With all the political fighting in our nation, I feel Willie and Waylon need to rerelease their hit song about Luckenbach, Texas, with a new chorus that says we are feuding like the Democrats and Republicans.In fact, it seems as though political affiliation or left or right persuasion are the chief indicators of our identities. I am also discovering that many are often confused about political differences or what parties even stand for.More interesting is discussions about political parties past.Especially with the era of cancel culture, there seems to be confusion of what parties did in the past making it difficult to know which party to condemn. For example, there is nothing worse than wanting to cancel everyone and everything having to do with slavery only to find out your party was its biggest supporter.The history of political parties is difficult in America, as the two major parties of today will do a complete ideological 180 degree turn from their founding.Over the next few weeks I will give a more concise version of my History of Political Parties class to clear up some of the confusion about parties, where they come from, how they changed and what they stand for. The goal will be to help readers be better informed about which party they may want to join. Again, the purpose is not to persuade but to inform.The best way to start a discussion about political parties switching between liberal and conservative is to identify what it means to be liberal or conservative. This itself is difficult as those terms will change from their inceptions. At their cores being liberal means to want change or progress while conservatives want to hold on to past values or institutions. A good example of this is in the Civil War era where the liberal Republican Party wanted to end slavery while the conservative Democratic Party supported it. I know this sounds backwards, but I will explain it later.I do not want to spend too much time discussing classic versus modern liberalism and conservatism; it is confusing to even those of us who study this for a living. Suffice to say that while there are some core similarities, there are also differences between these terms when they were first coined in the 18th and 19th centuries and how they are used today.Liberalism evolved during the reign of absolute monarchs. It revolved around individual rights,
