Talking About Political Parties in the U.S.: Have the Democrats always been left wing?

On Quora, Ian Ruth asks:

Have the Democrats always been left wing?

When I was in high school, and even well into my college years, my instructors (whether they were “teachers” or “professors”) drummed one concept into my consciousness:

In any discussion, whether it’s about history, politics, literature, movies, or religion, never fall into the habit of making gross generalizations. For instance, not all Germans were Nazis, not all Russians are Communists, not every blonde is dumb, and not every foreign film is inaccessible or otherwise unwatchable.

It seems that at least since the 1960s, the go-to gross generalization used by people who self-identify as either Republicans or “conservatives” is this: The Democratic Party is left-wing, embraces Socialism, and rejects American patriotic values.

Nonsense.

First, no political party consists of a monolithic mass of unthinking drones, sort of like the Borg Collective minus the cool shit like cube-shaped starships and cyborgs with hi-tech weapons and adaptive force fields. Within each party (it matters not if it’s the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the Greens, the Whigs, the Federalists, the Communist Party USA, or the Yippies), there are usually three factions - the conservatives, the liberals, and the moderates, with extreme fringe members on either end of the spectrum.

Second, the modern Democratic Party has “only” been around since 1828; before its founding by supporters of Gen. Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson, its members were adherents of Thomas Jefferson’s original Democratic-Republican Party, or simply “Republican Party,” which opposed the Constitution and wanted the U.S. to abandon representative democracy and embrace republicanism instead. This iteration of the party had a stranglehold on government, including control of the White House, Congress, and many states from 1801 to 1825, when it dissolved after an intramural split over the 1824 elections.

Though it had its factions, the Democratic Party that emerged during the Age of Jackson tended to be rural, pro-slavery, and extremely resistant to societal changes. It had members in both the “free North” and “slave South,” but none of its tenets could be considered “progressive” or “left-wing,” at least not in the 21st Century context.

Now, I’m not an expert on the party’s history, and I don’t have the time to write a synopsis of what I do know. Suffice it to say that until the 20th Century, the Democratic Party tended to be the “we like the way things are now, thank you very much, and you can stick progress where the Sun doesn’t shine” bunch. In the North and West, the liberal wing of the party began to embrace change, but in the South, especially after the Civil War, the Democratic Party was dead set against granting civil rights to the recently freed slaves and basically setting up the horrible obstacle course to the integration of blacks into Southern society by creating “separate and unequal” systems of education, laws, and politics designed to keep “Negroes” in their place. So, basically, the right wing of the Democratic Party held sway in Dixie for almost a century after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House in April of 1865.

Republicans, oddly enough, started out as the progressive party of its day. Its main (but far from only) plank in its pre-Civil War platform was the abolition of slavery. For its day, the Republican Party founded in 1854, was considered to be extremely liberal, and its antipathy toward the institution of slavery gained it very few supporters in the Old South. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that the Grand Old Party (GOP) began its long association with Big Business and edged slowly but surely toward conservatism.

Paradoxically, one of the most progressive Presidents elected during the first half-century of the GOP’s existence was Theodore Roosevelt. He went against the wishes of Republican party bosses and was the first Chief Executive to use the power of government to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. He also broke up some of the Big Monopolies (or trusts) that dominated the nation’s financial and industrial sectors. Because many Republican donors were in the wealthy classes affected by TR’s reforms and trust-busting ways, they started the whole “small government works best” myth in order to slow down or even stop progress in society and culture that hurt their financial interests.

Over time, the Democratic Party also evolved, but instead of staying “true” to its rural, agrarian, and conservative roots, it became more urban and forward-thinking. This was more evident in the big cities of the Northeast and the West Coast; Democrats in the nation’s heartland and the former Confederate states were leery of change and became even more entrenched in conservatism.

The “liberal” Democrats only became dominant during the 1930s and ’40s as a result of the Great Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War. But even so, even though Franklin D. Roosevelt was fairly progressive (he, after all, was the President responsible for the creation of the Social Security Administration and other programs to help those Americans who could not help themselves. Conservatives from both parties hated FDR for that, calling him a Communist and traitor to his class. But even though by the standards of the day he was liberal, he was more of a moderate pragmatist who tried to walk a middle path between progressives and old-school Democrats. (Note: During World War II, the globe’s largest and bloodiest conflict, FDR not only sent Japanese-American citizens to internment camps in 1942, but he also refused to integrate blacks into the dominated-by-whites armed forces. Negroes could be drafted or enlist, but they were usually assigned to “all-black” support units and kept out of front=line combat units. Only during the last two years of World War II did the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines allow blacks to fight in non-support units, but they were still in segregated outfits commanded by white officers, usually from the South. Hardly a wild-eyed radical, leftist liberal, that FDR.)

So, no. The Democratic Party did not start out as a “leftist” party. And even after all the unpleasantness of the 1960s and 1970s, all Democratic Presidents (including Barack Obama) have been pragmatic centrists and not the stereotypical leftists portrayed by the right wing of the GOP.