Political Memes

Feels like you stumbled your words a bit there, not sure if your comment would make sense to people who don't already have the context. I'm gonna leave some very much condensed notes here for future readers.

Basically: 160 years ago the parties were divided by Conservative Democrats, Young Progressive Republicans, and Moderates with respective caucuses, the system in place at the time was the result of the First Party System that ended in the late 1920s and the Second Party System that began thereafter. The caucuses had to form alliances in order to certify the president candidates, the speakers, etc since higher voter participation was only a recent development these decisions were mostly behind closed doors with less concern of public opinions. Lincoln was a Whig, a Moderate Republican with a strong aversion to the war started by the Seceding Southern States. In Fact, despite strong pressure to do so, Lincoln did not abolish slavery until the southern states had already seceded and waged war for 3 years, because he was still hoping until that point to convince the south to surrender and make lesser concessions.

Over the following century things changed quite a bit, while the Republican Party was still for the most part a pro-union and personal liberties/freedoms party until the signing of the bipartisan Civil Rights Act of 1964, in which majority Republicans voted Yes and minority Democrats voted Yes, the turning point is when Democrat President Lindon B Johnson signed the Act and paraded it around as a great achievement, and then went on to fund social programs such as Food Stamps. After this, the parties began to shift such that Republican Candidates had to Campaign against the party who was, in the eyes of the public, the party of Equality. Racism and segregation became a staple Republican Stance. Keep in mind at this point there was no harsh Partisanship or Polarization in the two parties, each had a broad range of opinions in their members but on key votes they usually voted with their caucuses.

This brings us to The Southern Strategy as it was coined by people like high ranking Republican Goldwater. The idea here was that the South was Ripe to be turned over to the Republican Party due to the lingering sentiments of the Civil War and the potential outrage against Lindon B Johnson, so that's where the Republican Party invested all of their campaign funds to try to win the house, senate, and presidency. As this happened, the policy stances of the Republicans had to realign with their new constituents, and the policy stances of Democrats shifted to oppose them. As more time passed Partisanship grew and grew, as illustrated by this nice graphic from Vox.

https://www.vox.com/2015/4/23/8485443/polarization-congress-visualization