I was chatting politics with a friend tonight. He said the reason that Democrats are called Democrats is because they believe (or believed when the party was founded) in pure or direct democracy and Republicans believe/believed in a representative republic.
It smelled like bullshit but I wasn't armed to call him on it. Is he right? I've read up a bunch on the years and different evolution and splits of parties but not the, for lack of a better word, political or philosophical etymology of the party names themselves.
Lincoln Republicans chose the name largely to claim of the legacy of the original Jeffersonian Republican party. Jefferson's Republican party had split in the early 19th century into the National Republican party and the Democrat or Democracy. National Republicans and Jacksonian Democrats both were trying to claim the legacy of Jefferson's party, with the National Republicans later merging with the Anti-Masonic and Anti-Jackson State's rights faction to form the Whig Party. The connection of Democrat with Republican had happened in the 1790's as a means for Republicans to show their support for white-male suffrage (although the party was still commonly called Republicans). The Original term "Republican" came after Jefferson had failed to "win" the term Federalist ( a reference to those who supported the Constitution and ratification) with Republican coming to harken back to the belief in "Republicanism" that had dominated the revolution. Of course these were really proto-parties lacking uniformity or any real experience with political parties so for a while at the local and state level you could have dozens of political entities, often times with quite confusing names like "Republican-Federalist" and "Federalist-Republican". Federalists didn't give up on winning Democrat or Republican terms, Alexander Hamilton wrote around 1800 that he still hoped to win back the terms.