Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party was the enemy of White southerners for a century, which meant that in many places in the South, every White voter was a Democrat, whether they were liberal or conservative. For decades, the Democratic Party suppressed its more liberal impulses on race in order to keep together a coalition that included southern segregationists, but the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s changed that for good. Southern conservative Whites began fleeing to the Republican Party; many of the most prominent archconservatives of later years, including such figures as Strom
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