A few days ago, my Twitter timeline seemed to be filled with senior historians dunking on Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Points USA, a conservative group dedicated to disseminating GOP talking points on college campuses. Kirk had tweeted out an uncommonly pithy version of one of those new talking points: the idea that, because the Republican Party was aligned with the anti-slavery movement at its inception and Democrats were mostly sympathetic to the causes of secession and the suppression of freedmen’s rights after the Civil War, we can close the books on present-day Democrats’ claims to the higher moral Read more