I'm sure there are historical reasons but I'm thinking about how meaningless the names "democrats" and "republicans" are. They convey nothing about their actual ideologies. Oh you sure like republics more over democracy!! Or is it the other way around? Those names carry so much semantic fatigue, nobody even wonders what they mean anymore
@noiob @Siph That and before that it was the Democratic Republicans and the Whigs. The Democrats ultimately became the conservative party when the Republicans split off to the left of them and the Whigs died out.
The whole "switched positions" thing is actually a bit more complicated because they were split across both political and economic lines, but both were opposite internally, politically liberal and economically conservative and vice versa. Asking an economics question ultimately answered a political one in an interesting way and realigned the parties into a simpler single-axis format.