There’s one big reason the right-wing media drives me nuts. It’s not a conservative take on current issues, a focus on anti-liberal stories, or fawning over Republican politicians. It’s that pieces like this show up and are so mindblowingly asinine it’s hard to believe someone got paid to write it. Jeffrey Lord, writing for the Wall Street Journal, apparently thinks he’s hit upon something by bringing up the Democratic Party’s history of racism.

The article reads like what happens when a D-grade history student finds out that there were racist Democrats while he’s flipping through his book during study hall and suddenly thinks he discovered the Ark of the Covenant. Lord, who I’m ashamed to say is a PA resident like myself, assails the Democrats for not outlining their pro-slavery past in their promotional material. I guess the Republican pamphlets are all full of all the awful things the GOP has done since its inception.

It doesn’t help that he’s a little off on his history, citing the slave owning Democrats between 1800 and when slavery was abolished. Between 1800 and 1824, there were no “Democrats”, but “Democratic-Republicans”. Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were “Democratic-Republican” presidents. Not Democrats. They called themselves either Democrats or Republicans, and they owned slaves. The D-R party paved the way for both of the current parties that bear half of its name, so pinning their sins on either side is just stupid. But that’s not what really chaps my ass on this column.

Most people aren’t going to be stupid enough to blame a party for what happened 150-200 years ago. It really wouldn’t matter if the Republican party had a “set non-Christian babies on fire” bill that they pushed in 1838, the fact of the matter is that in 2008 we need to look at what’s going on now. History is important, but only to draw a path to the present, not to just sit there staring at the past, and while Lord gets all in a tizzy because Democrats ignore their ancient history, he’s missing all the modern stuff, as well as context.

You can’t lump all Democrats together in this glossed-over history. There were two wings to the party, the liberal northern half and the southern half. The Democrats south of the Mason-Dixon. The Dixie Democrats. The Dixiecrats. Ever heard that term before? Obviously Lord hasn’t, because he seems unaware that there was a huge rift in the Democratic party that led to a schism in the 1960s.

One of the interesting things about American politics is how much parties can change over time. We’ve seen it on a minor scale in how previously small-government Republicans are now pushing for greater and greater executive power and massively increased defense spending, or how liberal Democrats admire a Ron Paul for his frighteningly intense “limited government” policies.

Place that on a massive scale now, stretching from 1824 to 2008 and you’re going to see one hell of a transformation. It’s true that southern racists called the Democratic Party home for many years. Remember too that half of the issue wasn’t “allowing slaves” so much as “giving the states the right to decide if they can have slaves,” the modern state vs federal battle that today has the Democrats on the opposite side of where they were then.

All this changed with the Civil Rights era, and I can use the history of a single man to illustrate it: Strom Thurmond. Modern political wonks know him as that extremely old dude that needed to be propped up with pillows in the Senate hall to avoid him tipping over and died at about 200 years old. But 50 years ago Thurmond was one of the Democrats’ leading racists, including a famous 24 hour and 18 minute filibuster to stop the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

Thurmond’s efforts were all in vain, though, and more CRA’s kept coming, up to the famous CRA of 1964. Purportedly, as soon as Democratic president Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law, he said “We have lost the south for a generation.” That year, that very year, Thurmond went from being a Democrat to a Republican, where he stayed until his death in 2003.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act altered the political landscape. The Dixiecrats, nearly en masse, changed from Democrats to Republicans. Johnson, if he said that at all, was half right. The Democrats did lose the south, but for more than a generation. Look at the map from 2004, every state south of the Mason-Dixon went red. Clinton managed to sway a few in 1992 and 1996, but it helped that he was southern Bubba, not New England Kerry. Congress gets redder as you travel south, bluer as you travel north, with a few outliers. Two generations on, the Democrats are still fighting to get back the south.

Oh, and on the subject of the liberal and Dixiecrat segments of the Democratic party, don’t forget that Newt Gingrich, Newt Goddamn Gingrich, that said the following:

No Republican here should kid themselves about it. The greatest leaders in fighting for an integrated America in the twentieth century were in the Democratic party. The fact is, it was the liberal wing of the Democratic party that ended segregation.

Okay? We got that? You on the same page as the rest of us, Jeffrey Lord?

Once the Democrats “lost the south”, the Republican Party became the home for all those racists that previously stood by the donkey as their mascot. They didn’t just vanish. That’s why we had fiercely right-wing Trent Lott getting into hot water by claiming if pro-segregation Thurmond had been elected president the country today would be a better place.

Lord isn’t incorrect in pointing out these pieces of history (though his early days are a bit muddled), but he seems to completely be disregarding context and why those mean ol’ racist Democrats seem to have disappeared. It wasn’t just a matter of putting blankets over them and claiming they’re end tables, that entire faction of the Democratic Party went from blue to red after the Civil Rights era.

Maybe that’s why Lord wants everyone to pick up all of their old issues of the TIME Magazine and look at how racist Democrats used to be before John McCain sat in his first fighter jet: it’ll help distract them from how racist Democrats turned into racist Republicans. The Democrats who fought the Civil Rights Acts of the 50s and 60s became Republicans who fight affirmative action and extra funding for inner-city public schools.

So there’s your irony. Jeffrey Lord, hoping to slap the badge of racism on the Democrats, ends up whiffing on how they happily handed that badge over to the Republicans. There’s some bonus irony too, since we have Lord pinning his sights solely on the pre-1964 past on behalf of a party that gets its panties in a knot when anyone has the audacity to look at the sins of the current administration from as far back as, gasp, 2003.