Regarding the parties being consistent or "switching" I think the argument too often is too focused on one answer. In fact, it's very complex. You can see some justification of both points of view. In general, I'm inclined to agree with BQ78, that the parties have underlying consistencies. I've given this far more thought in terms of the GOP. I do think the Democrats are more on the shift side than the Republicans.
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The Democratic Party is associated with more progressive policies.
I think this is a legacy of the 1912 shift. I don't think you can really say this about the Democratic Party for most of the 1800s. When the progressive movement came around, it was really a kind of national, bipartisan wave, and it had its earliest successes in the Theodore Roosevelt wing of the GOP. There was a Democratic progressive wing, but it was small and certainly not dominant (remember, the Democratic party was almost entirely Southern at this point). After Roosevelt bolts the GOP in 1912 and fails to win as a progressive, a lot of Republicans who had joined him found themselves homeless. Since they were mostly northerners and the Northern Democratic Party was relatively moribund, they moved en masse to that party, where Wilson was somewhat aligned with them (although they were not racist and he was).
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It supports social and economic equality, favors greater government intervention in the economy but opposes government involvement in the private noneconomic affairs of citizens. Yes the party changed in the 1960s and is changing today but the Democrats have had some consistent policies for hundreds of years.
I think you're on far safer ground to say the Democrats are relatively unchanged since the 1920s-30s than since the 1800s (other than civil rights, the defection of the southern democrats and on foreign policy).
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And the simple fact is that both parties had ideological conservative and liberal wings for over a century before the modern ideological alignment with party.
Yes. The parties became more mixed as they became more national. The Democrats of 1800-1860 were national, with both conservative and liberal wings. The Republicans were more regional before the Civil War, and though they were ideologically consistent and strong on abolition, they were diverse on other issues.
A note on the Democrats in the early days is probably relevant here. The party actually did "shift" but way, way earlier than most people are even thinking. It was the Jeffersonian/Jacksonian divide. Modern people forget how very different they were. It's too easy with our fetish for boiling down all early history to the slavery question, but they were actually very different. First of all, Jefferson NEVER called his party the Democratic Party, and would have been shocked at the usage. He was an advocate of Westerners (the emerging new states) and Southerners and against the New England Elite, but he always lived in the fantasy that the upper crust of the west and South (who wasn't "elite" simply because they weren't New England!) would always make the important decisions. Not the cobblers and the coopers and all those little people. Jefferson was an elitist who pretended he wasn't, which is why he's so hard to understand.
Anyway, I digress. The media, historians, Wikipedia and everyone else calls the early party the "Democratic Republican" Party, but that's 100 percent hindsight looking backwards and it's bullcrap. Jefferson called his party the "Republican" Party because of his ideology that stressed the states rights principles as opposed to Federal power (he never participated in the writing of the constitution and though he was close to Madison, thought even his compromises too much). Let me state this again: Jefferson NEVER used the term "Democratic Republican" and would turn in his grave if he ever heard it. He called his party Republican with no qualifier. Jackson and others started using the term to promote themselves to the common people, but Jefferson hated the concept. After Jackson took over the party, he dropped the term "republican" entirely, and with it, some of the ideology as well. The "Democratic" Party of the later years is really no more the same party as Jefferson's party as the Whigs were the same party as the federalists. They were a successor party that evolved from it, but as distinct as Homo Habilis is from Homo Erectus. Historians retroactively bequeathed the term "democratic republican" on the party to cover the entire period only after the modern Republican Party evolved, necessitating a distinction between them and Jefferson.
When Jackson took over the party, moreover, (recall the shocking (if somewhat exaggerated by political rivals) behavior of his supporters when he took the white house), it apalled Jefferson. Jackson too was an elitist who claimed to be for the common man, but he actually believed it, unlike Jefferson, and he actually did hang out with them. Jefferson, except in his young days, would never have stopped by the pub and drank a pint with the hoi polloi while trading yarns. Jackson would have. (Jefferson was also anti-military, far more so than most people today recognize. It's hard for conservatives, who lionize him, to admit, but when Bill Clinton infamously wrote that he "loathed the military," Jefferson was actually not far from him on that standpoint. Anyway, his hatred of it (more so hatred of the officer corps and the trappings of military power) was primarily focused on Caesar-like military chieftains seeking power - another reason why he absolutely HATED Jackson).
The Jeffersonians called their takeover of power from the federalists the "revolution of 1800" and you could call Jackson's takeover a "revolution" as well.
It is from this moment - the Jacksonian takeover, that you can find traits in the Democratic Party that remain consistent until the modern era: the elevating of the common man, the appealing to the lowest common denominator, etc. There are some Jeffersonian holdovers - agrarianism, states rights, etc. Oddly enough, it's mostly the Jeffersonian parts of the "Democratic-Republican" ideology that have now moved into the Republican platform in many ways, but not the specifically Jacksonian ones.
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One could make the argument that the Democrats signal themselves as being the party for the downtrodden but, in actuality, they remain a party that is primarily acting in the interest of maintaining & expanding power & government control for their like-minded elites.
Yes. What they discovered during the 1890s, when you had free silver and the Grange and all that, is that government power could be used FOR the downtrodden. For most of history, government was on the side of the rich. It was crony capitalism. US opening trade up to Japan, for instance or not caring about rebels around the world unless they had a possible canal route or sugar industry, or later on oil. Republicans harnessed government for the needs of business, but most of this was simply an orientation to business, rather than direct action (the examples cited above being exceptions, not the rule). In the progressive era, as I noted, there was a bipartisan shift to using government to promote the downtrodden, and this group ultimately settled within the northern democratic party. But you'd be hard-pressed to find it anywhere in them prior to 1890. Before then, helping the downtrodden meant keeping government small. By the 20th century, it meant making government big.
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The Civil War is a prime example of how Democrat elites used poorer folk to carry out their initiatives to retain power over governmental affairs. Fighting for "States rights" was a veneer painted over maintaining the strength of a slave labor economy, which benefitted (Democrat) slave owners, predominantly. The expansion of the US, coupled with the friction over new states being slave or paid labor threatened their political power, so they led a rebellion.
I'm not sure if this is Democrat elites doing it because they're Democrats or elites doing it because they're elites. I can see arguments both ways. Abolition and union were also not pure concepts that couldn't be exploited to get a bunch of poor irishmen to fight for New York Republican elites (who can hire substitutes).
I think that in general we're too eager to credit pure motives to the north and evil motives to the south, and I say this as someone who is not a southern apologist. But I will say that you can't overstate the effect of things like Nat Turner and John Brown in the southern ideology. Yes, to some degree, the elites whipped up enthusiasm, but pretty much everybody in the south had convinced themselves or been convinced by others that there was no way to abolish slavery without some kind of Haiti race war with massive slaughter as a result. Abolition wasn't winning converts, but even if it was and you were some southerner having pangs of guilt about slavery at church or something, THIS is what caused you to dig in your heels, and it didn't need the rich southerners to promote it, the poor ones believed it already.
The really big shift in the Democratic Party (amid these things that stay the same) was actually something that happened in the 60s but had nothing to do with civil rights. It was foreign policy. With JFK's death and Vietnam, so too died the pro-military, anti-communist, hyper patriotic aspect of the Democratic Party. In nine years, they went from anti-communist hawks to George McGovern for President. In 40 years, they went from America First to (a skeptic would say) America Last. This was a HUGE shift and had massive repercussions. It's an overlooked aspect of why the South started going Republican. That's a whole other post maybe I can do sometime.
