In the beginning, the Federalists were Conservative/Right, and the Democratic-Republicans were Liberal/Left.

Why?

To start, America was a left-wing nation when we got started – but only because the hard-right conservative ideology of the day was oligarchic monarchism, as practiced by Britain.

The Anti-Federalist/Democratic-Republican ideology of a free people working the land, mostly un-governed, was the radical-leftist ideology of the day – essentially it was to the status-quo what Communism was to Capitalist Republicanism was in the 1950s.

Democratic Republicans were anti-bank, anti-development, and most were farmers. There was a heavy bias toward agriculture, and a belief that good men worked the fields with their hands (or had their slaves do it for them), and there was something morally repulsive about manufacturing & banking (largely out of the fact that most farmers spent their entire lives in debt to one bank or another – Jefferson himself died bankrupt).

Further evidence of radicalism on the D-R side, was their desire to intervene in the French Revolution, in support of the revolutionary government…

The Federalist ideology, combining nationalism with industrialization & effective centralized government (it was very much a ‘some government vs no government’ thing back then – ‘Big’ government wasn’t on anyone’s mind), was the more conservative of the two on the ‘Monarchisim = Right, Republicanisim = Left’ scale of the day – but still well to the left of anything in Europe at the time.

Andrew Jackson (another FARMER. Are we seeing a pattern here, with Presidents) further inflamed the Democrat’s populisim – his crusade against the financial industry of the day, in the name of ‘the hard working common people’ cemented the Democratic Party as an anti-capitalist, anti-business entity, and essentially gave birth to today’s Democrats…

It just took them until now to ‘grow up’ into the full fledged socialists they were always going to be…

(It should be noted that of our worst, most populist, anti-business Democratic Presidents, most were farmers (Jefferson, Jackson, Carter – just to start)… Obama is perhaps the first truly terrible Democrat who was not.