[You, replying] Campaign on that at your own peril, mac. Just remember one thing about politics as they stand today in America. So if you want to piss off southern conservatives, be my guest. Just don't expect to win a national election anytime soon.
Actually, mac seems to have forgotten that the original GOP constituency of businessmen and propertied types (the old Whig/Federalist constituency) together with Midwestern freesoil farmers split at the end of the century under McKinley and "Dollar" Mark Hanna......the Main Streeters and farmers became the Bull Moosers, and the moneyed crowd, who'd been the Mugwumps when they put down Chester Arthur for killing off the spoils system, became the Machine that renominated Taft and repudiated Roosevelt.
Two generations later, the economic royalists stuffed Ike down the GOP's throat in their usual unflappable manner, to the dismay of Main Street Republicans who wanted Bob Taft -- and later, it was the same thing all over again with Rockefeller and Scranton on one side, and Goldwater championing Main Street on the other.
And remember -- Goldwater was Republican conservativism before the Southern whites left the Democratic Party. So mac_truck errs when he ascribes Klannish antecedents to social-conservative and libertarian-conservative Main Street Republicans who oppose corporate welfarism as much as Hillary's Clintonista personalismo.
The Southern Democrats joined the GOP because they realized that the national Democratic Party had made overt ethnic hostility to Southern whites, American men, and Western civilization a xylophonic touchstone of their political identity.
So yes, they were Johnny-come-lately; but the rapprochement between Southern whites and Main Street Republicans in other parts of the country rested on their common resistance to sovietism, brain-trust socialism, anti-Americanism, and Leftist identity politics, all of which last were tactical postures taken to only one end: splitting up American society and inducing civil tumult.