page_title: Republican Party (United States)
section_title: New Deal era
hierarchical_section_title: Republican Party (United States) / History / 20th century / New Deal era
caption_attribution_description: English: Richard Nixon's presidential portrait. Retouch has not been completed yet.
context_page_description: The Republican Party, also referred to as the GOP, is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with its main, historic rival, the Democratic Party.
  The GOP was founded in 1854 by opponents of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which allowed for the potential expansion of slavery into the western territories. The party supported classical liberalism, opposed the expansion of slavery, and supported economic reform. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president. Under the leadership of Lincoln and a Republican Congress, slavery was banned in the United States in 1865. The Party was generally dominant during the Third Party System and the Fourth Party System. After 1912, the Party underwent a social ideological shift to the right. Following the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the party's core base shifted, with Southern states becoming more reliably Republican in presidential politics. The party's 21st-century base of support includes people living in rural areas, men, the Silent Generation, and white evangelical Christians.
context_section_description: The New Deal coalition of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt controlled American politics for most of the next three decades, excluding the two-term presidency of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower. After Roosevelt took office in 1933, New Deal legislation sailed through Congress and the economy moved sharply upward from its nadir in early 1933. However, long-term unemployment remained a drag until 1940. In the 1934 midterm elections, 10 Republican senators went down to defeat, leaving the GOP with only 25 senators against 71 Democrats. The House of Representatives likewise had overwhelming Democratic majorities.
  The Republican Party factionalized into a majority "Old Right" (based in the Midwest) and a liberal wing based in the Northeast that supported much of the New Deal. The Old Right sharply attacked the "Second New Deal" and said it represented class warfare and socialism. Roosevelt was re-elected in a landslide in 1936; however, as his second term began, the economy declined, strikes soared, and he failed to take control of the Supreme Court or to purge the Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party. Republicans made a major comeback in the 1938 elections and had new rising stars such as Robert A. Taft of Ohio on the right and Thomas E. Dewey of New York on the left. Southern conservatives joined with most Republicans to form the conservative coalition, which dominated domestic issues in Congress until 1964. Both parties split on foreign policy issues, with the anti-war isolationists dominant in the Republican Party and the interventionists who wanted to stop Adolf Hitler dominant in the Democratic Party. Roosevelt won a third and fourth term in 1940 and 1944, respectively. Conservatives abolished most of the New Deal during the war, but they did not attempt to reverse Social Security or the agencies that regulated business.
  
  Historian George H. Nash argues: 
  Unlike the "moderate", internationalist, largely eastern bloc of Republicans who accepted (or at least acquiesced in) some of the "Roosevelt Revolution" and the essential premises of President Truman's foreign policy, the Republican Right at heart was counterrevolutionary. Anti-collectivist, anti-Communist, anti-New Deal, passionately committed to limited government, free market economics, and congressional (as opposed to executive) prerogatives, the G.O.P. conservatives were obliged from the start to wage a constant two-front war: against liberal Democrats from without and "me-too" Republicans from within.
  After 1945, the internationalist wing of the GOP cooperated with Harry S. Truman's Cold War foreign policy, funded the Marshall Plan and supported NATO, despite the continued isolationism of the Old Right.
  The second half of the 20th century saw the election or succession of Republican presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Eisenhower had defeated conservative leader Senator Robert A. Taft for the 1952 nomination, but conservatives dominated the domestic policies of the Eisenhower administration. Voters liked Eisenhower much more than they liked the GOP and he proved unable to shift the party to a more moderate position. Since 1976, liberalism has virtually faded out of the Republican Party, apart from a few Northeastern holdouts.
  The presidency of Reagan, lasting from 1981 to 1989, constituted what is known as the "Reagan Revolution". It was seen as a fundamental shift from the stagflation of the 1970s before it, with the introduction of Reaganomics intended to cut taxes, prioritize government deregulation, and shift funding from the domestic sphere into the military to combat the Soviet Union by utilizing deterrence theory. A defining moment in Reagan's term of office was his speech in then-West Berlin where he demanded Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to "[t]ear down this wall", referring to the Berlin Wall constructed to separate West and East Berlin.
  Since he left office in 1989, Reagan has been an iconic conservative Republican and Republican presidential candidates frequently claim 
caption: Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States (1969–1974)
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