The Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP), is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States. It emerged as the main political rival of the then-dominant Democratic Party in the 1850s. Since then, the two parties are dominant within the two-party system of American politics.
The Republican Party was founded in 1854 by anti-slavery activists who opposed the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed for the extension of slavery to the western territories.[21] The party supported classical liberalism and economic reform[22] geared to industry, supporting investments in manufacturing, railroads, and banking. The party was successful in the North, and by 1858, it had enlisted most former Whigs and former Free Soilers to form majorities in almost every northern state. White Southerners of the planter class became alarmed at the threat to the future of slavery in the United States. With the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, the Southern states seceded from the United States. Under the leadership of Lincoln and a Republican Congress, the Republican Party led the fight to defeat the Confederate States in the American Civil War, thereby preserving the Union and abolishing slavery.
After the war, the party largely dominated national politics until the Great Depression in the 1930s, when it lost its congressional majorities and the Democrats' New Deal programs proved popular. Dwight D. Eisenhower's election in 1952 was a rare break between Democratic presidents and he presided over a period of increased economic prosperity after World War II. Following the 1960s era of civil rights legislation and the 1964 conservative candidacy of Barry Goldwater, the South became more reliably Republican, and Richard Nixon carried 49 states in the 1972 election, with what he touted as his "silent majority". The 1980 election of Ronald Reagan realigned national politics, bringing together advocates of free-market economics, social conservatives, and Cold War foreign policy hawks under the Republican banner.[23] The 2000s saw an era of compassionate conservatism and neoconservatism under George W. Bush. Dissatisfaction within the party of this policy direction led to the rise of the Tea Party, libertarianism, and an emphasis on "the culture wars" in the 2010s, culminating in the election of Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2024 elections. His presidencies have both been marked by national conservative, right-wing nationalist, and populist policies.
In the 21st century, the Republican Party receives its strongest support from rural voters, evangelical Christians, men, senior citizens, and voters without college degrees.[24][25][26] On economic issues, the party has maintained a pro-business attitude since its inception. It supports low taxes and deregulation while opposing socialism, labor unions, and single-payer healthcare.[27][28] On social issues, it advocates for restricting abortion, discouraging and often prohibiting recreational drug use, and promoting gun rights.
A key feature of this is the thorough and ever-growing asymmetry that has come to characterize the partisan political context in the United States and that directs our attention to the conservative side of the political spectrum: the Republican Party as its major organizational embodiment
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.
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.
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.
By comparison, the U.S. Republican Party (Gould 2014) is something of an outlier. This is principally a product of the uniqueness of the U.S. party system. Indeed, major shifts in the party's ideological focus can only in part be explained by its longevity (founded in 1854). Unlike its Liberal/Conservative counterparts in the Anglosphere and Europe, the Republican party machine is considerably weaker than any of its counterparts and the frequency of elections has profoundly shaped the way political elites relate to their party and develop policy ideas. Historically, the electoral system has buttressed a true two-party system, which meant building broad coalitions. Today that instinct is countermanded by growing electoral boundary manipu- lation which sees the party aim to disenfranchise ideological opponents, while narrowcasting to its own ideological base. These features are either unique or extreme by comparison to other centre-right parties discussed here. Given this, it is not surprising that where comparisons between parties have occurred, they have focused on ideological dimensions, policy ideas and the exchange of campaign techniques (see Wineinger and Nugent 2020). A primary driver of comparisons between the USA and other Anglosphere centre-right parties appears to be cultural and language affinities, and if anything, this highlights the relative lack of comparison between centre-right parties in the Anglosphere (such as Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Canada and Ireland) which share greater institutional similarities.
Polarization by education
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
Democrats have become the home of highly-educated citizens with progressive social views who prefer credentialed experts to make policy decisions, while Republicans have become the populist champions of white voters without college degrees who increasingly distrust teachers, scientists, journalists, universities, non-profit organizations, and even corporations.
Higher Education
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
New Fusionism
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
The most sweeping account of how neoliberalism came to dominate American politics for nearly a half century before crashing against the forces of Trumpism on the right and a new progressivism on the left.
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