When did the conservative/liberal alignment take place?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Grover Cleveland was probably to the right of Benjamin Harrison in 1892. Harrison was moderately pro-silver, passed anti-trust legislation and tried to advance civil rights.

I'm sure there's an alternate universe where free silver Populists are absorbed into the Republican Party instead of the Democrats as historically and the GOP becomes the progressive party of popular economic reform.

It kind of happened in North Carolina for a short time.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Grover Cleveland was probably to the right of Benjamin Harrison in 1892. Harrison was moderately pro-silver, passed anti-trust legislation and tried to advance civil rights.

There is great irony in that William Henry Harrison was the first Whig President and his grandson was arguably the last one. Benjamin Harrison was a Whig in his early years before becoming a Republican just like Lincoln in that sense.

Being for loose money was not uncommon among Whigs as that was part of the Clay Economic Agenda, they wanted loose money, tariffs and internal improvements together to spur domestic growth and development. While the protectionism would continue, the 1890s is when the support for soft money among Republicans would end. However I don't consider this the start of "conservatism" or the end of "liberalism". TR was for hard money after all. This notion that the magic flip date happened just 68 years earlier (instead of 1964), fails to account for the evolution the ideologies underwent in reaction to each other during the mid to late 19th century.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I would say the Democratic party has changed a lot more than the Republican party, as the GOP was always really the industrial party and from 1856-1876 that put them to the left of the Democratic party as the goals of industry at them time were to the left of Agrarians. That didnt make the GOP liberal though, just its interests temporarily put them to the left of the Democrats.

Better but you still defining ideology based on present day issue positions.

It is my contention that issue positions held by ideologies is relative to the context in which they operate, not hard coded. Trade Protectionism isn't a left or right issue. If it works to protect business profits, it is a conservative position. If it works to protect societal stability, it is a conservative position. If it is used to preserve union interest and wages, it operates as a liberal one.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Also WJB's is more like the evolution of the Liberal Party itself then the rise of the UK Labor Party.

The likewise equivalent here to UK Labor would have been if the Demorats collapsed after Wilson and the Socialist or Progressive Parties replaced the Democrats. That didn't happen of course because of the hard wired Democratic lean of the South after Wilson's administration. The UK Liberals had no such rotten borough of considerable size to lean on.

The UK Liberals had already evolved to represent the economic interests of the left substantially, as was already mentioned, "The People's Budget". Also Keynes himself was a Liberal, not a Laborite. What destroyed them was the war.


For all of the changes that Bryan had wrought, remember he ran as the populist crusader against NE Big business on a base of farmers in the South and West. You know who also did this? Andrew Jackson?

Bryan was the Democratic Party getting back to its roots, not a radical transformation of it. Just as Jackson was an attempt to get back to Jeffersonian Roots after a lot of Federalists, Nationalists and elites had corrupted the Jefferson Republican Party.

Cleveland's approach also not a departure from the Democratic traditions in terms of issues, and Cleveland also supported anti-trust legislation if memory serves me. Anti-Monopoly and anti-business interest has been a uniting theme for the Democrats and their antecedents going back to Jeffersonian opposition to Hamilton.

Cleveland also shared Jackson's love of hard money. But when push comes to shove and the base wants "novel" approaches, whereas the elites have grown used to the former radical position (hard money), the base tends to shake off the "corrupting influences" who find themselves bewildered as a result because after all they were just pushing the standard Democratic line on money handed down from Jackson.

What changed was the economics and while business interests had come to prefer hard money, debtors began to prefer soft money because it was easier to repay loans. In the 1830's, this was different because soft money and speculation was blamed for several commodity price crashes, and hard money was seen as stable and honest. The base position evolves and the establishment suddenly becomes the traitors.

This is the exact same position that many Reaganites found themselves in back in 2016 GOP primaries.