"Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened." - Dwight D. Eisenhower 1945
The image is a black and white photo of a large pile of human skulls and bones in front of a barbed-wire fence.
Genuinely, Ike was the most recent Republican president that I truly respect. He was not perfect by a long shot, but he had his head on straight compared to many other politicians for a LOT of topics, considering the time in which he was raised, in the military, and serving as president.
The whole party switch thing is a bit of a misnomer, or mislead - the fact is, you had completely different worlds at the time. For example, Lincoln’s republicans supported the abolition of slavery, the abolition of alcohol, and westward expansion. The opposing democrats at the time supported white supremacy and protections of religious minorities. Then go forward a few years, and Democrats (like Wilson) wanted income taxes and silver-based money, while Republicans (like McKinley) wanted tariffs and gold-based money. Then after that, you get closer to what we know now, which is Democrats wanting larger government and welfare for the poor, while Republicans wanted less government and anti-communist foreign policy.
So there’s less of a switch and more of different gradual challenges to different shifting groups of ideologies. It just looks like a switch when you look at individual issues that look like they hold the same water as other issues today.
For example, you can have people that are absolutely for welfare, but also against religious freedoms; the poor need to be housed and fed, but everyone needs to be Christian. You could have then an opposing party that absolutely hates the idea of being theocratic, because they believe in the individual person’s freedom to be themselves, but at the expense of people who need support. Sort of the same way how Libertarians and mostly left circles can all agree that drugs shouldn’t be criminalized today, but have polar opposite beliefs for economic policies and government services.
Or smth idk I’m not an expert, I’m just taking a rly long shit
The Republicans started off as the party for rich Northerns. They took the abolitionist stance partly for humanitarian reasons, but also because industrialization of the South with it's massive slave labor pool would have crushed Northern industrialists. The GOP is still the party of Northern business owners, they just convinced white workers that they were also looking out for them.
You should've ended that whole thing with, "But don't let all this distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table."
I would say he is solidly in the middle of the party switch that took a long time. Nixon was still his VP and FDR, a progressive democrat, was before him. But there were still a lot of conservative democrats in the south. The parties used to be a lot more ideologically idiosyncratic.