Of a different kind, I’d argue. The republican party was a coalition of pro-free soilers (people who supported free, white argicultural labor/land ownership) and various abolitionists (from the practical to the radical, including freedmen and women). Today’s GOP has a large number of out and out white supremacists and white nationalists.
The GOP abandoned black voters a long time ago. See their absorption of the dixiecrats in the late 40s, the Nixonian southern strategy, Reagan’s coded racist language (welfare queens), and the rise of Trumpian populism, which is openly in league with white supremacists.
The reality is that the party is NOT the same party, even if it still claims to embrace entrepreneurial.
Douglass was also not stupid. He’s no Herman Cain, or even a Michael Steele or Booker T. Washington. On the issue of race, he was a barn burning radical. Abolitionists were considered the most radical political force in American and possibly global politics (though they competed with early socialists). They wanted nothing more than the complete economic overturn of the American economy, in many cases, by even violent means.
You really need to put these into their historical context. I don’t believe that if he was resurrected today, he’d look at the GOP and see the same party of the 19th century, because they are not that at all.
His die hard view wasn’t with party, it was with his race. He was a race man, through and through. All he did was to free his people. If during the 1850s, the democratic party all of a sudden denounced slavery, he would have switched parties in a heartbeat. He was a radical republican LITERALLY BECAUSE THEY OPPOSED SLAVERY.
The same base that thinks slavery wasn’t so bad, that brown children sleeping on a concrete floor is just, and that Muslims are all enemies of the state? You really need to put Douglass into context, as well as the nature of the GOP in the 1850s vs. 2019.
