I can't speak to the Republican politicians if the era, but all the Republican voters I know where legitimately focused on fiscal issues and balancing a budget until Trump showed up. Most of the older Republicans in my family have since left the party and registered independent, the younger Republicans I know are just about Trump though and, similar to Trump, don't really seem to hold any principles that underlie their views on any one topic.
The Republicans took over Congress in 1994, and immediately put an end to that game. Democrats say that the budget was balanced under Clinton, and it was, but it took a Republican Congress to force him to do it. (This also worked pretty well at starving Clinton's priorities, as you say.)
So neither side looks very good. Republicans spend like crazy when in power (though Trump is far worse than the average Republican administration), and get budget-cutting religion when out of the White House. Democrats occasionally talk about the budget, but don't do anything when in power.
The one historical example we have (post Andrew Jackson) of a fiscally responsible administration was a Democratic president hamstrung by a Republican Congress.
Technically, Clinton and a Republican congress solved the deficit during his terms (1993-2001), albeit in large part via post-Cold War dividends from BRAC et al.
Wikipedia has a nice graphic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...
The longer term plan would have been to solve the US debt, which was obviously larger. And tbh, will only realistically be solved via running persistent inflation.
Honestly, Congress should pass a law requiring presidents to only publicly communicate budget projections up to the end of their term.
No current term-savings, no announcements.
This a big worry. I thought Trump was for old angry people shaking their fist at sky. The ones with dementia. Why are young into him?
In both areas, the young people I know that are Republicans, and pay any attention to politics, seem to mostly be attracted to his energy and wild promises/claims. They also tend to laugh at the things that I expect many here are concerned by.
Big claim, but as a consequence you're seeing his support tail off substantially in younger voters as the rubber (his campaign claims) meets the road (actual governing, policy, and results). https://www.chip50.org/blog/whose-approval-disapproval-of-tr...
His rhetoric on the campaign trail was attractive to people who didn't think past first order effects ('Yeah! Fewer migrants! They took our jobs!'), but the net effects are becoming evident to those same people, even if they don't understand why.
* I'm explicitly differentiating "Trump voters" from Republicans-who-voted-for-Trump (aka the temporarily endangered mainstream Republicans)
At that point, there's going to be a huge shakeup in the Republican Party, and the American right wing more generally, because from all indications, he's the only thing holding that coalition together, and they do not have a successor who could do anything like the same.
TL:DR Brainrot
The Democratic Party has been the left-wing party since around the turn of the 20th century. Yes, there was a flip, but it was (roughly) under Teddy Roosevelt. Not Franklin Roosevelt.
And the comment you are replying to didn't mention Franklin Roosevelt. Are you in the right thread?
To be fair, US political culture (and capitalism in general) contain deep, deep contradictions so it's going to require a whole lot of glue and squinting to say that there is any coherence to any US political party...
The person you're responding to has it correct, though, that there was an important cultural shift around Johnson and Nixon and the Southern Strategy and all that... not that these cultural politics could ever touch the materialist facts of capital.
1. FDR made concessions to the working class in the Great Depression to stave off a communist revolution and protect the status quo. Yet this earned the Democratic Party almost unbroken control over Congress until the 1990s;
2. In the wake of desegregation and the civil rights movement, all the slaver-wannabe Southern Democrats (ie the Dixiecrats) left the party and became Republicans. This was an intentional effort by the Republican Party called the Southern Strategy;
3. Despite 60 years of control over Congress and the loyalty of the working class that went back to FDR, Bill Clinton decided "no, we need to be Republican Lite". This was the so-called Third Way neoliberlism. This is the era when we got the 1994 crime bill, welfare "reform" and NAFTA; and
4. After 40+ years of the destruction of real wages, working people were finally seeking a change in the 2010s. White working class people, who were once loyal Democratic voters, went to Donald Trump. I still believe to this day many of these people would've voted for Bernie Sanders had he been the candidate over Hilary "more of the same" Clinton.
But there's no flip here. The Republican Party just got more insane, overt and racist and the same donors that back Republicans successfully turned the Democrats into the controlled opposition party.
What's funny is that this era (the 1950s) is often fetishized by people who absolutely oppose the policies that made that possible, including a top marginal tax rate of 91% and a CEO to median worker ratio of 20-25x instead of the 400x+ it is now.
So the Cato Institute finally realized something that hasn't been true for 50+ years. What we're witnessing is the looting of government coffers and transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich on a scale never seen before. And they don't care about the consequences because capital is mobile. They'll simply leave.