Fantastic Meme Shows Why Democrats are the Party of Slavery

The Democratic Party could only be considered the "Party of Slavery" to someone who completely ignores the last 60 years of American history.

Yes, it is true that a Republican President and a Republican Congress drove through and passed the Thirteenth Amendment over the objections of the Democrats, and for the rest of the 19th century, no white southerner was *ever* going to call themselves a Republican. This found them in an uneasy but stable association with the Democratic Party in the North. And from the end of the Civil War to the middle of the 20th century the GOP was largely run by the Northeast Republicans, who were conservative but not at all the way we understand that term today.

So what changed? The Civil Rights Act. Seriously. As soon as that bill was signed on July 2nd, 1964, LBJ correctly predicted that he could kiss the South’s support of the Democrats goodbye. The Republicans from the Northeast were mostly opposed to it as being a federal intrusion into state matters, but the newly-emerged Goldwater GOP coalition that was bulding steam in the Southwest really, REALLY hated it because it would effectively halt their ability to terrorize and subjugate southern blacks. So if you were a Dixiecrat like Strom Thurmond or George Wallace, you suddenly found yourself far more aligned with that new part of the GOP than you did with the Northern Democrats.

We tend to forget just how dramatically both parties split in the aftermath of that monumental legislation. The GOP split to the Southwest and Northeast while the Democrats split between straight North and South. The Dixiecrats, after unsuccessfully attempting to go it alone for a while, ended up joining the Southwest GOP, and what was left of the Northeast Republicans – who called the shots for that party for almost a hundred years! – over time shifted their allegiance to the Democrats. The last “classical” Northeast Republican I can even recall offhand is Olympia Snowe, and she retired from the Senate in 2013 largely out of disgust with her own party. By the time Ronald Reagan was inaugurated (bonus question: where was his first campaign stop after the Republican National Convention in 1980?), the final flight of the Dixiecrats was complete.

THAT’S why even conservative segments of black citizens still by and large vote Democrat – they remember where those pro-segregation, racist Democrats defected to and who welcomed them with open arms back then.

No internet meme is going to change the fundamental truths about our political history.

Ah, yes, that old false canard. Pretending like history just stopped in the 1940s, and the massive party re-alignment never happened. **yawn** If you want to tie something to being against civil rights, you can't use party labels, because those change too much over time; you have to use ideology, which is more stable -- and the ideology of anti-civil-rights voices both then (including the entire War of Southern Treason) and now are solidly conservative, while the ideology both then and now that lines up with advancing civil rights (and was how Lincoln himself would be described) was liberalism. Not an opinion; a fact. Revisionist history of the shameful type you posted belongs in the swamps of StormFront, not here...

You do realize that the GOP were the progressives and the Democrats the conservatives in the 1860s right, and that they have since switched places.