Democratic Party (United States)

The Democratic Party is one of the two major political parties in the United States, alongside the Republican Party, and is the oldest political party in the country and among the oldest in the world. It traces its roots to 1792, when followers of Thomas Jefferson organized as the Democratic Republican Party, but the modern party dates from the late 1820s, when supporters of Andrew Jackson began calling themselves Democrats, and it formally adopted its current name in 1844. During the nineteenth century the party supported or tolerated slavery, and after the Civil War it opposed Reconstruction era civil rights reforms to retain Southern white support, contributing to decades of disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South; Southern Democratic senators also conducted a prolonged filibuster in an unsuccessful attempt to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The party underwent a dramatic ideological realignment beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, reinventing itself around organized labor, civil rights, and progressive economic policy, and is today generally described as the more progressive of the two major American parties.