Monday, June 18, 2018

Switcheroo Theories, Real and Imagined

       Polar shifts in politics only occur when extreme changes in the practice of politics make the foundational principles of the party outdated.
       The actual switcheroo came in Nineteenth-Century Britain, where Benjamin Disraeli turned Toryism from an ideology that gave unlimited power to the Crown into a Conservative party.  Eighteenth-Century Tories were unremittingly hostile to commercial life, and considered landed gentry the only fit wealthy.  Disraeli romanticized pre-Reformation England, and had Charles I in his pantheon of Tory saints.  Old Tory ideology was about King over Parliament;  new Tory ideology was a rejection of Utilitarian attempts at utopia.
       The imaginary switcheroo came in Nineteenth or Twentieth-Century America.  The Republican Party, after opposing extension of slavery, the Dred Scott decision that black people were farm animals, and secession, supposedly changed place with the pro-slavery Democratic Party.  Perhaps it was after Charles Sumner authored the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.  It must have been after a Democratic president thought "Birth of a Nation" was a great film, and re-segregated the military.  As a matter of fact, black Americans were reliably Republican until FDR's presidency.
       Unlike the actual switcheroo, there was a genuine political change that caused Toryism to become Conservative (and Whig to become Labour).  The Reform Act of 1835 made more Britons entitled to vote.  This, combined with post-1688 Parliamentary ascendency made the Toryism of Henry St. John and Jonathan Swift an antique curiosity.  Republican ideology, being a continuation of old Federalist principles, has never been obsolete.

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