Australia doesn't have whole states that follow specific parties or follow a set belief/lifestyle. Everyone just does whatever they want, wherever they are. How did it get like that over there?
Well, it all started with idiots. There were people that wanted slavery "conservatives" and the people that didn't want slavery "liberals." The conservatives were the Democrats at first and the liberals were the Republicans (Lincoln) at first, but that changed. I'll get back on that later. Anyways, the South were states that relied on farming cash crops (hemp, cotton, indigo, etc.) and required slavery to do that because machines weren't around then. The Northern states thought that slavery was bad, so they wanted the South to abolish it and keep it from spreading further. That's when the Civil War came in. The South lost and the North won, so slavery was abolished and that's when racism kicked in. At this point the conservatives were still Democrats. So they forced the blacks to abide by the Jim Crow laws, which were laws that required "separate but equal" facilities for whites and "colored" people. They were separate but not equal. So they didn't like it and started the Civil Rights movement. Some "liberal" people decided to move to the Democrat party. The current Democrats weren't happy, so a TON of them moved to the Republican party and those are the parties we have today. People in the South still have kinda backwards views ("conserving" old American values) and they'll only vote Republican for anything, even if the person doesn't actually have Republican values. For example, most Republicans are Baptists, but when Mark Sanford decided to become a Representative for the House of Representatives, they automatically voted him in even though he didn't have Republican values (He cheated on his wife and went missing for a while; he was in Argentina with his mistress. He used taxpayer money to fund his little vacation). So that's the story of this shitty country and why I hate the South. Oh, and some people in SC still fly the Confederate flag. Just shows how backwards some of us are.
