That, then, is the story of the long period of depolarization in American politics. The South was in the Democratic Party, but it didn’t agree with the Democratic Party—particularly once liberalism’s vision of redistribution and uplift expanded to include African Americans. So southern Democrats had ideological reasons to compromise with Republicans but political reasons to compromise with national Democrats. Southern power kept the Democratic Party less liberal than it otherwise would’ve been, the Republican Party congressionally weaker than it otherwise would’ve been, and stopped the two
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