cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17294985
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” - Abraham Lincoln
“I am glad to know that there is a system of labor where the laborer can strike if he wants to! I would to God that such a system prevailed all over the world.” - Abraham Lincoln
“The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.” - Karl Marx
For anyone who doesn’t understand how it happened, after the civil war the Republican party slowly began to become a big business party after all the contracting that was done to supply the Union military brought party leadership into network with business leaders.
This relationship began to drag the party rightward on economics, while the reforming northern democrats began to drift left as the northern party’s ranks became filled with working class voters.
By the time of the 1930s the northern democrats had a solid hold on black voters because they’d moved far enough to the left on class issues, even if they had to caucus with dixiecrats to ever do anything, and when the civil rights movement made their push, LBJ chose them over the dixiecrats, marking the beginning of the transition from a bigtop party generally to a more region locked coalition party like we see today.
Worth mentioning is that very few people actually “switched” parties, the “switch” took the form of new voters changing who they were registering with in the wake of the civil rights breakthroughs drawing the center and left towards the democrats and the war on abortion pulling the right to the republicans.
And that’s how a party once lead by a quite possibly proto or para socialist who went to war to crush slavers becomes a party that threatens the fabric of democracy.
The lesson here is that autocracy anywhere is a threat to democracy anywhere. Big business leaders will always choose capitalism over democracy, we cannot allow them to have the power to make the decision. We must begin a transition to a more democratic economic model, to worker ownership.
Vote to save our democracy, and then organize to spread it to the dark corners where the autocrats go to hide in reserve for the next round.
We must purge them like parasitic slime they are.
It was much much after the civil war. Teddy Roosevelt was not a business friendly Republican. God he would be fun to have around today.
Interestingly Wilson also claimed to be a progressive like Teddy(and had some actual social justice initiatives to show for it despite being an awful white supremacist) and that three way election between Him, Taft, and Teddy was a big part of the switch. Harding to Hoover is what really cemented the switch to capital and conservatisim in the Republican party.
That election really was one where America still had some ideas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_United_States_presidential_election
Yes and no, Roosevelt was very anti big business, but that made him a step outside the trend. It’s actually part of how he became president. He was doing too good a job fighting corrupt business in NY as governor, so they stuck him in as VP basically to lock him out of anything he could do but make noise about it all.
And then an Anarchist shot McKinley, and Teddy was off the leash.
Had it been up to party leadership Teddy would have gone down as another one of the also rans progressives hold up to insist that the fix is always in against “real progress”