There are a number of reasons why the Repubs became the pro-business party. In the simplest terms the leaders of the Repub party were business men in the Industrialized North and they got very rich thanks to the Civil War as war is very profitable. In addition to the profit motivation, one could reasonably argue that because these Northern Industrialists were paying people to work in their factories – sh-t-wages, of course, still – they weren’t at all happy that business men in the south (i.e.: plantation owners) were getting free labor (i.e.: slaves).

Repubs, as much as they love to pat themselves on the back, have never really been the pro-Civil Rights party. Don’t forget that Lincoln himself said in August of 1862, "If I could save the union without freeing any slaves I would do it;... and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that." (http://www.abrahamlincolnonline...) Not exactly the words you’d expect out of “The Great Emancipator.”

As the years rolled by more and more Northern and Western Democrats became Left/liberal politically and White Southern Dems increasingly became de facto Repubs (i.e.: See Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” https://en.wikipedia.org...).

In 1992 Bill Clinton ran for President as a new kind of Democrat (https://en.wikipedia.org...): A centrist who embraced the Supply-Siders pro-business, "laissez-faire capitalism" philosophy (i.e.: “a policy or attitude of letting things take their own course, without interfering; letting the Free-Market be Free”) with an equally (at least almost equally) "laissez-faire" approach to most social issues like abortion and gay rights. Clinton wasn’t either progressive or liberal. He was a rock-solid pro-Corporation, pro-Lock-‘em-up, Centrist/Establishment, “Third Way” candidate (https://en.wikipedia.org...) from Deep-South Arkansas.

On the plus side, Clinton did push through a modest middle-class tax-cut (very modest); increased taxes on the ultra-wealthy by almost 2% (imagine that! Almost 2-whole-%-points! WOW!); and he signed the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy that allowed homosexuals to serve in the military (if they were very, very, very discrete, of course).

On the other hand, under Clinton’s reign African-American men and boys were imprisoned in record numbers, devastating the Black community (specifically, a ratcheted up “War On Drugs” pointedly targeting Blacks – i.e.: for crack, much more common in Black communities, you get twice the sentence/years as for the identical amount of cocaine, much more common in white communities); he signed the unconstitutional (according to the Supreme Court) “Defense of Marriage Act” defining Marriage legally (i.e.: exclusively) as between a man and a woman; and with his austerity policies millions of poor people lost their welfare and food-stamps (what with the age of big government being over and all).

Obviously, this Middle-of-the-Road “Third Way” was very attractive to a lot of people – after all, Clinton did win the Presidency twice and Hillary, while she didn’t win, got 3-million more votes then the dumpster-fire currently in the White House. And it all but goes without saying that most people are neither on the extreme left or extreme right politically, so, at first glance at least, a rock-solid Centrist seems the perfect candidate for either party.

But that seemingly “perfect candidate” is only “perfect” at first glance. Regardless of how “centrist” you are politically, you have to admit the last almost 3-decades of Establishment/Corporatist/Centrist politics simply haven’t worked for the majority, and, if anything, we now find ourselves, the whole country in fact, in desperate and dire straits. (https://www.salon.com...)

The facts are these: Corporations and the rich have been given huge tax-breaks and increased their profits exponentially without sharing any of that with their workers (unless you consider the CEO a “worker” https://www.theguardian.com...); today, CEOs make as much as 1,424-times the amount as the Average Employee (https://www.cnbc.com...); and in the United States today the income gap between the rich and everyone else has been growing steadily and markedly, by every major statistical measure, for more than 30 years, since Ronald Regan (https://inequality.org...).

The young people of America today, the so-called Millennials, are the first generation since the Civil War that don’t think their lives will be better than their parents, and everything suggests they’re right. Even in the “Gilded Age” (the 1870s to about 1900), most people expected that life would get better for them and their lives would be better than their parents’ lives; and they were right, it was better. Part of that, of course, was because the average person was starting from such a deficit to begin with (for most people back then it would have actually been pretty difficult for things not to get better).

The point is, these Establishment/Corporatist/Centrist wishy-washy politicians have failed us. Their systems, their beliefs, have failed us. We need to go in a different direction (http://progressive-liberal.com...).