Why did the Republicans and Democrats essentailly swap ideologies during the twentieth century?
I have long wondered at the apparent political shift that occurred during the twentieth century in which the conservative reactionary national Democratic Party battling the Progressive Republican Party each switched ideological identities. It’s frankly puzzling. I’m no historian, so I am going to try to present a layman’s view of what I think happened. It seems to revolve around the failure if the otherwise Progressive Republicans to deal with the Great Depression they created by ideologically based failure to use government to either prevent or cure the Great Depression which put the Democratic Party into power nationally until 1994. The Republican Party of the early twentieth century was controlled by liberal Progressives, but part of older liberalism was the free market ideology. The Progressive Republicans were taken over by Wall Street, and Wall Street drove the total free market ideology which both created the Great Depression and intensified it. That was what discredited the Rep
