>>45606741The Democratic and Republican parties have essentially swapped ideological positions since their inception. Since race is the most consistent wedge issue in American history, all you really need to know is each party's historical stance on black people to understand how they've shifted. Before (and during) the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. From the Civil War up to roughly the Great Depression, the Democratic Party was the party of the Ku Klux Klan. There are literal libraries worth of books you or I could read to understand when and why the swap happened, but for most of its history the Democratic Party was explicitly conservative and at a minimum segregationist.
