Editor’s Note: The following piece is a departure from our customary focus on academic works. It marks the debut of our new “Lazy” series, which is dedicated to correcting the most persistent and poorly substantiated myths that pervade popular understanding. In this series, we will scrutinize claims originating from sources such as Wikipedia, Britannica, AI chatbots, viral social media posts, and, as is the case with this inaugural article, frequently cited web pages. If you’d like to see fewer or more of these, let us know in the comments.
The old adage about a lie traveling halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes needs an update. Today, a lie can work remotely. It can simply anchor itself via legacy search engine optimization at the very top of a Google result.
Case in point: “The Great Switch: How the Republican & Democratic Parties Flipped Ideologies” by a webzone called “Students of History.” If someone has sent you this link, congratulate them on completing the arduous research of typing in “Party Switch” and believing the very first thing they saw.
The “Students of History” page on the subject is not a serious analysis. It's more Facebook-ey than scholarly. The article's flaws are immediate and damning: it's a roughly 800-word authorless essay without a single citation, an irony of its lazy premise, and also its proponents.
But, its true crime is its dishonesty, and its inaccuracies, all to prop up the ridiculous thesis that America's two major parties simply and conveniently swapped souls. This isn't just an error; it is a foundational myth that requires dismantling.
Ideologies of the Past
Students of History lays out its thesis in the opening paragraph and makes its first elementary mistake by applying modern political labels to the 19th century: “America's two dominant political parties have essentially flipped ideologies in the time since they were founded.” The article goes on to explain:
In its early years, the Republican Party was considered quite liberal, while the Democrats were known for staunch conservatism. This is the exact opposite of how each party would be described today.
The Party Switch Myth relies on defining ideological terms in as vague a way as necessary to support the partisan claim. If your definition of “conservative” links together violent pro-slavery Border Ruffians along with Bob Dole, your definition is too broad to be useful. This is as vapid as saying MLK and Jefferson Davis had the same ideology because they were both for “rights.” “Conservative” entirely depends on what you want to conserve.
Students of History describes the Confederate South as “conservative” because they “viewed the central government as the enemy of individual liberty.” SoH associates conservatism with support for individual liberty, which is reasonable, but SoH doesn’t allow for the possibility that someone could have a strong stance for individual liberty and therefore oppose slavery, as it is the greatest affront to individual liberty. This is a large omission, since, I would wager it is the majority opinion of Republicans past and present.
SoH reveals its partisanship by inferring that “conservative” somehow just means “maintaining the status quo.” This kind of bias is essential in believing the Party Switch Myth. To give more nuance to political ideologies is to dispense with the Myth. SoH says that Republicans were “considered quite liberal,” but the words had completely different connotations.