Last time I checked the Southern Democrats were always accused of using poll taxes and literacy tests to keep poor people from voting. How you translate that into government of, by, and for the unproductive I’ll never understand.
No one today supports slavery (thankfully) but the idea that Obama is the direct ideological descendant of Jefferson Davis is ludicrous. Southern conservatism, which is the only thing really keeping America from becoming a Euro-Socialist planned & controlled society, is the direct outgrowth of resistance to centralized federal power circa the Civil War era. Obama is the result of the remaining old school Southern Democrats being purged from the party in the 1960s, leading to the radical left and the multicultists seizing the party from both the old guard conservative Southerners and the Scoop Jackson type patriotic Dems in the North.
If the rebs were all against centralized federal power why didn't they release regions like East Tennessee and Northern Alabama which didn't wish to be under the new centralized federal power in Richmond?
And what's this about about the old Democrats being against multiculturalism? The southern Democratic power elite were all for multiple cultures as long as they could make an easy buck off the other culture. From the very first after the war, a Republican South would have been best for most southerners, better both for the freed slaves and better the majority of whites who survived on their own hard labor. But instead, the old Democrats successfully played their tired old tune of "us against them", the same tune that Democrats still play today.
And it is all of a piece. Shelby and Sessions soldier on. Who will fill their shoes when they retire the field?
Far down on my list is whether Charlie Crist is a political descendent of Dempsey Barron or Claude Kirk. I am distraught.