In a 1994 episode of the Simpsons they make a lot of jokes about the Republicans party being evil. When did it become culturally normal to characterise the party this way?
Local Link | Content link | Reddit Link
r/AskHistoriansu/venuswasaflytrap (4113)

In the 1994 episode “Sideshow Bob Roberts” the republicans are shown to be meeting in a large stormy castle, with unambiguously evil characters like Mr. Burns and Dracula, and they have secret chant.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oSLJKoqwMV4

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sideshow_Bob_Roberts

I know that this was the party that was started as an anti-slavery party. At (roughly) what point did it become the party that pop culture would unapologetically characterise it as the “evil” party?

Comments (122)

Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.

Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.

We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension, or getting the Weekly Roundup. In the meantime our Twitter, Facebook, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

Please check this earlier answer from /u/fearofair: In the 1994 Simpsons' episode "Bart Gets an Elephant" a gag shows the Democrats declaring that they "hate life and ourselves" and "can't govern", while the Republicans say that they "want what's worst for everyone" and they're "just plain evil". How and when did these political stereotypes develop?

Thanks for posting this, a tour de force response. Impressive.

I have to ask - this link contains the following line:

Those criticisms have their parallels in the narratives of the 1990s, but Eisenhower's hawkishness was limited in comparison of what was to come.

But Eisenhower was elected on a promise to end the Korean war, he had founded the Institute of War and Peace Studies, he tried to de-escalate the arms race with the Soviets, and of course his farewell speech was probably the most anti-war stance ever adopted by a president to that date. Is he really considered 'hawkish', or is this just a reference to his actual military service?

Maybe "hawkish" was an imprecise term. I was referring mostly to Eisenhower's support for NATO as compared to Senator Taft and other contemporary Republicans in Congress prior to the 1952 presidential election. This was a deep enough rift the two had to issue a joint statement smoothing things over after Eisenhower's nomination. In substance I think we agree about where he might be situated on a modern spectrum.

Wow, what an answer.

This question runs up against the 20 year rule, not because this started happening 20 years ago but because it's still on-going. The characterization is multi-faceted, but I'd argue that it it stems from the partisan divide over Unions.

Unions have historically seen corporations as antagonists (see the Battle of Blair Mountain and other union-busting activities in which companies used private and/or state-sponsored violence against Union organizers) and they've also historically been deeply connected with Democratic politics especially since the New Deal.

Taken together, this sets up the two major parties in the United States as ideologically divided over the question of "can we trust corporations to do the right thing," first with regard to worker protections and then, eventually, everything else. Democrats, dependent on Unions for political organization, will say no. Republicans, dependent on corporations for the same, will say "yes."

So the question then becomes less "when did it become normal to characterize REPUBLICANS as evil" and more about "when did it become normal to characterize CORPORATIONS as evil."

For that we can turn to some more contemporaneous sources. This is what I mean about the 20 year rule. Since this question is fundamentally historical, any primary source answering it is likely to observe the 20 year rule itself, so to keep within the rule ourselves, we'd be looking for a 20-year-old source discussing pop-culture from 20 years before it was published. I'm sure they're out there but I'd argue it's not necessary in this case.

This article from the Atlantic only briefly touches on the "beginning" of the trend of "corporations are evil", but it does document a shift from government-centric-dystopian-fiction towards corporation-centric-dystopian-fiction. Not surprisingly, this begins to take hold as the memory of the government's near total control of daily life fades following the close of World War Two. Post war America is one in which private companies rise in importance relative to government and, with that rise comes a change in the tone of fiction which worries about what life might be like under a corporate boot-heal.

By the 1980s this is so well established that films like Robocop aren't even pretending to avoid comparisons to their contemporaneous political environment. Rapacious, amoral, profit driven corporations are shown pillaging public goods (like law enforcement) regardless of the human suffering caused. These fictional representations of Republican politics land, in large part, because the GOP is, by this point, committed to Reagan's message of "government is the problem" and expressly endorses a political position in which there are very few regulations on what business can do.

This plays out in ways which cast Republicans as almost cartoon-like villains in several instances, most notably with respect to the tobacco industry. Today the tobacco lobby gives almost exclusively to Republicans but in 1990 (which is as far back as I can pull data from OpenSecrets) both sides took money... though the GOP did take slightly more. It wasn't until the late 1990s that the GOP felt that the political risks of taking money from Tobacco companies outweighed the benefits by which point about 9 in 10 people understood tobacco to be harmful.

By this point we're a little ahead of the 1994 target date but the broad outlines are still important: the GOP's anti-regulation position put it in a position of fighting for causes that many Americans saw as overtly harmful especially from about 1980 onward.

Please could you comment on the history of perceiving pre-WWII corporations as evil? This New York Times article has a fair go at drawing parallels between the Royal Dutch Shells etc. of today and the original East India Company. As you noted, there was a post-WWII "shift from government-centric-dystopian-fiction towards corporation-centric-dystopian-fiction", but this doesn't preclude there being a shift from corporation-centric-dystopian-fiction to government-centric-dystopian-fiction before the government got involved in e.g. the World Wars. Is Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol not an anti-laissez-faire-capitalist critique of Victorian society, constituting a version of corporation-centric-dystopian-fiction?

Thank you for this research.

Can you clarify exactly why it's this particular position you think is the driving force behind references to the Republican Party as "evil" and not, say, supporting racial segregation, opposing expansion of voting rights, etc.?

...this sets up the two major parties in the United States as ideologically divided over the question of "can we trust corporations to do the right thing," first with regard to worker protections and then, eventually, everything else. ... Republicans, dependent on corporations for the same, will say "yes."

Sideshow Bob claims that what people really want is a Republican who will "rule you like a king."

Is there a clear reconciliation between "letting corporations be free to do what they want" and "ruling the public like a king"?

the memory of the government's near total control of daily life fades following the close of World War Two

Can you expand on this? This is not the impression I have of the role of government before WWII.

During World War 2, not before

Okay, well, what do you mean by that?

Can't we go back to around 1900 and Teddy Roosevelt's "malefactors of great wealth?" Was he not talked about both the super rich and corporations, their tool? For much of the Gilded Age until FDR, Republicans dominated federal leadership. Without Teddy breaking the party, isn't it likely there would have been no Wilson presidency? Battles against unions were a big deal long before the 20 year rule.

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

[Single sentence]

Sorry, but we have removed your response, as we expect answers in this subreddit to be in-depth and comprehensive, and to demonstrate a familiarity with the current, academic understanding of the topic at hand. Before contributing again, please take the time to better familiarize yourself with the rules, as well as our expectations for an answer such as featured on Twitter or in the Sunday Digest.

[removed]

[Single sentence]

Sorry, but we have removed your response, as we expect answers in this subreddit to be in-depth and comprehensive, and to demonstrate a familiarity with the current, academic understanding. Positing what seems 'reasonable' or otherwise speculating without a firm grounding in the current academic literature is not the basis for an answer here, as addressed in this Rules Roundtable. Before contributing again, please take the time to better familiarize yourself with the rules, as well as our expectations for an answer such as featured on Twitter or in the Sunday Digest.