When did the conservative/liberal alignment take place?

[RINO Tom]

Lol, of course before 1976 ... and 1964 ... and 1932...

[RINO Tom]

My actual answer is that throwing any date around here is absolutely ridiculous. 

We didn't have a coherent and widespread definition of what being economically "liberal" and "conservative" meant until we could frame it in terms of support for and opposition to the New Deal, respectively.  That gave us our impression that "liberals" favor government intervention into the economy to help the poor and create a better society, and "conservatives" oppose this and want the market a bit more left alone.

I'd argue we didn't get our "coherent" and widely used definition of being socially "liberal" or "conservative" until Roe v. Wade.  Before that, social issues often weren't neatly framed in a left/right manner, with things like civil rights, women's suffrage, immigration, prohibition, etc. gaining support and attracting opposition from wide ranges of people, with otherwise "liberal" or "conservative" people on economics being all over the board here.

To those who insist on putting foreign policy on a left/right scale with liberals being more anti-war than conservatives, we DEFINITELY didn't get any type of "liberal" vs. "conservative" divide there until the mid-Cold War at the absolute earliest.

It is so easy (and lazy) to make a Facebook-comments-style conclusion based on some cherry-picked wedge issue or event that we can now apply revisionist history to in order to fit some "realignment" or whatever.  Green Line perfectly summed up (hilariously) how some Atlas poster, or equivalent, 100 years from now could look at how Orange County, CA votes and isolate free trade as an issue and conclude that the parties "switched" in 2016, haha.  At the end of the day, that could end up looking no more stupid than someone saying they switched in 1992 because of Bill Clinton, 1980 when Southern Whites officially abandoned the Democratic Presidential ticket, 1964 because look at how the South voted!, 1948 because Truman supported civil rights, 1932 because FDR likes big government, 1928 because Al Smith faced bigotry, 1912 because third parties, 1896 because William Jennings Bryan, etc.

My opinion is that the terms "liberal" and "conservative" cannot appropriately be applied to ANYONE pre-New Deal Era politics UNLESS you are talking about more "timeless" concepts like support for business interests vs. working class interests or support for immigration restriction vs. support for a more open immigration policy.  If we actually did the latter, we'd obviously need to account for state-specific parties (it's hard to argue that a Democratic Party in 1870s South Carolina that opposes newly enfranchised poor voters isn't a "right-wing" party compared to that iteration of the SC GOP, for example) ... but overall, there is a reason that historians have ALWAYS traced a lineage from the Federalists to the Whigs to the Republicans, and from the Jeffersonian Republicans to the Democrats.  That is not to say the parties haven't changed drastically, and it's definitely not to say that either party today is a coherent "heir" to EITHER party's long history ... but it IS to say that a basic spirit of left-leaning thinking, for a given time period, has always been present in the Democratic Party, and a spirit of right-leaning thinking, for a given time period, has always been present in the Republican Party.  In geographic areas that were one-party rule (like the South with Democrats or upper New England with Republicans), you are obviously going to get exceptions, as all ideologies are going to fall in that party.  There were obviously very "liberal" Republicans and very "conservative" Democrats.

I have yet to hear a coherent argument from anyone anywhere that there was a time when the Democratic Party was clearly more conservative than the Republican Party, on average.  Period.  The arguments ALWAYS lie on lazily founded shortcuts like "the GOP used to win the Black vote, and look at how Southern Whites and Blacks flipped" ... okay, you're telling me NOTHING could have contributed to that besides two parties completely flipping ideologies (I really don't think people stop enough to appreciate how RIDICULOUS of an idea that is)?  Or "the Democrats used to support states' rights, and now the GOP does!"  So?  Lol, seriously, that is not an argument whatsoever.  Or, "the GOP employed the Southern Strategy to win racist Whites!"  Uh, yeah, DUH ... so what?  A conservative party tried to get more voters, and they were voters that used to vote for the other party ... that does not, in and of itself, imply that 1) the GOP wasn't just as conservative before incorporating these new voters or 2) that these new voters weren't less conservative than before joining the GOP; we have all seen how well voters chameleon themselves to fit their new tribe.  RE: any 1960s arguments, Mad Men ironically does a very good job of showing how a switch in voters does NOT mean a switch in ideology.

If you go back and read actual primary sources or look closely at what individual candidates were running on even back to the 1850s and 1860s, you will find Democrats accusing Republicans of being in the pockets of big business.  You will find Republicans accusing Democrats of being godless.  You will find Democrats calling Republicans intolerant, while supporting SLAVERY, because the social framing of the time was different and they meant explicitly that the GOP was bigoted toward new European immigrants.  You'll find Republicans calling Democrats unpatriotic.  Anyone with half a brain can see how drastically things have changed ... it's alarming how few people seem to notice the things that have remained the same.  The parties never switched.  They changed.  And they're constantly changing, and they'll continue to change.  There are people alive now that would have been in the opposite party 100 years ago, yes ... and that proves a lot less than most people think.

Alright, I gotta go study Stats.  Peace out.