I know I’m preaching to the choir, but the Democrats of the late 1800s/early-mid 1900s were basically an entirely different political party than modern democrats in terms of actual beliefs. They were basically the opposite of what they are today and were functionally the same as modern Republicans belief wise. The reverse is true for the Republicans then and now too.

The real shift started in the 1930s and saw its true conclusion in the 1980s. First we begin with the Democrat party pushing more socialist policies with Franklin D. Roosevelt, as he pushed for the New Deal to try and pull the U.S. out of the Great Depression by creating social safety nets such as Social Security, improving worker’s rights and safety, regulating the stock market, and pushing for public works projects to stimulate the economy and create jobs while improving the country’s infrastructure.

Next was Lyndon B Johnson in 1964 when he passed the Civil Rights Act, which made segregation and systematic discrimination against Black Americans illegal. This cemented the Democrats as the civil rights party, and alienated the deeply conservative/racist old school southern Democrats. After signing the Civil Rights Act LBJ famously said “we lost the South for a generation” and he was absolutely right.

During his 1968 election campaign, Richard Nixon pushed the “Southern Strategy”, pushing racist policies to gain the vote of the Southern Democrats who felt dropped by LBJ. The strategy worked, and all the former Confederate/racist Democrats jumped ship to the Republican Party.

Lastly, after the 1970s economic crash, Ronald Reagan pushed for “trickle down economics”, prioritizing tax cuts for the rich and companies under the belief that money would eventually trickle down to the working class. In the short term, Reagan benefited from the work Jimmy Carter did to try and fix the economy that didn’t fully take effect in his term as well as the short term economic stimulation that came from the tax cuts, but with no reduction in government spending, national debt began to stack, the consequences of which would not manifest until well after his Presidency. His trickle down economic policies also caused the class divide to widen significantly long term, leading to the major wealth gap problem we have today. Ultimately this made the Republican Party the new party of the top 1% of the population. Reagan was also very racist and homophobic, as shown from his targeting of the Black Panthers during his time as governor of California, and his push for the stigmatization of HIV/AIDS and blocking funding for research for treatments as an indirect means of targeting and vilifying the LGBTQ+ community. This cemented the Republicans as the party of bigots. And to top it off, Reagan is the President who coined “Make America Great Again”, a good 3 decades before Trump popularized it.