Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president; the South’s enmity toward the Republican Party was thus signed in blood. The Democratic Party supported redistribution from the rich to the poor—and the North was rich and the South was poor. “Around the turn of the twentieth century the southern Democrats represented the left wing of the Democratic Party,” says Princeton University professor Howard Rosenthal. “They were basically populist. The questions of redistribution at that time were from a relatively well-off North to a poor South. Race was not on the table as an area of disagreement
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