Why Do U.S. Political Parties Lie About Their Histories?

The RNC website's party history timeline.

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​Originally published in the Mischiefs of Faction blog.

By Jonathan M. Ladd

This weekend, Seth pointed out that the Democratic Party blatantly lies on its website about the Party’s historical commitment to civil rights, which was small before 1960 and almost nonexistent before President Harry Truman. (Even most New Deal programs were initially designed and implemented in a discriminatory manner.)

And if we turn to the Republican Party's web page, we find a similar lack of acknowledgment that since the early 1960s the Democrats and Republicans have switched geographic constituencies and positions on racial and women's rights issues. Here is the RNC's timeline of major Republican accomplishments.
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No mention of Nixon's Southern strategy, or the party opposing the Equal Rights Amendment for the first time ever in the 1980 platform, or campaigning against welfare queens and prison revolving doors, or the five Republican-nominated Supreme Court justices striking down the main enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act. Earl Warren and Ronald Reagan are presented as a unified list of Republicans all pushing the same agenda.

I won't elaborate here on how this (and the Democrats official version of their own history) completely glosses over how the positions advocated by leading Republicans and Democrats have changed. (Seth already does a great job on this. See also here, here, here and here.)

I want to discuss why both parties hide their ideological evolution and just emphasize the positive. Why doesn't the Democratic Party say something like this on its website?: "We were founded by a group of (mostly) southerners supporting white supremacy and skeptical of federal power. Despite being the party of racial reactionaries for the majority of our history, about 50-80 years ago we saw the light and now support egalitarian policies and a robust welfare state."

I think it has to do with voter psychology. If people voted purely based on policy, the history of the parties shouldn't matter. All that should matter is the positions of the current leaders of the party and what they will do in office if elected.

But public opinion doesn't work that way. This isn't why people hold party affiliations. People largely don't come to see themselves as a Democrat or Republican because they agree with the party's current positions, but because of a more abstract psychological bond. People affiliate with a political party because they feel that people "like them" are members of the party. The social groups they associate with the party are groups they like or belong to. This is why, on most issues, when people discover that their personal opinion differs from their party's position, they change their opinion rather than their partisanship.

The fact that our party attachments are emotional bonds rather than simply a way to enact policy is why parties don't want to air publicly their historical dirty laundry. You attract and hold party adherents by building positive psychological associations and avoiding negative ones. How you feel about the history of your party can plausibly affect your psychological attachment to it, even if history is irrelevant to the party's current policy agenda.

Connected to this is research showing that people's evaluations of candidates and even parties are not just influenced by things that they currently remember. Instead, people engage in "online processing." If people's attachments to parties adjust via "online processing," people may learn new information that changes their feelings toward a party. Then, when making a political choice, they may remember their new feelings toward the party, but not the information that changed those feelings. (See here, here, here, here and here.)

In the case of the Democrats, if people learn (or are reminded) that they once supported slavery, Jim Crow and the Trail of Tears, their emotional evaluation of the Democrats may become more negative, but later they may not remember that the reasons they have more negative feelings toward the Democrats are out of date. And for the Republicans, why risk describing your ideological evolution over time when you can just list a string of associations with positive historical events? In this way, you increase the likelihood that people will develop (or maintain) positive emotional association with your party brand.

Not only does the academic research indicate to me that people's party attachments are not purely meant to achieve current policy goals, my own personal interactions support this as well. I have talked with lots of even high political awareness people (even some political science PhDs) who feel the need to defend their chosen party's entire historical record. In my experience, it is rare to encounter someone who will come out and say: "I'm a strong Democrat. Even though for most of its history it was a white supremacist party." People don't talk like that or think like that. Even as I write this, it feels somehow strange for me to think that, even though I am now a Democrat, if I lived in an earlier era I should have been (based on policy) a Republican or a Whig. Thinking this way goes against something basic in human psychology. People are tribal. They want to embrace their tribe and all things connected to it, including its history.
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