DEMOCRATS: The Negative Power

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Meanwhile, changes impend in Southern political alignments. If the Republicans nominate Eisenhower, who looks remarkably unlike Thaddeus Stevens, observers expect that he will get more Southern votes than any Republican in history. That could lead to the extension of the two-party system to the South. With it could come a re-establishment of the delicate operations of Calhounian compromise which do not require the clumsy open threats of bolts by party leaders.

Then the states'-rights issue would die down again. Nearly everybody in American public life is for (and against) states' rights. Russell and his friends had no qualms about turning their backs on states' rights when they were voting for New Deal farm and spending policies in the '30s. They have had few such qualms since. The cry of states' rights is now what it was in Calhoun's day: a creak in the machinery of intraparty compromise between majorities and minorities.