re: If the Reps had punished the Dems following the Civil War, would this be occurring now?

Democratic President Truman desegregated the US Military and put some civil rights and voting rights policies (eliminating "poll taxes") in place and the Southern Democrats broke off into the "State's Rights Democratic Party," or "Dixiecrats. They claimed that any Civil Rights policies would make AMerica susceptible to Communism (sound familiar?). For various reasons Dixiecrats like Strom Thurman of North Carolina began to drift to the Republican party, though in the deep south it was still not a common thing.

As the Civil Rights Act was passed effectively ending racial Segregation African Americans left the Republican Party (they had stayed Loyal to the Party of Lincoln if they were in an area where they were even allowed to vote) and became Labor Union-member Democrats... and this pushed some Dixiecrats to flip to being Republicans, as they didn't like the socially Liberal focus the Democratic party was veering to... and they figured out that while Black and White Union members both voted the same way, if you could destroy the Labor Union they voted differently and white voters could be convinced to vote for Republican candidates. That takes us through the 1970s and the campaign to instill "Right To Work" laws that destroyed Unions and changed the electorate. The South still mainly stayed Democratic in registration and flipped between party candidates with the rest of the country... it went for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1994, then has been reliably Republican overall since 2000 in Presidential elections.

So, as to your question... which I take it to be "would we be having this Problem today if the Republicans had committed a genocide after the Civil War and killed all Democratic white citizens of the South?

Well... uh... that's a hell of a question. Like I said, the Republican party instantly changed after the Civil War into being the party of "business (management, banking, investors)," and that actually breathed new life into the Democratic party in the North to become the party of "Labor," which could co-exist with a Conservative faction in the South that broadly represented Labor and agriculture and farmers and had the shared interests of fighting big companies and their monopolies. Along with the Union busting changing how working/middle-class Southern whites voted, the "Watergate Babies" assumed power in the Democratic party in the late 60s and 70s, and where previously the Democratic party had been full of people who came from Union leadership or small bsuinessman, they were college kids, just like most Republican politicans... the difference being they opposed the War in Vietnam and they were super socially Liberal and focused on social issues and civil rights. What they didn't share with older Democrats was that opposition to Corporations and monopolies... they were mostly pretty well-off kids that didn't come from "hard working-class" households, so they didn't see that as their enemy. And this is a big thing that brings us to our current problem: BOTH PARTIES ARE TOO FOCUSED ON APPEASING THE WEALTHY AND CORPORATIONS, one of them is socially Liberal while the other one is socially Conservative, and that IS NOT DOING WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE FOR MOST AMERICANS.

And I think all that matters is people being able to make a good living and see themselves progress in life for their effort. The rest of it is all bullshite they might not even give a damn about if it wasn't constantly shoved in their faces to distract them from the fact that they're being robbed blind in a lot of ways in this country.

I'm a Democrat... it is hard to actually get the stalwarts - ancient unbelievably wealthy people who been in office way too damned long - to really fight for working people. They give up too easily. Republicans use this Cultural smokescreen of representing the common man, but they don't... Mitch McConnell gets wealthier and wealthier while the state of KY gets poorer and poorer and has a big meth epidemic. I can't say the Democrats really perform that much better... they're too willing to throw up their hands and say "we tried, they won't budge!" And Americans have been so programmed with fear of "SOCIALISM/COMMUNISM" that they fight anybody who would focus on working people.

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A third of us either wouldn't be here or have different grandfathers/mothers, and we'd all sound like New Yorkers or Ohioans.

Most rebellious factions are slaughtered, and then their entire families are wiped out.

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That war, in particular, had heavy casualties from battles, deaths from starvation and disease as a result of the war disrupting everything...

Then there's the joke from some movie:

(Old man to a group of kids in a museum): "Say kids, do you know that more Americans died in the Civil War than any other war?"

"Nooo"

"Do you know why?"


"Noooo"


"Well, there were Americans on both sides, see... so everybody who died was an American... and a lot of people died."