AP: Alabama Politics (Again!)

 

The Associated Press has posted an Alabama-centric story connecting the lines between George Wallace and Donald Trump:

“To understand it, you really have to go back to the Civil War and Reconstruction,” said Bill Baxley, a former state attorney general and lieutenant governor.

Now 82, Baxley said he knows how stereotypically Southern that sounds. But it’s fact, he said, that Republicans being the “Party of Lincoln” made white Southerners vote Democratic for generations after the 16th U.S. president won the war.

The more layered reality of the so-called “Solid South” was that two unofficial parties operated under one banner. Moderate to progressive “national Democrats” were concentrated in north Alabama, Baxley explained, while reactionary “states-rights Dixiecrats” cohered in south Alabama. Not coincidentally, south Alabama is where plantations anchored the antebellum slavery economy. Politics became “economic populism in the north,” Baxley said, and “race-issue populism” in the south.

 

FULL AP STORY IS HERE.