traininthedistance
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« on: February 15, 2013, 03:05:32 PM » |
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« edited: February 15, 2013, 03:27:37 PM by traininthedistance »
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John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Harrison, and Teddy Roosevelt would be Democrats. Pretty much everyone else fits better in today's Republican Party, though there is of course significant variation:
Ulysses S. Grant, Chester A. Arthur, and William Howard Taft would be various stripes of RINO-esque establishment moderate, relatively progressive or at least reformist on some social issues but still largely conservative on fiscal issues. James Garfield was a bimetallist, which probably puts him here too in context, I guess.
John Adams the elder would basically be Simfan: too cosmopolitan for the mainstream of the Republican Party, but way too aristocratic and pro-wealthy for the Dems.
William McKinley fits almost perfectly into the Republican party of today, better than anyone else. The rest of the Gilded Age is pretty close, too: Rutherford B. Hayes and Grover Cleveland were both quite conservative by modern standards. Cleveland's union-busting and support in the South probably makes him the right-most of all post-Lincoln presidents.
I'll let the Libertarians have Thomas Jefferson. And no, that's not a compliment.
James Monroe would probably run some sort of Unity '08/Americans Elect/John Anderson-esque moderate hero independent platform. I think Cathcon is probably right about James Madison, though. Hard to place these two.
With the possible exception of William Henry Harrison, who is impossible to place but more of a Northern Whig (ergo potential Dem in context), and Martin Van Buren on account of being a Free Soiler post-presidency, everyone from Andrew Jackson to James Buchanan was pretty much so retrograde that I'm not sure they even belong in the Republican Party. Nativists, slaveowners and/or slaveowner-sympathizers all, in an era where that was the animating division in American politics, I could see most of them as possible Constitution Party members. Eh, Zachary Taylor would probably be just a Repub as well: he was relatively moderate on the slavery question, and a war hero too.
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