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Ben Connelly's avatar

“The entirety of Jim Crow was one huge near-century chunk of conservatives (and yes, segregationists were conservative) subverting the 14th and 15th Amendments.”

Hmm. I think that’s debatable depending on what is meant by the term conservative. Certainly Lincoln made an argument that the anti-slavery Republican Party was more conservative (he used that word) in upholding the spirit and letter of the Founding than its Democratic opponents. For decades, Jim Crow was the policy of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party was the party of civil rights. And, yes, the Democratic Party was reliably more progressive and interested in central planning during that period. As an aside, the Confederacy was into central planning.

Great conservative Republicans like Coolidge and Harding were both the most pro-civil-rights presidents until recent memory and pro-business/pro-market lovers of the Founding and the Constitution/Declaration. Our most progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, was a member of the KKK and wanted a break with the past, an overturning of Founding tradition. There’s at least as much of a through-line from Wilson to Obama as there is from Coolidge to Reagan.

But in the sense that they were interested in preserving a traditional Southern way of life, yes the Jim Crow South was “conservative.”

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