There's a lot about both parties that have changed during their long histories, but also a lot about both parties that has stayed the same.
The Party Switch narrative is correct in that specifically Southern White Supremacists switched from being Democrats to being Republicans in the mid 20th Century. How and why it happened is a longer and more complicated story than the common simplified narrative that makes it about 1 or 2 presidential elections in the 1960s, but the gist of that narrative is true.
In fact I’ll even say there’s another type of voter who switched from being more likely to be Democrats to more likely to be Republicans slightly sooner and that’s Classical Liberals or Pro-Capitalism Libertarians like Grover Cleveland.
However, the problem I have is when people act like this means in every way they completely switched, that there was nothing Liberal about any of the Antebellum Democrats and nothing Conservative about the Antebellum Republicans. The fact is that what political positions seem to innately go together today did not always innately go together, many of them seemed innately at odds in the past. At their philosophical core the continuity between what these parties were when they were founded and what they are today is greater than the divergence.
Typical attempts to in any way deconstruct the Party Switch narrative are done with an agenda of supporting the modern Republican Party. But that’s not what I’m doing, I don’t like either party in its current state and think both had more redeeming qualities in the past then they do now but would not fully endorse either at any time period. Which one I would nominally consider the lesser Evil depends on the circumstances. But the basic fact that the Republican Party is today the party of the Racists is not a fact that can be denied no matter how you look at its history.
I shall start with the origins of the Democratic Party.
Andrew Jackson was a Slave Plantation Owner and a Racist against both Blacks and Native Americans. But he very much demonstrated that he did not prioritize his positions on those issues over the Unity of the Union. He opposed “States Rights” during the Nullification Crisis creating tension with other Southern Democrats like John C. Calhoun, and even predicted the next Crisis to provoke Secession would be the Slavery question. Regardless Jackson was also the first U.S. President who was an active vocal defender of Slavery.
The reasons Jackson is a villain to modern Leftists were unforntatly not divisive issues at the time, I'm sure people on the right sides of them did exist but they were not what principally animated any Presidential Elections of the 1820s and 30s. The organized vocal anti Jackson sentiment of the time came from the right, from New England and New York aristocrats and also the Anti-Masons, modern Conspiracy Theorists lionizing Jackson have it backwards, at the time people who believed in the Illuminati saw Jackson as an Illuminati puppet.
The Democrats were named what they were because they wanted to make the country more Democratic, there is a reason why in both the 19th and 21st Centuries every Presidential Election with a discrepancy between the Popular Vote and Electoral Vote it was the Democrats who lost even though they got more votes. And both then and now the Party was partly driven by Anti-Wall Street Populism.
The Republican Party when it was founded is often mischaracterized as a Single Issue Party with that issue being opposition to Slavery. The thing is the nation had already had Anti-Slavery single issue parties and they were no more successful than any other single issue party. The Republican Party was simply the first major Political Party that was not internally divided on the Slavery issue.
And that includes the Democrats, Anti-Slavery Democrats always existed, particularly in the northern States. Martin Van Buren was a co-founder of the Party who came down against Slavery when that became a divisive issue. In New York the Pro-Slavery Faction were called the Hunkers and the Anti-Slavery faction the Barnburners. Remember when I said above the Classical Liberals were mostly Democrats in the 1800s? Well they were usually with the Anti-Slavery Democrats like Samuel Tilden, which is not surprising since Classical Liberals followed the Economic Ideology of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill who both made their opposition to Chattel Slavery well known. Local and State level Politicians in the North often didn’t concern themselves with Slavery one way or the other which is why I have trouble even finding the Anti-Slavery Democrats outside New York, but one example is Nelson Dewey the first Governor of my home state of Wisconsin.
The most vocal and uncompromising Pro-Slavery Southern Democrats were not Liberals, Classical or Otherwise, nor were they “Conservative” by any modern understanding of Conservatism, they were Agrarian Neo-Feaudalists who self identified as Anti-Capitalist and loved Thomas Carlyle. But those two types were not the only types the Democrats had, they also had the ideological ancestors of the future Progressive Democrats.
Slavery was not the only issue early American Parties were internally divided on, for the most part they were not even truly Ideologically defined parties to begin with. America’s first party system was during Washington’s first term primarily about the fight over Hamilton's Bank but after that issue was settled it became principally Political Anglophiles (Federalists) vs Political Francophiles (Democratic-Republicans). However the French Revolution context of that made it so Anglophiles tended to lean Tory (or at least Burkean) and Francophiles tended to lean Jacobin (or at least Girondin).
However one interesting expectation would be how after the Hattian Revolution many former Saint-Domingue Slave owner emigres migrated to the Southern United States, especially the Carolinas. Some of them were Royalist but some supported The French Revolution in-spite of how popular Abolitionist Sentiment was across all the factions of the Revolution in Paris. And then there's how Napoleon complicated things.
The story of how the Democratic Party is related to prior American political parties is usually oversimplified as just being a daughter of the Democratic-Republicans. And there is some truth to that especially in New York where Tammany Hall is the continuity between them. The problem is after the Federalist Party was basically dead and the U.S. became functionally a Single Party State for awhile, many Federalists just joined the Democratic-Republicans without really changing their positions on anything, this is especially true of John Quincey Adams.
Jacksonian Democracy is basically the partial fulfillment of the vision of Northern Federalist James Wilson. While the Ethos of the Southern Democrats arguably began with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney who was Hamilton’s handpicked successor as leader of the Federalists. Oliver Wolcott Jr was an important Federalist who became a Jacksonian at the end of his life. And James Buchanan was a Federalist till 1824. Meanwhile Thomas Jefferson who was still alive in 1824 was vocal in his distaste for Andrew Jackson.
