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The Republican PartyAmerican Political PartyClick here for a list of candidates from all American political partiesThe Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the Grand Old Party or the GOP, despite being the younger of the two major parties. The party's platform is generally considered right of center in the US political spectrum.Founded in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854 by anti-slavery expansion activists and modernizers (an early slogan was "free labor, free land, free men") the Republican Party quickly surpassed the Whig Party as the principal opposition to the Democratic Party. It first came to power in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln, a former Whig, to the Presidency and presided over the American Civil War and Reconstruction. During the tremendous economic expansion in the North during and following Reconstruction, Republicans promoted policies to sustain the rapid growth but also supported the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Interstate Commerce Commission Republican William McKinley was elected President in 1896 on a platform that included high tariffs, and the party continued to support tariffs and pro-business policies generally during its political dominance of the next thirty years. The Republicans were blamed for the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, and Democrats would generally dominate the political landscape for nearly forty years thereafter. Republican dominance of the White House returned with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and was matched by the Republican Revolution of 1994, which gave the GOP control of both houses of Congress. This dominance ended with electoral defeats at the hands of Democrats in 2006, and the White House was lost as well with the election of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008. In the 21st century, the Republican Party has been defined by social conservatism, a preemptive war foreign policy intended to defeat terrorism and promote global democracy, a more powerful executive branch, supply-side economics, support for gun ownership, and deregulation. Source: Wikipedia.org |