But then race became an area of disagreement. Democrats didn’t just want to redistribute from rich northern whites to poor southern whites. They also wanted to redistribute from richer whites to poorer blacks. Furthermore, beginning in 1948, with President Harry Truman’s military desegregation orders, the Democratic Party became a vehicle for civil rights, betraying its fundamental compact with the South. It’s in this era that a Republican—Barry Goldwater, running on a platform of “states’ rights”—carried much of the old Confederacy in a presidential election for the first time.
