How the GOP Went from Emancipation to “Maybe Books Are the Problem”
It started like all great American disasters do: with a bunch of men in suits mistaking themselves for moral authorities while mostly protecting their real estate.
Back in the powdered wig days—when you could own another human and still be called a “founding father”—the Republicans were, believe it or not, the party trying to end slavery. Lincoln, the tall one in the hat, wasn’t just a statue. He actually did the thing. Emancipation. Civil War. Union preserved, though God knows barely.
Meanwhile, Democrats in the South were busy doing their own kind of preservation—the kind involving nooses, voter suppression, and later, a little domestic terrorist startup called the KKK. No, the Democratic Party didn’t file the incorporation papers for it, but there was enough overlap to make a Venn diagram that smells like burning crosses and bourbon breath.
Then came the 20th century, dragging behind it the Great Depression and the New Deal. FDR, a Democrat, offered Americans something wild: help. Jobs. Hope. The South liked the money but hated the civil rights talk. So they stayed Democrats the way a tick stays on a dog it hates—until LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act and broke the fever. Or, depending on how you look at it, lit the match.
That’s when the exodus started. White Southern Democrats—once the party of segregation and “states’ rights” (read: “our right to keep Black folks down”)—started shuffling, slow but steady, toward the Republican Party. Not with banners and confetti, but with muttered threats and quietly swapped voter registrations.
Nixon didn’t invent racism, but he knew how to code it. The “Southern Strategy” wasn’t a strategy—it was a dog whistle in a tuxedo. Appealing to “law and order” while winking at every sheriff who once turned hoses on schoolkids.
By the time Reagan came along, he was already a Republican. Not because the party had always been what he needed—but because it had remade itself into something that felt familiar: anti-government, pro-business, nostalgic for a past that only worked if you were white, male, and holding the mortgage.
Now we’ve got people hollering that “Democrats founded the KKK” and “Republicans freed the slaves,” like history is a wrestling promo and not a funeral slideshow. Yes, technically, those statements are true. But so is “dinosaurs existed,” and you don’t see anyone consulting a triceratops about gun policy.
Parties aren’t religions. They’re vehicles. And they can go off-road real fast.
What matters isn’t what they were—but what they do.
Right now. With power. With policy. With people’s lives in the balance.
So if someone tells you the Democrats were racists, say “Yes. And the GOP learned how to monetize it.”
If someone says the Republicans freed the slaves, say “Sure. Then spent 150 years learning how to dress oppression in a flag and sell it as freedom.”
The truth is: both parties have worn every hat in the costume shop.
And America? We keep mistaking the hat for the person.
So let’s stop arguing over old jerseys. Start asking who’s playing dirty now.
