A simple question. Did they always have some vested interests in working together yet appear as red vs blue or were they separate then slowly coalesse over the years into becoming a unified deep state?
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There are numerous points in time and overlapping events we could call death knells in actual multi-party representation. The civil war and Lincoln's "Americanism" destroyed any actual sense of real opposition in the political leadership. "These United States" became "The United States" - a country with a strong centralized government and the states as subordinate provinces. You could talk a good game about our freedom and fighting back against whatever they were imposing, but from that point on everyone knew you couldn't actually back it up with force if necessary. You had to be the loyal opposition. This naturally filtered out anyone who wasn't going to play the game.
Then you get into a lot of the unconstitutional economic shit that's above my head, but was no doubt easier to pass since the politicians no longer represented the people and were more easily bought out. This includes the Income Tax and the Federal Reserve. (someone needs to tell me how they managed to get so many states to agree to the income tax though, because I don't see that happening today)
Rebellious and independent sentiment was still alive within the states themselves for a long time, as people still believed what they were taught about the constitution and states rights. That was until the Civil Rights Act got passed, and schools were forced to integrate by the military. This meant that not only did Governors have to follow federal law, but individuals and businesses no longer had their own freedom of association. Everyone now felt the loving reach of Uncle Sam. You'd think that means people would become more united against the government, but...
Mass media had already been bringing the nation together into single competing ideologies (rather than individual self-interested state factions) for a while at that point, and more individuals at the local level were able to get involved in the process than ever before. Various constitutionalist groups who pointed out that neither party was following the founding principles any more - and worse yet might be influenced by international communist ideology - were gradually gaining support. The "two-party" system couldn't allow this. Controlled opposition figures like William F. Buckley were put in place and amplified by the media to dampen any kind of actual groundswell opposition. (the John Birch Society was one, but the pattern has repeated many times since then with backing of the intelligence agencies) Rather than people being encouraged to build coalitions from the ground-up and vote their conscious, the media always held up third-parties as spoilers to keep people locked into the "two-party" system.
Obviously there's a lot more to it, like how wars were exploited to strengthen the military industrial complex, influential wealthy cabals of rootless globalists, clandestine oversight of the parties, and punishing politicians who strayed too far off the ranch. Good lord it's times like this I wish we had 'Based AI'. A legit chatbot should be able to generate a much better answer than that, with sources... but if you asked any major model this question today it would parrot off some bullshit about progress and gay rights and how the uniparty is a baseless conspiracy theory.
Lincoln was the real end of America. Humanity experienced true freedom for not even a century before that quisling sent the Federal Government to crush all resistance to his authoritarian dreams.
π¨βππ«π¨βπAlways has been
At least starting with Woodrow Wilson
The last proper republican was Herbert Hoover. The party lost its spine in the following decades.
You have to understand one thing: Eisenhower was not a Republican. He was Eisenhower. Now, he did believe old guard Republican things (ie, he wasn't a racist democrat) but economically he was a New Dealer.
Nixon was probably the smartest of the Cold War presidents when it came to foreign affairs, but he should have handled inflation by keeping the dollar peg. He knew NOTHING about economics and trusted the wrong people.
By the time you get to Reagan, the party has already been transformed. Reagan was just a tough talking sock puppet.
Donald Trump, republican, was a 90s democrat.
Ronald Reagan, republican, was a 50s democrat.
It's tiresome to realize people have been propping up false republican saviors longer than I've been alive. And I don't even hate Trump.
Not to mention Reagan was complicit in something nefarious, given that CIA Director Bush was his VP.
Trump and Reagan really are the perfect examples of how todays Republicans are yesterdays Democrats.
Whether or not someone idolizes Reagan is a great test to see if he is just repeating talking points or has actually thought about what is going on.
One guy who doesn't get enough shit is Jack Kemp.
If you were to look at all the things that suck about the current congressional republicans, he would be patient zero.
Rush Limbaugh idolized Reagan to the point of calling him Ronaldus Magnus.
There, fixed that for ya. Hoover portrayed himself as a conservative, and was portrayed by the Left as a rabid, uncaring man... but a lot of his policies and people were kept on by FDR. Kinda like how a lot of people in the Dubya government were kept on by Obama.
Meanwhile, Coolidge did a lot of radical things, and was vilified for them. Every department in the Executive Branch got a 10% budget cut per year, and all office supplies were rationed (to keep people from stealing them and selling them). The end result was ostracism to the point that lifetime Federal employees quit rather than work for Coolidge.
Your grievance against Hoover's response to depression is understandable but blind to magnitudes.
Yes, Hoover did create many of the programs that FDR rolled with. But under Hoover's government they were all very small.
I understand that there are some people, probably even yourself, who adopt a "size matters not" attitude with regards to government programs, but, well, that's irrational absolutism, and we're never going to agree on that.
The more I learn about Reagan the more I dislike him especially since most conservatives worship him.
Hoover was the first director of the FBI and a corrupt faggot.
Wrong Hoover. You're thinking J.Edgar Hoover.
Herbert Hoover was one of the founders of Consolidated Zinc (now Rio Tinto Group), the Commerce Secretary who standardized radio, and then President.
