Gosh, you mean the DemonRats weren't "the conservative party back then"? A bunch of useful idiots on our side have "informed" me that "prior to the 1960s", the Democrats were "honorable and patriotic", and that they were the right-wing party in America, where the GOP were "the liberals back then", until both parties magically decided to "switch sides" around 1965 or so.
So you're saying the Wilson administration doesn't fit into this fantasy. Hmmm.
It’s remarkable how prevalent that “switched sides” garbage is (on both sides).
I heard it as a kid from some *itch at the Chicago Historical Society (Lincoln would be a rat and Douglas a Republican she said.)
I believed it myself not all that long ago, after all I kept hearing it around here, Lincoln was tyrant blah blah blah. I figured it happened in 1896, by magic. The people that think the rats were awesome before the 1960’s are insane, or trolls. Those conservative Southern democrats were known as Southern Whigs before the civil war.
In reality you can trace the democrats ideological ancestry back to Jefferson’s ‘Republicans’, despite his modern popularity with conservatives and libertarians. I don’t mean to bash him because he and Andrew Jackson would pump todays rats full of lead, but that’s a fact.
Whereas the Federalists were the progenitors to the Whigs and Modern Republicans (named to evoke Jefferson’s Republicans in a clever electoral ploy). We’ve basically always had the same 2 parties, the names just changed. Federalists/National Republicans/Whigs/GOP has always been the party that supported commerce and the Jeffersonian Republicans/Jacksonians/Rats have always been pseudo-populist rabble rousers.
With the rats turning to socialism in the late 19th Century the differences became more clear, that’s all.