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.
For example, in the 1870s, a group considered the more liberal wing of the Republican Party, in large part for their desire for “universal amnesty” for the South, bolted from the party, forming the Liberal Republican Party. Their basis was that “when a party’s objective was accomplished, new political parties should organize around the next great idea.”1 The Democratic Party in 1872, ended up adopting the entire LRP platform verbatim and nominated their candidates, the same Democrats that SoH describes as “conservative.”2
We can go in circles about vague definitions of “liberal” and “conservative,” but the entire notion is missing the obvious point: the political divide in 1860 was primarily over the spread of slavery, in which every normative modern voter aligns more closely with the Republican side. For this reason alone, the entire notion of the Party Switch should be disregarded and replaced by a more honest analysis.
Post-Civil War Policy
Students of History goes on to give summaries of the next eras in American politics. They describe a post-Civil War change:
Northern industrialists had grown rich from the war, and many entered politics afterwards. These new wealthy politicians did not see much sense in supporting the rights of Black Americans when the nation was still largely white.
This is a cartoonish summary of Republican views of the time. Given the disparate groups that made up the Republican Party, it’s no surprise that they had to forge a new direction after their uniting factor—stopping the spread of slavery—was largely resolved. What emerged was a party that still maintained a high value for individual liberty, and was the party of the Fourteenth Amendment, the party still more in line with fighting for a colorblind society. SoH claims that “many in the Republican Party felt they had done enough for Black citizens.” Its qualification of “many” in the party is a meager enough statement to be technically true, but still deceptive in that it is provided as a representative explanation of the Republican Party in this period.
The primary obstacle to black civil rights after Reconstruction was not Republican apathy, but the Democratic Party's relentless violent subversion of the U.S. Constitution.
Southern Democrats bypassed the Fifteenth Amendment (passed solely by Republicans), which banned racial discrimination by the government in voting, through a devastating loophole: political parties were legally considered private organizations. This allowed the powerful Democratic oligarchs of the South to create another layer to elections with the infamous "white primary." The goal was to create their own electoral ecosystem with their own rules, and regulate any and all voter participation, especially blacks, from freely participating in order to protect and maintain their power. This was the reason there was always an overwhelming consensus for whatever the Southern Democrats wanted. If you didn’t align with them, you likely stayed out or were forced out of the political system.3
In the one-party "Solid South," winning the Democratic primary was the same as winning the general election, which became a mere formality. This system effectively created a state within a state—a political colony run by, and for, the Democratic Party.4 The national Democratic Party protected this arrangement in exchange for the South's unwavering bloc of votes, leaving Republicans powerless to intervene short of another war.
The oppression of the Jim Crow South was truly systemic, but not in the debased modern sense of the word. The problem wasn't only the bigotry of individuals or even a few tyrants; it was the Democratic Party system that fastened the local city councils to the nation's capital. This handed each little southern tyrant near absolute, uncontested power.
A competitive Republican, or any other national party presence, even one with roughly the same prejudiced members, would have been preferable to the existing local-to-national Democratic machine. Why? Because the national Democratic Party, whatever its stated ideals in the North, was the institution that empowered and protected the South's segregationist system.
A serious two-party system would have shattered this monopoly. It would have forced political contests out of the exclusionary "white primary" and into a general election where votes had to be earned. This competition would have inevitably broken the power of the local oligarchs, forcing the South to join the rest of the nation's political evolution. This dynamic is crucial: the political structure of one-party rule was the true obstacle to progress, a reality obscured by focusing on the stated "ideology" of individual politicians or even southerners in general.
The claim by Students of History that the Republicans “stopped all efforts to reform the southern states” is patently false. In 1890 the Republican Henry Cabot Lodge introduced a bill that would be known as the Lodge Bill, which would have secured voting rights for blacks in the South, but was filibustered by the Democrats.5 Lodge’s grandson would become the Vice Presidential nominee alongside Richard Nixon in 1960.
When Democrats in the South disenfranchised the voting rights of blacks by abusing literacy tests alongside disallowing anyone to educate blacks, many Northerners acted as missionaries, risking their lives, to travel South and educate blacks. W. E. B Du Bois would call this act “the finest thing in American history.”6 This was the rise of educators like Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, the latter of whom was platformed in the White House by Republican Teddy Roosevelt.
What also became most notable in this time period was the re-emergence of the Ku Klux Klan, after the first iteration was essentially destroyed by Ulysses Grant. Republicans continued to fight against the Klan, and mobilize the federal government against them, while the lone Democratic president of this era, Woodrow Wilson, promoted the Klan and their ideology.7
One of the clearest examples of the contrast was the Republican nominee for president to run against Wilson in 1916, Charles Evans Hughes. He was the son of an abolitionist preacher who was one of the heads of the anti-slavery movement in New York, and Hughes continued to push his father’s principles. As a Supreme Court Justice, he had many pro-civil rights rulings, and he was the keynote speaker in the first National Conference on Lynching in 1919, pushing strongly for an anti-lynching bill.8 The showdown between Hughes and Wilson only highlights the unambiguous difference that was maintained between Republicans and Democrats on race.
