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Entry: The Ron Paul Revolution Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_ron_paul_revolution#8647 Post contents: Sid Condiff sed: “We once had a Jeffersonian Party in the Federal US. It was called the Democrat Party. It was a coalition of Catholic ethics, Southern Bourbon Democrats and Northern Copperheads, the British Border-Backcountry, Labor, and Farmers. Wilson destroyed this party and replaced it with a Socialist-Social party that absorbed Farmer-Populist and big Labor.” I really think that your appraisal of the history of the Democrat Party is wrong. In the late 19th Century, the Democrat Party consisted of the southern landowning plutocracy and the corrupt urban political machines, the infamous “Tammany Hall” Democrats. I think you are confusing them with the Whigs. Originally, the Republican Party was the party of labor, of farmers and generally poor people…thus the opposition to slavery as it was a threat to free labor. After the Civil War, the party was corrupted by war profiteering, and slowly became captured by the Wall Street bankers, the wealthy “new’ class that benefited from financing the massive federal debts and industrial growth that the Civil War created. Consequently, neither represented labor or farmers, and both the Republicans and Democrats were threatened by the agrarian populist revolt against the tyranny of the gold standard which was rapidly ruined the ideal of Jefferson Agrarian farmers as millions were bankrupted into becoming destitute sharecroppers. The Democrats could never really convince the urban ethnic laborers to give up the patronage politics of the Democrat urban machines, while the Republican maintained what little support they had among the working and farming classes by constantly “waving the bloody shirt” while the Democrats appealed to the same lot by constantly evoking the “Lost Cause”. Thus the rise of the People‘s Party, the real populist revolt. It would be true to say that the Democrats co-opted the People’s Party, the original agrarian populists on the issue of “free silver“, and Williams Jennings Bryan. But “free silver“ was never central to the real populist reforms. Yes, the Democrats entered the 20th Century uniting farmers, urban workers and the Southern landed aristocracy, which is your Wilson illusion. . For more info, see LAWERENCE GOODWYN's book, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America Sent at: 2008 09 05