Republican Party | |
---|---|
Chairperson | Michael Whatley |
Governing body | Republican National Committee |
Founders | Alvan E. Bovay[1] Henry J. Raymond[2] |
Founded | March 20, 1854 Ripon, Wisconsin[3][4] |
Merger of | Whig Party[n 1] Anti-Nebraska movement[7] |
Headquarters | 310 First Street SE Washington, D.C. 20003 |
Youth wing | YRNF, TARs, HSReps |
Women's wing | National Federation of Republican Women |
Membership | 35,739,952 (2023 est.)[8] |
Ideology | |
Political position | Center-right[21] to right-wing[22] |
International affiliation | |
Colors | Red (since 2000) |
Seats in the Senate | 49 / 100 (49%) |
Seats in the House | 220 / 435 (51%) |
State Governors | 27 / 50 (54%) |
Banner logo, c. 2017 | |
Website | |
gop.com | |
^ a: The GOP has been evaluated by political scientists as a conservative-liberal party.[23][24] |
The Republican Party, also known as the GOP (Grand Old Party), is one of the two major political parties in the United States. It is the second-oldest extant political party in the United States after its main political rival, the Democratic Party.
In 1854, the Republican Party emerged to combat the expansion of slavery into western territories after the passing of the Kansas–Nebraska Act. The early Republican Party consisted of northern Protestants, factory workers, professionals, businessmen, prosperous farmers, and, after the Civil War, former black slaves. The party had very little support from white Southerners at the time, who predominantly backed the Democratic Party in the Solid South, and from Irish and German Catholics, who made up a major Democratic voting block. While both parties adopted pro-business policies in the 19th century, the early GOP was distinguished by its support for the national banking system, the gold standard, railroads, and high tariffs. The party opposed the expansion of slavery before 1861 and led the fight to destroy the Confederate States of America (1861–1865). While the Republican Party had almost no presence in the Southern United States at its inception, it was very successful in the Northern United States, where by 1858 it had enlisted former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats to form majorities in nearly every Northern state.
With the election of its first president, Abraham Lincoln, in 1860, the Party's success in guiding the Union to victory in the Civil War, and the Party's role in the abolition of slavery, the Republican Party largely dominated the national political scene until 1932. In 1912, former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party after being rejected by the GOP and ran unsuccessfully as a third-party presidential candidate calling for social reforms. After 1912, many Roosevelt supporters left the Republican Party, and the Party underwent an ideological shift to the right.[25] The GOP lost its congressional majorities during the Great Depression (1929–1940); under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrats formed a winning New Deal coalition that was dominant from 1932 through 1964.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Southern strategy, the party's core base shifted with the Southern states becoming more reliably Republican in presidential politics and the Northeastern states becoming more reliably Democratic. White voters increasingly identified with the Republican Party after the 1960s.[26] Following the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, the Republican Party opposed abortion in its party platform and grew its support among evangelicals.[27] The Republican Party won five of the six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988. Two-term President Ronald Reagan, who held office from 1981 to 1989, was a transformative party leader. His conservative policies called for reduced social government spending and regulation, increased military spending, lower taxes, and a strong anti-Soviet Union foreign policy. Reagan's influence upon the party persisted into the next century.
In 2016, businessman and media personality Donald Trump became the party's nominee for president, won the presidency, and shifted the party further to the right. Since Trump's nomination in 2016, the party is seen to be split between the Trumpist faction, which ranges from far-right nationalists to populists, and the anti-Trump faction, which consists of center-right conservatives, moderate centrists, as well as some traditional conservatives. Since the 1990s, the Party's support has chiefly come from the South, the Great Plains, the Mountain States, and rural areas in the North.[28][29] Today, it supports free market economics, cultural conservatism, and originalism in constitutional jurisprudence.[30] There have been 19 Republican presidents, the most from any one political party.
American conservatism is a form of classical liberalism.
