Guy, you’re making a big mistake, one that I’ve seen many, many times.

What you’re doing is assuming that political parties don’t change. History shows that political parties DO change over time.

In the MS Delta, one of our family acquaintances was a near-neighbor named James O. Eastland. My grandmother worked in his plantation commissary back in the 1930’s. He was a lifelong Democrat and twice president pro tempore. He was also for a generation the most powerful racist in America (more so than George Wallace).

AND Eastland, like the examples of Wallace and Maddox and Faubus you provided, was deeply and proudly CONSERVATIVE. If anyone made the mistake of calling Eastland a liberal, they would have found themselves (and probably their families too) out of a job with no hope of getting hired by anyone else. The Deep South was for most of our nation’s history strongly Democratic and has only relatively recently become solid Republican…but it has ALWAYS been the most conservative (and the most racist) region of our nation.

After the Civil War, the Republicans were the liberals and the Democrats were the conservatives. By the time of FDR, this had changed to where both parties had strong contingents of liberals and conservatives. In fact, the 1964 Civil Rights Act could not have passed without the votes of Republican liberals. The Democratic Party had a significant contingent of conservatives even in 2008. I was a strong conservative until 1992 — I had happily voted for Reagan and Bush Sr. But neither of those presidents would recognize the Republican Party of today, for the GOP has changed, and wildly so.