th century, though, when liberal still meant liberal and did not yet mean socialist. The writer may not know that, few modern "liberals" have any idea what a liberal is.
The writers references to the "religious right" as being a burden for the Republicans ignores a historical fact. The Whigs disappeared when religious Americans could no longer abide it. When religious Americans abandon the Republican Party it will go the way of the Whigs.
The reference to "states rights" also misses the point. Republicans believe in the Constitution, and that includes the sadly atrophied 9th and 10th ammendments. The writer sees "states rights" as a racial thing, because the Democrats made it so. You can't use "states rights" as a justification to enslave people and rob them of their civil rights, as Democrats did right up until recently.
Having been denied the use of "state's rights" as a tool for beating black people, the Democrats abandoned those principles and no longer believe in them.
Republicans understand "state's rights" the way they understand the concept of co-equal branches of government, as a barrier to repression. If one branch of government oppresses you, you can appeal to another. If one level of government oppresses you, again, you can appeal to another. That is very different to the Democrat understanding of states rights, as a cover for the most awful repression this country ever saw.