15 thoughts on “Another Inappropriate Historical Analogy”
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Oh, this could be picked apart on many levels, including the fact that it’s not accurate. However, political propaganda has never been known for accuracy. More accurate, but no less inappropriate, would be pointing out that the 1964 Civil Rights Bill was passed with Republican support over a filibuster by Democrats (ignoring the fact that many of those filibustering Democrats in ’64 would probably be Republicans today while many of those Republicans in ’64 couldn’t get nominated by today’s Republican party, and I say this as someone who generally leans Republican).
Ignoring the fact that the GOP of today is the party of the states that formed the Confederacy, and the 2012 Democrats are the heirs of the 1860 Republicans, a change that began in the 1950s, the ad argues that all those who fought for the Union were Republicans, This is something that Black Jack Logan, Dan Sickles, even USG (who would have voted for Douglas had he been able to satisfy Illinois’ residency requirements), would have disagreed with.
Apart from the obvious shift in the parties since the 1960s, typical estimates are that 40% of Union soldiers were Democrats or came from Democratic families. Probably the same percent of Southerners came from families that were Whigs or Know nothings in the 1860s. Given that the II corps was the “Democratic Corps”, it could be argued that in the Army of the Potomac the casualty rate for Democrats was higher than that for Republicans.
I guess things started to change around FDR.
!860,- 2012 diffident worlds, different political parties. I never apply 18th century historical events or 18th century politics to my 2012 political views.
Can you spell p-r-o-p-a-g-a-n-d-a… I’m tempted to say this is much along the line of what we get from “the gift that keeps on giving”. Just another case of bad and/or selective history…
I never thought I’d see Republicans waving the bloody shirt during my lifetime–especially in reference to the Civil War. Given the complete reversal of party positions, this goes to show how stupid politicians think their constituents are.
Just stating the truth. Democrats will have to face the fact that they were the party of Segregation for about 100 years. Almost every Confederate had voted Democrat in 1860. Further, Southern racists in South Carolina voted for a Democrat POTUS nominee in every election from 1880-1976 except for Nixon in ’72 and Goldwater in ’64. The segregationist South voted for Al Smith, Stevenson, and JFK.
Not all Union dead were Republicans … and not all Confederate dead were Democrats.
I remember that John Ransom, the author of Andersonville Diary, touched on this. According to him, he and his fellow POWs held a mock election in which he voted for McClellan–he’d been a War Democrat all along. Ransom also noted an interesting trend: the older men in the Army tended to support McClellan, while the younger soldiers favored Lincoln.
And, of course, a lot of votes by soldiers either way on McClellan would have had diddly to do with “Democrat/Republican”.
That’s true–they were voting for the man and the policy. Of course the soldier vote went heavily for Lincoln.
Voters are not — and should not be — focused on what their respective parties positions were 50, or 100, or 150 years ago. Part of having a well-informed electorate is people having a general sense of how the political landscape has shifted over time, but I don’t think many potential voters are going to be swayed by arguments of this sort. Anyone who argues that the (D) and (R) parties stand on the same ground they did generations ago is either an idiot or a liar.
So unless the Dems in South Carolina have dug up Pitchfork Ben Tillman’s corpse and are running him for office again, I really don’t see any merit behind the argument behind this ad at all.
What on earth does that have to do with 2012? Abe Lincoln expanded the federal government exponentially, favored big government involvement in transportation and higher education, and imposed an income tax. Tell me what party he’d be aligned with today, if any? The labels mean squat 150 years later. Plus they leave out everybody before 1856.
Go back to the War of 1812 and see the party of the South start a war that wrecked the US economy, cost more than the Revolution did for the national government and all the states combined, and pretty much wreck and invalidate a lot of Jefferson’s cherished small government ideas. Then see the Treaty of Ghent that ended it giving the US absolutely nothing as the result of the war. You’ll have massive taxation, expansion of the federal government, and huge social, economic, and cultural change which was always what the Jeffersonians didn’t want.