(06-03-2019, 11:35 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The Civil War 4T struggle was over Gray vs Blue. The Blue progressive party won. In the Depression the struggle was over Conservative vs (econ) Progressive. The Blue Progressive party won again. The progressives have always won the 4T struggles.The party that won the last 4T was the Democratic party that won the 1932 election. That party was a Red party, the party of the Jim Crow South. The candidate was FDR, who was a progressive Democrat. He had been Navy Secretary for Wilson, who, like FDR, was a progressive, but Wilson was also a racist (that is, a red economic liberal).
Blue is progressive, Red is conservative today. Cultural and Economic issues are tangled up because the issues are tangled up. Cultural conservatives (racists, homophobes, religious bigots) are dedicated to economic conservatives (trickle-down free-market ideology). They are joined at the hip. Social and cultural justice is bound up with economic fairness. You can't have one without the other. The issues are bound together so the politics is tied together.
Red vs. Blue is a cultural measure. It can be mapped on a two dimensional chart along with liberal and conservative economic views to form distinct quadrants:
1. Red conservatives (usually called conservatives, but nowadays could include what is known as the alt-right)
2. Blue conservatives (often called neoliberals or libertarians)
3. Red liberals (often called populists)
4. Blue liberals (often called progressives)
You have seen this before except they label the non-economic axis as authoritarian vs. libertarian. I think replacing it with the Red-Blue axis is more informative.
That the Democrats were Red and the Republicans Blue should be clear based on the Civil War. The Whigs were a quadrant 2 party. The Republicans were an amalgam several groups. Besides Whigs there were Free Soilers (quad 3) abolitionists (quad 2) and Know-nothings (quad 1). So the Republicans were a mix of Blue and some Red, plus both conservative and liberal economics. In the 1860's the Radical Republican faction (quad 4) was influential, and the Free Soil content (quad 3) expressed in the Homestead Act. By the 1870's the Whig majority was asserting itself and the GOP became largely quad 2 with conservative taking precedence over blue.
As the GOP moved towards quadrant 2, Democrats moved towards quadrant 3. As the GOP put increasing emphasis on economic conservativism, Democrats put more emphasis on economic liberalism.
Republican economic liberalism tended to manifest as Progressivism. Rank and file Democratic economic liberalism was populist.
You can see the difference by comparing Republican progressives like TRoosevelt and Lafollette (who were liberal on economics and culture) with populists like William Jennings Bryan and Tom Watson (see below).
Bryan headed the Democratic-Populst Fusion ticket in 1896. He is most famous for bring down the house at the Democratic Convention in that year with a rousing speech which ended with:
Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
Later he defended creationism in the 1925 Scopes monkey trial.
In the 1890's Watson supported black enfranchisement in Georgia and throughout the South, as a basic tenet of his populist philosophy. He condemned lynching and tried to protect black voters from lynch mobs.
But by 1908 Watson identified as a white supremacist.
They were progressive on economics, but not on culture.