So that’s another area in which the Republicans have only relatively lately embraced evil.

Which, of course, as you point out, in NO WAY excuses those bastards who call themselves Republicans today.

I am not disagreeing.. I am sure you are right. My desire to read up on US history<0, I’m afraid. My only knowledge is a misty awareness of post-64 US politics and the Republicans don’t seem to have covered themselves in glory in this.

My point was more to do with the Republican’s anti-racism-come-lately and the attempt to identify the Democrats with the KKK.

YOU, however, have to read up on your U.S. history. The KKK was, indeed, originally a reaction to Republican carpet-bagging in the South during the Reconstruction era. Of course, in those days, the Republicans — Lincoln was one, don’t forget — were philosophically closer, in some ways, to what we would probably call Democrats today. And the nineteenth-century Democrats were what we might call Republicans.

Well into the mid-1900s, the Democratic party is the one that led the charge both supporting and opposing civil rights. The segregationist South used to be solidly Democratic before the 1964 presidential election. All those famous Southern racists you’ve read about from those days called themselves Democrats. (They were referred to as Dixiecrats. Look it up.)

It’s only since 1964 and then Nixon’s “Southern strategy” in ’68 that the Republicans have become associated with racists on the level you’re thinking about.