Another interesting detail of the Jackson era Nullification Crisis was that James Madison came out in clear opposition to allowing states to Secede from the Union.
Early American Labor Unions were already more inclined to support the Democrats over Republicans even before the Civil War.. William H. Sylvis supported Stephen Douglas during the 1960 Election but was Loyal to the Union during the Civil War. Before that just look at the history of the Locofocos and the Working Men's Party.
Also pre Civil War it was already the Democrats who were more supportive of Immigrants while the Nativist WASP Xenophobes like the Know Nothings and Bowery Boys were more inclined towards first the Whigs then the Republicans. George F. Edmunds was of the founding generation of the Republican Party being elected to office as a Republican in 1954, and went on in 1894 to be a founding member of the Immigration Restriction league which throughout its history was lead by Republicans like Henry Cabot Lodge though most Democrats also wound up voting for the Legislation it backed in 1917. The principal sponsors of the 1924 Immigration Act were also Republicans, Albert Johnson and David A. Reed.
The reason so many people want to believe the “party switch” represented a more complete switch then it actually was is because the simplistic shorthand definition of what a “Conservative” is makes one assume a Conservative could only ever claim to oppose Slavery in Hindsight. However Edmund Burke is popularly referred to as the father of Modern Conservatism, and he was very vocal in his opposition to Slavery. John Wesley was an Abolitionist to the right of even Burke actually calling himself a Tory and opposing the American Patriots. The Federalists in the United States were very much the Edmund Burkes of America, especially Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris and John Adams, all three opposed Slavery with Morris being the one person at the Constitutional Convention trying to get Slavery outright Abolished at the country's inception. And they equally shared Burke’s hatred of the French Revolution.
The Whigs were born out of the ashes of the Federalist Party, especially Northern Federalists, and then the early Republican Party was entirely led by Former Whigs. During it's brief existence the Confederacy never developed much of a Party system, but in North Carolina an opposition party made of former Whigs did exist for a bit and called itself the Conservative Party.
Alven R. Bovay was a former Whig co-founder of the Republican Party who in 1874 denounced the Party considering its Anti-Slavery Mission statement complete at a time when Reconstruction was already on the verge of failing and went on to join the Temperance movement. So he sounds exactly like a modern “Racism is already solved” type Conservative.
Following the various “Compromises” of 1850 and 1854 the most recent changes to the Status Quo were in favor of the Slave States. So in that context fighting those changes became definitionally Conservative or even full on Reactionary.
The appearance of the Republican Party being a single issue party was marketing, they got the Votes of even Marxists because Marx himself rightly deemed opposing Slavery the most vital issue in the U.S. at that time, and also many Anti-Slavery Democrats left to join the Republicans. But the leadership of the Party was almost entirely former Whigs who were a Burkean Conservative Party. At the 1856 Convention their platform already treated another issue as of near equal importance, opposing Polygamy on the same false Biblical Logic that their 2004 opposition to Gay Marriage was based on. At the 1860 Convention’s Platform they downplayed the Slavery question refusing to call for outright Abolition. This platform condemned Disunion but also affirmed the sovereignty of the States, so no the Republicans didn’t start caring about States Rights only when former Southern Democrats joined them a century later.
Opposing Slavery was always objectively good, but not everyone who opposed Slavery did so for the right reasons. Some were Racists who didn’t want Black people in the country at all. But more influential than that were the Northern Capitalists who viewed the Southern Plantation owners as Economic Rivals they wanted to crush, and the South as a whole as a Pre-Capitalist Society ripe for Imperialist exploitation. And that’s why most of the Republicans never really wanted Reconstruction to go all the way, actually making the Freed Slaves truly fully enfranchised citizens would make them more difficult to exploit. Giving them ownership of the Land they spent Generations working would get in the way of Proletarianizing them.
Meanwhile a lot of the founding Republicans were mainly just opposed to Slavery expanding westward and/or the Fugitive Slave Act and not actively calling for Abolition in the states where it was already entrenched.
With the Democrats the unifying factor that enabled Neo-Feudalists and Classical Liberals and proto-Social Democrats to be able to coexist in the same party was their shared hatred of Wall Street and Bankers. Benjamin Tilman was one of the most vile and despicable openly racist Southern Democrats, but he also has his name on one of the most important pieces of Progressive Era Antitrust legislation, the Tilman Act of 1907. There were even pro New Deal Segregationists like Tom Connolly.
Republican President Calvin Coolidge was Fiscally Conservative and also Anti-Racist.
No one actually denies the Republican Party had Conservatives before 1960, but they desperately want to pretend that in the Roosevelt era Republican Party there was no overlap between the Conservative Republicans and those who were still fighting Racism. However Robert Taft and Hamilton Fish were absolutely leading the fight to get Anti-Lynching legislation passed while self identifying as Conservative at the same time, and Taft at least is who later Conservative Republicans sought to claim they were carrying the mantle of even while squabbling with each other.
That said the Republicans party also already had Racists at that time, James Wolcott Wadsworth Jr. opposed Anti-Lynching legislation on States Rights grounds, as did William Sterling Cole, Harold Knutson and Clare Hoffman. And the Republicans even already had a full blown Nazi in Jacob Thorkelson.
Even the Progressives the Republican Party had during the era of Teddy Roosevelt Progressivism did in fact take Conservative positions on some things like Prohibition. And their Conservationism was much more Eco-Fascist then actually Environmentalist.
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