@blatham,
As I've said before, there was a time in this country when both of the major parties had a left wing and a right wing. I began to follow domestic politics closely when I was a college freshman in the fall of 1969, and I also began to study the rather unpleasant history of race relations in this country. If I had been around in, say, 1865, given my racial attitudes, I would have been a Republican. I was a liberal from the late '60s through the '70s. Today I'm apolitical; and I'm not a member of any political party. Given the sorry state of political affairs today, I seriously doubt I will ever change in that regard. My poor wife began to identify with the Republican Party when she was a young girl, but she left the party when Donald Trump won the presidential nomination. She will never become a progressive, but neither will she ever financially support the Republican Party again.
In 1960 while living in Houston, Texas, I was all but an eyewitness to a particularly vicious form of racial discrimination. I was home from school with a cold one day when a black Korean War veteran who had been working for my parents as a yardman was bitten by a water moccasin in our backyard. My mother told me she was going to take him to the nearest clinic and that she would be back in time to cook dinner. (As I recall, my father was out of the country on a business trip.) Well, my mother didn't get back until late that night. I remember greeting her at the door. She was crying. I later found out that the yardman had been turned away at the clinic simply because he was black -- despite the fact that he was a combat veteran who had put his life on the line for this country. In fact, he was suffering from shell shock. So, my mother had to drive him all the way over to a hospital on the other side of town, where he was not treated for an hour and was mocked by white interns. No wonder she was crying when she came home! About a year later, I was bitten by a copperhead and taken to the same clinic that had refused to treat my parents' yardman. I knew nothing about the Southern heritage of Jim Crow at the time; and, so, I wondered why my snakebite was treated but the yardman's snakebite wasn't. Funny, but I've never heard of any white person who was denied treatment for a snakebite because of the color of his skin.
Yes, I've posted about this experience before; but it had a profound effect upon the development of my political views. Years later I learned who opposed legislation to put an end to this incredibly vicious mistreatment of human beings. I also noticed which ideology was considerably less sympathetic to the civil rights movement. Of course, other factors have influenced my political views as well.
I'm quite familiar with the Southern strategy, blatham. I think Patrick Buchanan had a lot to do with it. We should remember that there have been individual Republican politicians (such as Robert Dole, who is probably considered to be a RINO today) who had pro-civil rights records. (In fact, I voted for him when he ran for President in 1996.) My mother-in-law, a wonderful lady who was a Herbert Hoover Republican, once participated in a public demonstration against the University of Texas for refusing to admit black WW2 veterans as students.
Of course, some conservatives today claim the Southern strategy was a hoax. But the Chairman of the Republican Party under President George W. Bush declared that it had, in fact, been a deliberate policy.
In the last 30 years or so, I've noticed just how dishonest some white conservatives are about the record of their movement on race. For example, Rush Limbaugh claims that President Lyndon Johnson never would have gotten the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed without the help of Republican Senators. Of course, since he's intellectually dishonest, he won't point out that most of these Republican Senators were MODERATES and LIBERALS -- precisely the sort who would be dismissed as unwanted RINOs if they were alive today. Most, if not all, of the Democratic Senators who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act were white Southern CONSERVATIVES.
I have to say that I'm not completely liberal. I am against abortion and same-sex marriage. While I agree with conservatives on these two issues, I fear what might happen to civil rights laws when President Trump appoints more Supreme Court and Federal court appointees. I fear that in ten years discrimination against minorities will become legal again. It's happened before in the history of this country. It can happen again.
The way things are, I have a constant need for comic relief. No, I've not committed any lynchings as they obviously are against the law today. However, I've been told that my ancestors include a few horse thieves, who (if they were unlucky) may have had a rendezvous with a necktie party. 
