Republican Party
The Republican Party was founded in the 1850s as the principal national anti-slavery alternative to the Democrats and reached the presidency with Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Across the twentieth century it evolved from a party of Union, business, and anti-communism into the modern conservative coalition associated with lower taxes, deregulation, evangelical and social-conservative activism, hawkish law-and-order politics, and the Reagan-era reordering of the American right. In the Trump era the GOP became even more explicitly populist and nationalist, putting immigration restriction, cultural grievance politics, judicial conservatism, skepticism toward older party elites, and personal loyalty to Trump-aligned politics at the center of its national identity.
