Conservatives: wolves in sheep's clothing for 200 years

[fabius]

An historical example - Conservatives try out their new spin.

In the late 1830’s, faced with several electoral defeats at the hands of the Jacksonian Democrats, the conservative party (Whigs), began to modify their once unabashedly elitist message, with its aristocratic Federalist roots, to appeal to the working class. They didn’t actually modify their preferred policies, just the spin. If you look closely you can discern a familiar pattern:

“The problem of government", Justice Story had once said, was “how the property-holding part of the community may be sustained against the inroads of poverty and vice”. But now that “poverty and vice” had been granted the vote, it was essential to discover some less insulting way of talking about them. The radicals, moreover, were beginning to turn Federalist axioms against the Federalists with great political effect. The Hamiltonian demonstrations of the innate hostility of numbers to wealth, for example, now appeared powerful proof of the innate hostility of wealth to numbers. The result in votes lost of this restatement of their own argument impelled the conservatives to work out more affectionate theories of the relationship between the “rich and well-born” and the masses.

<snip>

As an associated strategy, the business community worked out a kind of pastoral mythology about the laboring classes, describing the beauty of relations between capital and labor, and hinting, sometimes not too subtly, that the workingman was far happier than the wealthy capitalist. The propertyless classes, once a menace to social stability, now became the sturdy core of the nation.

The first real test of this approach was the election of 1840. The Whig candidate was war hero William Henry Harrison, a man of aristocratic background and unremarkable achievements. The Democratic candidate was Van Buren, running for re-election on the “Jacksonian” Democratic ticket. (Just so he gets credit, Van Buren instituted the ten-hour work day for Federal contracts – a real liberal).

Hard cider and a log cabin? Yes, the answer soon rang across the land, the Whig party is the party of hard cider and log cabins, and it will defend them to the end against all sneers of the Democrats.

Harrison himself, born a Virginia aristocrat, watched without protest his transmutation into a plain man of the people, while his spacious house in Ohio was reshaped into a humble log cabin. Nicholas Biddle’s advice of 1836 was not forgotten: pen and ink were as wholly forbidden (to Harrison) as if he were a mad poet in Bedlam. His public appearances were infrequent, vague, and highly effective. The weatherbeaten old soldier, exchanging his tall silk hat for a broad-brimmed rustic model, speaking with great earnestness to little effect, delighted crowds already exhilarated by Whig hard cider. … But on most major issues Harrison’s views were carefully concealed, doubtless even from himself.

Unfortunately it worked for the Whigs that time.

From The Age of Jackson, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., 1945.

Sorry, no link, you have to get the whole book. If you want to know how the people keep getting fooled, read and find out: the Right has had two hundred years of practice.

[Sulldogg]

1. It is disingenuous

to associate the Whigs with the Republicans who were founded in response to the other parties (Whigs, Democrats and 'Know Nothings') and their ambivalence towards slavery.

About half of the Whigs became southern pro-slavery Democrats and half became northern anti-slavery Republicans.

[fabius]

2. Also disingenuous ...

...to associate the Party of Lincoln with the Party of Bush. When they first were founded the Republicans were the "radicals", in favor of human rights and against slavery. Where are they now?

[Sulldogg]

3. Never did I say they were

Today's incarnation of Goldwater Republicans is in no way the Party of Lincoln.

[ashling]

4. The "Republican Revolution"

is Abraham Lincoln - turning over in his grave!