Major shifts in party platforms show ideological migrations

Everybody knows the Republican and Democratic parties have changed in recent years. But the parties haven’t just grayed and added some wrinkles since the 1990s – indeed, each would be unrecognizable to its former self.

Depending on your penchant for nostalgia, what follows is either an indictment or a great step forward, and it applies to both parties.

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Start with the Democrats.

Here are verbatim excerpts from the 1992 Democratic Party platform:

• American Values: “The basic American values that built this country and will always make it great: personal responsibility, individual liberty, tolerance, faith, family and hard work. . . Our future as a nation depends upon the daily assumption of personal responsibility by millions of Americans from all walks of life.”
• Crime and Policing: “An explosive mixture of blighted prospects, drugs and exotic weaponry has turned many of our inner city communities into combat zones. . . The simplest and most direct way to restore order in our cities is to put more police on the streets.”
• Safety Nets: “Welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life. . . Democrats will pursue a new course that stresses work, family and individual responsibility, and that empowers Americans to liberate themselves from poverty and dependence.
• Student Loans: “A Domestic G.I. Bill will enable all Americans to borrow money for college, so long as they are willing to pay it back as a percentage of their income over time or through national service addressing unmet community needs.”
• Spending and Debt: “We must also tackle spending, by putting everything on the table; eliminate nonproductive programs; achieve defense savings; reform entitlement programs to control soaring health care costs; cut federal administrative costs by 3 percent annually for four years. . .”
• The Administrative State: “We vow to make government more decentralized, more flexible, and more accountable—to reform public institutions and replace public officials who aren’t leading with ones who will.”
• Israel: “The end of the Cold War does not alter America’s deep interest in our long-standing special relationship with Israel, based on shared values, a mutual commitment to democracy, and a strategic alliance that benefits both nations.”

One might find these exact proposals today on a generic Republican’s campaign website – that is how far both parties have shifted in three decades.

Compare just the first page of the Democratic Party’s 1992 and 2024 platforms. The 1992 document opens with a testament to Thomas Jefferson, “the man whose burning pen fired the spirit of the American Revolution.”

The 2024 platform, by contrast, begins with a “Democratic National Convention Land Acknowledgement,” which are fringe-type statements that usually point out such-and-such land was once occupied by natives before the Europeans stole it. Political commentator Alexander Sammon opined in Salon this week about Bernie Sanders’ DNC speech – and that it sounded like everyone else’s at the convention. That’s particularly fascinating, as Sanders was blistered by the left with criticism in 2020 for his “mythologized and out-of-date theory of blue-collar political behavior, one that assumes that a portion of the electorate is crying out for socialism on the basis of their class interest.”

The party’s dramatic leftward shift has partially alienated some of its stalwarts. Familiar names like James Carville and Ruy Teixeira speak often of their desire for the party to rediscover the moderation that delivered Bill Clinton two terms in the White House.

But it’s not just a Democratic Party phenomenon. The Republican Party, too, has drifted far away from economic conservatism. The party entirely reversed its position on policies like foreign trade, for example, and the Trump years ballooned the deficit even before COVID.

Indeed, the 2024 Republican Party platform doesn’t even mention the national debt. Politico published an illustrative side-by-side of the 2016 and 2024 platforms that show just how “Trump-ified” the party has become in the past eight years. The Republican Party’s transformation has likewise alienated its former standard-bearers like Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney.

Some, particularly elements of each party’s “new” base, welcome these changes. Others don’t. But two takeaways seem indisputable.

First, the leftward economic shift from both parties means neither seems to care about the nation’s finances, and that’s dangerous. Presidents and congressional majorities from both parties have added trillions upon trillions to the national debt. At some point the party is going to end, and that’s going to be a very bad day.

The question is just how bad things have to get before that reckoning happens, and which party will take the hit. The answer may lie as much in timing and luck as anything else. Whichever party holds power when a debt crisis finally happens will likely bear the brunt of voter retaliation.

Second, both parties have become more extreme and an eventual reckoning seems inevitable. Just how far can both parties go before one of them breaks?

On this point, 2026 may well turn into a major backlash election for whichever party wins the presidency this year. Vice President Kamala Harris’s first major policy unveiling contemplated food price controls and large taxpayer grants for homebuyers, both of which would almost certainly end in disaster. If she pursues an agenda like that, 2026 might look a lot like 2010 did for Republicans. 

Former President Donald Trump, for his part, has always been a motivating force for Democrats. If he wins, the 2026 midterm may well look like 2006, when Democrats trounced Republicans – or worse. 

Regardless, one uniting force seems to be broad dissatisfaction with the choices before the electorate. One must go back multiple cycles to find a presidential candidate who at least commanded some level of general respect and popularity.

Perhaps the future will deliver a leader who can harken back to those years in the 1990s when both parties agreed on core American values like personal responsibility, hard work, and a balanced budget.