Whichever way you look at it, American conservatism has embraced a great chunk of classical liberalism-so much of it that many observers have argued that American conservatism was an oxymoron; that it is basically classical liberalism in disguise.
Of course, the original conservatives had not really been conservatives either. They were merely classical liberals. It seems to be the case in American that most so-called conservatives have really been something else. This has confused not only external observers of American conservatism (be they on the European Right or on the American Left), but it has confused American conservatives as well.
Locke's classical liberalism is American conservatism, a conservatism whose core ideas went virtually unchallenged until the New Deal.
Moreover, Americans do not use the term liberalism in the same way that Europeans do. In fact, classical European liberalism more closely resembles what we (and what Americans generally) call conservatism.
The conservative veneration of individual autonomy...
The American conservative system of individualism, free markets, economic competition and deep respect for tradition
Conservatism generally is associated with pro-business, anti-labor, and strong-national-defense stances, all of which lead to support for free trade principles.
While right-libertarianism has been equated with libertarianism in general in the United States, left-libertarianism has become a more predominant aspect of politics in western European democracies over the past three decades. ... Since the 1950s, libertarianism in the United States has been associated almost exclusively with right-libertarianism ... As such, right-libertarianism in the United States remains a fruitful discourse with which to articulate conservative claims, even as it lacks political efficacy as a separate ideology. However, even without its own movement, libertarian sensibility informs numerous social movements in the United States, including the U.S. patriot movement, the gun-rights movement, and the incipient Tea Party movement.
Considering all the evidence, the most apt description is that conservative Christianity has transformed the Republican Party, and the Republican Party has transformed conservative Christianity ... With its inclusion in the Republican Party, the Christian right has moderated on some aspects ... At the same time, the Christian right has altered Republican politics.
Unaffiliated Americans were not abandoning orthodox beliefs, but rather, the increase in "no religion" was confined to political moderates and liberals who were likely reacting to the growing alignment of Christian identity with the religious Right and Republicans.3
Within the Republican Party, the Christian Right competes with more secular, upstart free market libertarianism and button-down business conservatism for dominance.
The emergent Christian Right attached itself to the Republican Party, which was more aligned with its members' central commitments than the Democrats ... By the time Falwell died, in 2007, the Christian Right had become the most important constituency in the Republican Party. It played a crucial role in electing Donald Trump in 2016.
In the 1980s and 1990s, as white Christian conservatives forged an alliance with the Republican Party, Christianity itself started to become a partisan symbol. Identifying as a Christian was no longer just about theology, community or family history — to many Americans, the label became uncomfortably tangled with the Christian Right's political agenda, which was itself becoming increasingly hard to separate from the GOP's political agenda.
In this article, we first illustrate that the Republican Party, or at least the dominant wing, which supports or tolerates Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) agenda have become a proto-typical populist radical right-wing party (PRRP).
To better understand the structure of cooperation and competition between these groups, we construct an anatomy of the American center-right, which identifies them as incipient factions within the conservative movement and its political instrument, the Republican Party.
A strict two-party system, such as the United States, does not fit the tripolar logic. If authoritarian attitudes exist in an electorate that effectively has no potential for anything but a choice between one centre-left and one centre-right party, people with such attitudes may find a place in one of the two dominant parties.
The most relevant distinctions within the parties' activist bases are likely to be between the most conservative Republicans and center-right Republicans and between the most liberal Democrats and center-left Democrats. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats no longer exist within either party's activist base.[failed verification]
A primary driver of comparisons between the USA and other Anglosphere centre-right parties appears to be cultural and language affinities.
the Republicans changed from being a right of centre coalition of moderates and conservatives to an unambiguously right-wing party that was hostile not only to liberal views but also to any perspective that clashed with the core views of an ideologically cohesive conservative cadre of party faithfuls
The larger ideology that the president-elect represents is a post-Iraq War, post-crash, post-Barack Obama update of what used to be called paleoconservatism: On race and immigration, where the alt-right affinities are most pronounced, its populist ideas are carrying an already right-wing party even further right.
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