You are, of course, correct. The Democratic Party, ever since its creation by Alexander Hamilton, has been the progressive (liberal) party. The problem is, over the course of time, the definition of "progressive", or liberalism, has changed, is changing. As an examply, during the civil war, "State's Rights" was a liberal ideal, as opposed to a more Whig, or Republican, ideology of federalism.

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ex animo
davidfarrar
The National Online Party

Let's get it straight the the reason the Republican party started in the first place was because they disagreed with the majority of Democrats who were pro slavery. Divisions among the Democrats over the issue of slavery caused the Republican party to be the dominant party for a long time. It wasn't until Abaraham Lincoln took office that the Republican party came to be known as the party for big business, but that's not to say Democrats were the party of the poor. It wasn't until the Great Depression and FDR that the Democrats came to be associated with welfare. After that, Democrats became the dominant party for a while, until Reagan took over, basically creating this new group of religious conservatives.

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Yes it used to be the other way around.

Suffice it to say that the terms "Republican" and "Democratic" are party names. They have no ideological content.

Times change, people change.

The traditional 'social conservativism' of the Democratic party ended with the Civil Rights movement as a large number of 'Dixiecrats' (socially conservative Democrats from the South) eventually left the Democratic party and switched over to the Republican party. That process took about 30 years to do - and is only just nearing compeletion. Once Senator Byrd is gone, the realignment will be complete and the Democratic party will be rid of its race-mongering rump.

Essentially, the two parties have reversed their stance regarding a multi-racial society. Republicans (as the party of Lincoln) used to be 'for it' and Democratic party 'against it'. Now they have reversed within the last 30 years (Republicans are the party of Trent Lott and Storm Thurmund, the Democratic party is the party of Barak Obama).

Party labels and party political platforms mean nothing nowadays. They are used by the power elite to keep the minds of masses occupied while they achieve their goals.

The only political activity worth the investment of our time at present is that of re-empowering the voice of the people within our political system using the Internet -- it's either that or revolution. The political mechanisms are in place. We don't need to re-invent the wheel. It will be much quicker and far more effective to take over the present party system than to create a new one.

All we have to do is join a social networking site, get as many of your friends within your own precinct to network with each other, register with the National Online Party if you like, but organize yourselves online and go after your political party's executive committee member representing you.

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ex animo
davidfarrar
The National Online Party

Yep, it did. What happened was that the Progressive movement of the early 20th Century began a fundamental shift in the ideological makeup of the two major political parties. When Theodore Roosevelt ran for a third term against his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, the result was that the Progressive wing of the Republican Party left to follow him or join up with the Democrats. This paved the way for the conservatives to take over the Republican Party. When the Civil Rights movement found a home with the Democratic Party, the majority of Southern Dixiecrats went over to the GOP in an act of rebellion against integration, thus completing the ideological shift.

In this regard it mirrors an act of geological shift many thousands of years ago. Apparently the Antarctic was in a very different position on the globe than it is today, but the entirety of the Earth's crust seems at some point to have literally slipped upside down in a very short period of time. Imagine an orange, and that the peel is the crust. You know those two spots at either end, one signifying where the stem once was and the other marking where the flower had been? Imagine those two are the physical (not magnetic) poles on the Earth. Now imagine the skin, loose on the orange, suddenly turning around independently so that the two poles are now in a different position than where they were before. The orange itself hasn't moved, but the skin has. Likewise, the Earth's crust moved -- placing the physical poles where they are today.

This is what gradually occurred with the two major political parties a century ago. While the electorate remained more or less the same, the parties that represented disparate interests switched around. By the time FDR was elected president and a new Democratic Congress swept into power in 1932, the GOP was the party of the affluent.

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