All the while, an unacknowledged and unofficial third party has survived inside these alignments. A party of Southern conservatives, aligned originally with Democrats, has remained a distinct political entity, complete with their own institutions, practices and values. Elsewhere in America, Democrats and Republicans dueled their way through a two-party democracy. By contrast, Southern states never tolerated partisan competition. Southern states have always been governed by a single, distinct local party, an arrangement that continues today.

America is a three-party nation locked inside a two-party political process. Poles of American partisan alignment have been scrambled in recent decades by a rare event, something unprecedented in our history. Our Southern conservative shadow party just completed a decades-long shift in its official affiliation. It will take time for our system to absorb the implications of this change and establish a new equilibrium. This journey toward a new alignment of our political poles has no certain endpoint, no roadmap, and no promise of a happy ending.

Our constitution was shaped by a troubling contradiction born of political necessity. Our founders were forced to develop a political framework capable of encapsulating a Caribbean slave economy inside a wider classical-liberal project. From that effort emerged a governing framework that allowed the slave states to preserve their peculiar institutions. Influenced by their essentially defensive posture, slave states developed a highly insular brand of conservatism under a monolithic, single-party system.

Southern conservatism presumes the existence of a natural, inherited hierarchy. As Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens explained in his criticism of the US constitutional order, “They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.”