It could be argued that Hoover was the first conservative shock jock. Guy loved giving radio speeches, and he was chummy with all the radio execs during FDR's government. Even with all the blame FDR threw at him for the depression, if Hoover wanted a radio address, he could get it. It was partly why the GOP was in such shambles during FDR, because Hoover was (much like Trump today) just so much better at being a public figure than anyone they could find to actually run.
"Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt." -HH
My best guesstimation would probably be around the Civil War, since then looking through history it's more dependent on the executive than the legislator. Look how things flipped when Teddy went from VP to president.
we've always been being probed, infiltrated, subverted by City of London banking. the south during the civil war was bankrolled by British/Jew banks to fight the war, including all of the south's warships.
we had about 2+ decades of nationalism after the civil war. we built ourselves into an industrial powerhouse in that time, challenging all of the world's top economies.
then we were finally fully subverted and colonized by the parasites. They killed McKinley and installed their puppets. Soon Woodrow Wilson came along and that was that. End of the USA. They really should have renamed the country at that point. The republic is dead.
Post-Civil War and entering the Imperial expansion of the US territories is really where things get set in motion. Concept of States rights crushed, the federal government amassing more power and control after the turn of the century. Looking outward by getting involved in other nations distorts central governments to become more uniform rather than internal interests.
But it becomes more apparent after World War II and obvious once the 60s and 70s kick in.
The real answer to this question is in about the end of the civil war. The wrong side won the civil war in the USA. The end of the civil war brought about changes to the patronage/spoils system in the USA where politicians were able to reward their friends and similar like-minded people when they won elections with positions of power that paid well, hence spoils system. This essentially allowed politicians in the USA to not care about corporations and corporate interests because you could get rich off politics itself. When this system was abolished, corporations gained significant influence in politics because now the only real way to get rich off politics was to be backed by corporations and have corporate interests at heart instead of political interests. This led to the Uniparty. The patronage system was abolished officially in 1883 and the result of that was essentially the creation of the central bank in 1913. The USA has been "Uniparty" ever since. Had the Confederates won the civil war, things would have advanced quite differently and the USA likely would be a much better country.
https://mises.org/library/betrayal-american-right-0
It's been a long, long time. The Old Right was characterized by opposition to the New Deal and that faction was evaporated in the events and aftermath of WW1 & 2, with anyone who had managed to avoid that then being attacked by Bill Buckley, who is an absolute shitstain. The Old Right was extremely radical compared to our current crop of traditional conservative apologists for the existing order. That's the thing though, anyone who would dare speak up or out against what was happening was thrown in jail and thrown out of good graces of the institutions. We've had nothing but absolute fucking garbage on the right ever since. I cannot even imagine a "right winger" embracing the inequality of nature and the world, they're all completely ruined at their core having been raised chanting to the song of democracy and reading from the hymnbook of equality.
Assassin47 has a good point that Lincoln is perhaps a better time to place the beginning of this happening, truly a despicable tyrant. However, despite literally leading a war against his own brethren he didn't completely and utterly eradicate the ideology or the people from the face of the earth but I imagine if he had the WW1 and WW2 version of the US empire he would have tried to do so.
Republicans have always been marked by a certain progressivism that have made them uniparty compatible. The last Party I liked was literally the evuuuul slaving Democrats. Modern Republicans are about 1/100th as "right wing" as they were. There has not been a real right wing since the destruction of the South.
The US Civil War wasn't like most civil wars. We just politely split into two countries, fought a conventional war, one side formally surrendered, and the country got back together. There weren't vicious ethnic massacres, nobody was finding their cousin in a ditch with wire wrapped around his wrists and drill holes in his kneecaps, it was just a regular war.
I don't care if it was or wasn't like other civil wars. I didn't compare or contrast it to another civil war so I don't know why you are saying this to me.
Congress started getting really dysfunctional after Newt Gingrich's Contract on America.
Before that pork barrel was the way of the world and each congressman lobbied to get funds into his own state. Each state fought each other to get government programs, whether they were red or blue.
Newt and the Contract made changes to committees and destroyed comity between the parties resulting in congressmen representing their party more than their state. There were other factors like 24/7 CNN followed by internet information bubbles, but Newt was the progenetor.
This gave the uniparty more control since more deals are made in the back room and by party machine rather than by individual representatives with riders and earmarks.
Everybody infighting over who directly gets benefits from expansion of government is still uniparty- real opposition would be fighting to prevent the expansion of government and the inherent theft from the taxpayer involved, not squabbling for handouts
I think it was between WW1 and WW2 that it solidified into a majority. States had lost a lot of their power. Global rich bros pulling strings in govt and media. That huge 'white feather' smear campaign organized in WW1 is a good example of social engineering and division sowing like we are being hammered with today. We get the breakout of oligarch funded feminism. Prohibition to snatch more control, then even more control as a 'reaction' a sold-solution to the problem they created. We get the creation of untouchable govt agencies.
I'd go back to about Woodrow Wilson for a uniparty with some exceptions mixed in as President that didn't play along. Although the ruin of the United States goes all the way back to Alexander Hamilton. There's been issues from day 1.
*Replicants.