“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.
That’s because he isn’t actually a republican. This was before the party switch.
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.
Hmm, how do we square that with the fact that Lincoln was very pro-labor and he argued against the myth that wealthy capitalists create jobs?: “It is [falsely] assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor[…] Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration” -Abe Lincoln , First Annual Message to the Senate and House of Representatives
The only time I’ve ever heard it come up is in the context of slavery. So that’s probably why most people call it a switch. It’s a single issue.
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.
