The citizen-farmer who ordered mass genocide, destruction of food sources, and stole 10s of thousands of acres of land for his own personal wealth? The president who called native Americans “beasts of prey” and who was given the epithet “town destroyer” and “devourer of villages” by the native people of the land?
That citizen-farmer?
That’s not how the Republican party went further right. They went further right because their previous right rhetoric and aesthetic laster long enough for the economy to continue to collapse and for their constituents to feel real economic pain. So, they had to go further right in order to rationalize the situation in the mind of their voters by blaming the erosion of traditional values even more. It’s a death spiral driven by economic realities, not voter ideology.
In the same way, the Democrats are losing because the voters want a solution to the economic problems but the only solution threatens their true constituency - the owning class. So the Democrats can’t be pulled further left because that would accelerate the erosion of the power of the elite. And the Republicans are forced to go further right to explain why their previous policies didn’t create the change that was needed. Thus, the entire elite, both Ds and Rs are dragged right, back into the original rationalizations for founding a nation in indigenous genocide and chattel slavery.
Voting D will never fix that. The proof is all throughout history. The Ds and the Rs collaborated to purge every leftists they could find in the country - twice. And they may very soon be doing it again, because this is what happens when unions get stronger, when resistance movements get stronger, and when solidarity movements get stronger.