"As a conservative, I'm beginning to wonder: Are we the bad guys?"

[raging moderate]

37. My mother was a non-racist Republican. But she finally voted for all Democrats.

My mother was descended from staunch Abolitionists, and they were all Republicans. Her mother's grandparents (he was a minister) had hosted Black houseguests several times because they were all attending a Methodist Church meeting together. And they waited on those Black people themselves; they never had servants. And they were proud to do so; each of them had had an older brother who had been killed fighting to abolish slavery in the Civil War, when the Republican Party was mostly Abolitionists and their sympathizers. My mother never let us use racist words or phrases; she always did what she could to educate us about the bad treatment Black people still endured. She was so happy when new laws helped Black people get good education and good jobs. She told me how her family, suffering poverty and hunger in the Great Depression, had mourned over the even greater suffering they could see in Black people they met. But, as the Dixiecrats and Northern racists began to take over the Republican party, she gradually voted for more and more Democrats (and so did her parents and her brothers and her sister). Right before the last election of her life, my mother told me, with widened eyes, "I guess I'm voting for all Democrats this time!" So Yes, there was a political shift in this country.