The USA never ceases to surprise me, and after reading the mammoth biography of Lincoln, Team of Rivals, now of course after seeing the cunningly gutted and powerful wonderful portrayal by Cecil Day Lewis in Speilberg's Lincoln, I'm reading political articles that I wouldn't perhaps have read before. I'm still have great difficulty seeing how the Southern Democrats and their racial prejudice (even in 1937 a Democrat senator, Claude Pepper was a proud white supremacist)somehow metamorphosed into the party of social conscience and liberty, of Clinton & Obama. There must be a point where they changed, and I don't know enough history to find it.
The other surprising thing is that despite the appeals from German Nazis the Southern Democrats "resisted, with a startling degree of rightousness, any analogy between Nazi anti-Semitism and Southern segregation". They were right behind the Allies in WW2, solidly anti-Fascist. Who says Americans don't do irony.
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