Many think of the period between 1870 and 1932, a period dominated by Republican control, as a lull in black progress, but by some measures, it was a period that showed one of the most dramatic rises of any group in history. The black illiteracy rate went from 79.9% in 1870 to 16.4% in 1930, all while Southern Democrats were trying to keep blacks from being educated.9
At the end of this period, black unemployment was nearly even with white unemployment, a trend that would be broken under the years of Franklin Roosevelt, and only continued to widen. The Klan went from its peak participation following Woodrow Wilson, to declining by millions.10
A New Century
Next, Students of History regurgitates Democratic campaign talking points of the next era:
When the economy crashed in 1929, the Republican president, Herbert Hoover, opted not to intervene, earning him and his party the ire of the American public. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, sensed the need for change. […]
It was FDR’s campaign policies that caused a major shift in party ideologies.
Aside from being objectively wrong about Hoover’s non-intervention in the economy, which further discredits SoH, these statements aren’t coherent when taken together.11 According to Students of History, the Republicans were pro-laissez-faire before FDR, during FDR, and after FDR. How then was it “FDR’s campaign policies that caused a major shift in party ideologies?” This is an argument against the parties switching ideologies. It is correct that the Great Depression created a cultural shift towards government intervention in the economy, but this was not any part of a “flip” of ideologies between the parties. The Republican Party continued to be the party most reluctant to massive government intervention in the economy. Hoover made the economic situation worse by his meddling, but federal intervention was pushed further under FDR.
The Civil Rights Movement
Next, Students of History moves to its last section, which covers the Civil Rights Era.
After providing no coherent examples of any kind of ideological flip, SoH describes a “final, decisive switch:”
In 1964, Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. In the 1964 election, Republican candidate Barry Goldwater publicly opposed the new law, arguing that it expanded the power of the federal government to a dangerous level.
Barry Goldwater was a long-time supporter of racial equality and fought for it in every area where he believed he had authority. He opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because he thought it was unconstitutional, but even within the campaign of 1964, Goldwater, when speaking to southern delegates, vowed to enforce the Civil Rights Act and use the moral power of the presidency to end discrimination.12
After Goldwater’s landslide defeat in 1964, the Republicans turned to the same candidate they had run prior to Goldwater: Richard Nixon, who supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The next Republican president was Gerald Ford, who also supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The next Republican president was Ronald Reagan, who initially didn’t support the ‘64 Act, but by the time he ran for president, he had changed his view to support it. This “final, decisive switch” was not the trend SoH thinks it was.
The closest SoH comes to an accurate portrayal was in the following paragraph:
As the 60s and 70s continued, Democrats sought reform in other places, such as abortion and school prayer. White southern Democrats began to resent how much the Democratic Party was intervening into the rights of the people.
This is true, but Students of History mentions that the demographic groups of southerners and blacks have switched voting patterns over time, as if that is related to the parties themselves switching ideologies. As SoH points out, the South had changed its views and priorities, just as the whole nation had. People were not primarily voting on the issue of abortion prior to the Roe v Wade decision, and this came to be a significant issue for the South. Blacks had started voting Democratic under FDR, when the Democratic Party was unambiguously fueling a system of oppression in the South. But blacks largely didn’t have that as their highest priority at the time, and mostly voted for FDR for the same reasons everyone else voted for FDR.13
Conclusion
Students of History fails to justify their core claim, that the parties “flipped” ideologies. Their first argument solely relies on vague definitions of “conservative” and “liberal,” and the argument further falls apart with every addition of specificity. Their next argument is that Democrats in the mid-twentieth century slowly moved in the direction of racial equality over the years while the Republicans of the previous generation “stopped all efforts to reform the southern states.” The first half of the argument has some truth to it, but the second half is false. The entire nation moved in the direction of racial equality, including Democrats, but the difference between the parties was maintained, which means there was not a “flip” of ideologies, and more importantly, progress was more dependent on breaking the relationship between the Democratic Party and its colony, the South. Their final argument is to misrepresent Goldwater while overstating his election results as a trend. These weak arguments accumulate to nothing, and their mischaracterizations and inaccuracies only further discredit the short article.
The likely next argument from a lazy Party Switch proponent is to act like the myth is all part of a settled consensus, and for you to fall in line. Likely they’ll continue to actuate their already worn Ctrl C and V keys from their panicked Google search, the results of which we’ll cover next in this series. Stay tuned!
Others in this series:
Notes:
1 Andrew L. Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era, (2007).
2 Willard E. Wight (1956) "Horace Greeley, Presidential Candidate: A Floridian's View," Florida Historical Quarterly: Vol. 35: No. 3, Article 9.
3 V. O. Key Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation, (1949).
4 Ibid.
5 The Gentleman from Massachusetts: Henry Cabot Lodge, Atlantic Monthly (1944).
6 James M. McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton University Press, 1975) 198.
7 The History of American Anti-Lynching Legislation; The Miles City American, 6 October 1921; El Paso Herald, 23 August 1922.
8 Richard D. Friedman "Charles Evans Hughes." Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law, edited by R. K. Newman (Yale Univ. Press, 2009) 278-9.
9 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970.
10 Shawn Lay, "Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century." New Georgia Encyclopedia.
11 Thomas Sowell, Government meddling is what sparked Depression; Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America (Holmes & Meier, 1993).
12 The New York Times, 13 July 1964.
13 Angus Campbell, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes. The American Voter (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960), 45-47, 160.