The Whig party formed in 1833, making it just a few years younger than the Democratic Party. It was a center left, anti-Masonic, anti Manifest Destiny, pro American System, party, although most articles will claim it was a "conservative" party.
It opposed populist Andrew Jackson, a Democratic populist.
William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachery Taylor and Millard Fillmore were members of the Whigs.
A lot of its policies were very reasonable in a modern conservative context. What it couldn't adjust to, however, was slavery, and the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act, which nullified the Missouri Compromise, broke it up in 1856. Those members of the party who came down as solidly anti-slavery formed the new Republican Party, which was also a center left, anti-Masonic, anti Manifest Destiny, pro American System, party, with anti-slavery added to it.
The GOP went from birth to the White House in just four years.
The Whigs drew from the Democratic Republican Party that preceded it, but it drew from other camps as well. Not only did the old Democratic Republicans come into it, but Democrats did as well as that party became increasingly populist.
Note that.
The Whigs were a major center left American political party. The Democrats were a conservative, populist party. The Whigs of the 1850s would have recognized the Republican Party of the 1950s as their successor.
Note what happened, and perhaps more importantly, how quickly it can happen.
The classic bromide of American politics is that third parties don't succeed.
Some do.
The Whigs came out of a prior political party's period of turmoil. They consolidated around solid, government backed, economics and a policy of what would amount to anti discrimination for the era. As a result of that, it attracted businessmen, quasi liberals, and (immigrant) Catholics. It won several elections before spectacularly breaking up.
The GOP has been around much longer, but at least in its early periods up to the Great Depression, and then again from 1950 on, up until Ronald Reagan, it was much like the Whig Party it had replaced, but with civil rights added as an element. Ronald Reagan, as much as he is admired by conservatives, began to dismantle that when the Democrats incorporated civil rights into its makeup starting in the 50s and 60s. The Democrats had been struggling with its southern membership, which very much reflected the views of the traditional party, since the 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt. Southern Democrats stuck with the party as they had nowhere else to go, until Reagan cynically offered them one.
Now that element has taken over the party.
The GOP nearly cracked up in 1912 when the Theodore Roosevelt wing of the party, which wanted to take the party much to the left, and make it much more liberal/populist, bolted. That same year, the Democratic Party began its evolution into a liberal party by running Woodrow Wilson, drawing in disaffected Republican populists.
Note that.
It took twenty years, but by 1932 TR's cousin FDR put the liberals in the Democratic Party permanently in control, Wilson's bid having transformed the party permanently. It took roughly 30, but Ronald Reagan did the same thing with the Dixiecrats he incorporated into the GOP, that having also transformed the party permanently. It took the Democrats 40 years to start shedding the Dixiecrats. It took about 40 years for the Dixiecrats Reagan invited into the Republican Party to start a GOP civil war.
Conservatives gush about Reagan, and with some good reasons. He was the country's one and only really conservative President. Prior Republicans had fit more into the Whig mold. Those who came after him sort of recalled it, like the first Bush, or fit into a new Neo Con mold that real conservatives tended to despise. Reagan's Presidency was transformational, however, in that it inserted certain conservative strains of thought into government, while it never got a hold of the nation's budget, which has become increasingly out of whack due to the tax cuts he and Republican successors introduced.
But what he also introduced, Dixiecrats and Rust Belt Democrats, infected the party and now has killed it. The "Republican" Part of today is the Dixiecrat Party/Rust Belt Democrat Party in a very real sense. It's populist, but not conservative.
There are holdout Republican elements within it, but they have no hope of taking it back. The past three years have proven that. Trump Populists don't care that Trump tried to seize power illegally. They see class enemies everywhere which justify their positions, something Democrats just don't grasp. Democrats like Robert Reich run around wondering when they'll wake up, not realizing they're wide awake.
When the Whigs broke up, it took the GOP only a few years to become successful. The Whig collapse in 1856 was followed by the Republican success of 1860.
That's lesson number 1. New parties can succeed quickly when the old one dies.
Lesson number 2 is that opposing parties become complacent. The Democratic Party after 1912 didn't worry about its southern base and allowed it to go into the Republican Party, which briefly helped the GOP, and then killed it. The Whigs took not only from the collapsed Democratic Republicans but also from the Democrats themselves.
The current Democratic Party is the legacy of 1912 the same way that the GOP is the legacy of 1980. Just as the GOP has gone Dixiecrat/Rust Belt Democrat, the Democratic Party has gone Ivy League Pink. It's nearly as enfeebled as the GOP is right now, it's just not as obvious.
A new party must emerge to replace the GOP, and frankly it now will. Conservatives have no home and need to find one. Centrist, however, have no home as well. People who believed in Reagan's social conservatism aren't the same people who vote for serial polygamist and icky Donald Trump. Democrats that voted for a guy like Harry Truman aren't comfortable with Joe Biden, at least in the expression he's manifested himself. 49%, at least, of the electorate are independents who have already dumped the GOP or the Democratic Party.
The one, and only, thing the Democrats and the Republicans agree on is that you absolutely must not vote for a third party, as that helps the other guy. That thinking insures that the extremes of those two parties have a free ride.
Well, the party is over and on the GOP side, the people have gone home. This election, or the next, a new center right party must form, and will form.
If it formed now, with a Manchin or Christie at its head. It'd take the election, and the GOP would completely collapse. Quite a bit of the Democratic Party would defect as well.
It should happen.
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