I posted this to show how the GOP has always been inclusive of blacks. Some of the finest minds of this current era are conservative blacks who sorrow for what has been handed to their brethren by liberals.
Hate to burst your bubble but Liberals invented the concept "all men are created equal", so ... no cigar there.
It's always tempting to look at our world and assume things (and people, and parties, and politics) have always been the way they are right now. After all, that's all we can see. But the idea that any political party that doesn't fizzle out in a generation "has always" stood for the same thing just doesn't square with history. Political parties exist for one reason, and that is to acquire power. What kind of ideology it follows to get that power can and does shift with time and even with space within time.
The RP for example started out as abolitionist, not "conservative". The conservatives of the time and place alluded to in your images who opposed them were Democrats (they could hardly be anything else, as the RP effectively didn't exist there). Yet even the DP was for generations caught in a tension between its conservative and modernist wings. For a century it represented two different kinds of ideology depending on what part of the country you were standing in, with each faction turning a blind eye to the other. You and I are old enough to remember this; we had Democrats in Alabama who had nothing ideologically in common with Democrats in Massachusetts – yet it was the same party in name. Republicans of those two states meanwhile were much more on the same page, even if they were scarce as hen's teeth in the South.
Side note: My read is that there was then, in effect, less national division between the two parties as a whole, and more national division by geographical/cultural region. The divisions we see today by party, such as on this message board, would have looked quite strange to the America of 1950; their divisions were more cultural (regional) and less political.
As far back as 1860, the intraparty infighting of that bipolar DP caused a mass walkout at its national convention, which then disintegrated and split off rival candidates which ensured that in the 1860 Presidential election neither the Democratic nor the Republican candidate won the South. Once that election was counted the secessions and Civil War began.
A similar walkout/split would occur 88 years later with Strom Thurmond's "Dixiecrat" presidential run, the one Trent Lott referred to at the infamous 100th birthday speech. Thurmond would again lead yet another split in 1964 when he bolted to the Republican Party, an act theretofore unthinkable in the South, and began the mass migration in that region from the DP to the RP. Same conservative people, simply residing in a different party. But obviously a bipolar party carries occasional costs.
That's a significant date.
The RP for its part was only too happy to welcome Thurmond and the new blood, as it meant votes (exactly the same reason the DP had courted it, i.e. opportunism), and as noted at the beginning, that's what a political party is all about -- getting votes. When it comes down to a choice between votes or ideology, the votes will win that contest almost every time. The single exception to that I can think of was LBJ and the CRA of 1964, which led to the mass migration starting with Thurmond noted above. The microcosm of that would be the candidate who tries to pander to his fringe but eventually has to disown those who veer too far, such as a David Duke.
That DP-to-RP Southern migration, infusing a new right and far-right element into the greater RP, inevitably moved what had been a rational centrist party, much further to the right, particularly after opportunists like Jerry Falwell contrived a relationship with religion, an arranged marriage (religion+politics) that had never before existed. These dynamics bubbling in the RP not only moved that party rightward but the gravitational pull of that social shift moved the DP in that direction too, which is kind of how we as a nation ended up in the center-right political position we have now.
Pertinent to this thread, the end result of all this is that today these social conservatives are collected under the RP umbrella, rather than being split between the parties. It might be argued that this concentration (two parties, each with its own personality, rather than two personalities within a single party) has served to both unite us more regionally and divide us more politically, but that's just me thinking out loud.
So in summary, any party IMO will be led ideologically by the maxim, "follow the votes".
"Our party is for the nativists!
Oh, you're immigrants?
Well we need your votes, so... our party is for the immigrants!"
-- Whatever sells. Parties are not fixed in their ideology. They go where the votes are. And they'll talk out of both sides of the party mouth as far as they can get away with it.
In effect both of these parties have had to deal with (read: turned a blind eye to) two factions that are perpetually at ideological odds with each other. The DP before 1964; and the RP after. Each of these factions tolerated/tolerates the other for the greater goal of vote power, even if it is at times an uneasy truce. Probably the most important distinction between the old and new models is the addition of religion-as-politics to shore up and solidify rhetorical territory. Unfortunately that element has also led us to a greater polarization.
The bottom line is that a political party --
any political party -- shifts with the political winds. A politician trafficking in the euphemism "states' rights" in 1960 was almost certainly a Democrat; the same politician hawking that phrase in 2000 was almost certainly a Republican. The people don't change; the parties do.
Sorry -- I get longwinded. Somewhere in there I think I was on topic...
