One thing I always found interesting, is how exactly did he do that? I'd say most people agree with trump's view on abortion (rape, life of mom, incest personally, but should go to the states)
In addition to others' earlier replies to your post, I'll add that Trump also benefited from supporting the more realistic-minded factions among the pro-life movement against the absolutist hardliner activists who insisted on pushing for all (as in, total outlawing of abortion with no exceptions anywhere) or nothing, every time, and pretty much always end up with 'nothing'. I wouldn't necessarily classify the former as 'moderate' because a lot of their number - people like
Kristan Hawkins and organizations like her
Students For Life - generally also want to end abortion altogether (not all of them are that way, but many are), but they're less over-the-top militant about the issue and have a much more realistic approach where they'll settle for the earliest ban they can realistically get passed on a state-by-state basis.
What happened with the Florida abortion amendment last November is a pretty good example. Trump was originally going to vote for it and said as much, which got major backlash from the pro-life crowd; however instead of going full retard and screaming that they'd never vote for him again or something like that, people like Hawkins and
Marjorie Dannenfelser (head of an older pro-life org, the
Susan B. Anthony List) reached out to him.
They eventually persuaded him to change his mind on that particular vote, even though he obviously never added a 'will ban abortion federally' plank to the Republican platform, and in return they helped shore up support on his right flank from the pro-life/social conservative camp as election day came ever closer.
As we know, the abortion amendment proceeded to lose in Florida; they got over 50% of the vote but still fell short of the 60% supermajority needed to amend Florida's state constitution - pro-life forces won more unambiguous victories with 50%+ of the vote in Nebraska and South Dakota, though (especially SD, which had and thanks to said referendum, still has probably the most restrictive ban on abortion in the country; it's banned from conception, no rape or incest exception, though there is a 'save the life of the mother' exception). It's a win-win: for Trump this vindicated his 'let the states decide' position, and for the pro-lifers obviously keeping/tightening abortion bans on a state level is a W too.
OTOH, more hardline activists like
Lila Rose straight up declared that Trump being insufficiently zealous on the anti-abortion front meant they could not vote for him, no matter what else he did (including the above volte-face on Florida's abortion amendment). Nothing short of trying to pass a total federal ban on abortion ASAP, no matter how politically suicidal, would've been good enough for them.
Rose actually backed down from her stance just before election day, after personally meeting and presumably getting buckbroken by Trump for two hours, but the damage was done and she's lost influence while the more realistically-minded pro-lifers enjoy having actual concrete successes to point to & build upon. As on many other issues, 2024 has made the line a lot clearer re: the grifters & perpetual activists vs. actual politicians among the pro-life camp, and Trump did well in identifying & aligning with the latter who actually have workable plans to fight and win as a functional part of his coalition, not just bitching about & fundraising off of babykillers for all time.
I thought that you were talking about abolitionism leading to the American civil war, and you probably are still talking about it in a more runabout fashion, but with that in mind, I'd really like to know if you're talking about Irish indentured servitude or if this was something more psychotic of the Democrat party's work. I'd also appreciate your literary source.
Something that's not talked about nearly enough re: the root causes of the ACW, I've found, is how Southern planter elite and pro-slavery ideologues went batshit insane as the years went ever closer to 1861. Early on in the nation's history Thomas Jefferson and his generation generally considered slavery a 'necessary evil' that would be abolished in time,
and Jefferson himself favored the option of emancipating the slaves but then also punting them back to Africa. Then around the 1830s more radical types like John C. Calhoun started pushing the idea that slavery was not evil at all, but a positive good which benefited the niggers as much as their owners. This line of thought crossed over with the
mudsill theory, which more generally held that society always needed a lower class to be exploited & bossed around by their betters in the upper class.
George Fitzhugh, as I see has already been brought up, took those ideas to their logical conclusion by pitching the concept of enslaving
everyone regardless of race to the master class. After all, if slavery is so awesome for the darkies, then why would it not suit the poor white farmhand (who in all likelihood works with the slaves already!) or factory worker, or so the basic logic went. Also the aristocratic planters generally disdained poor whites, who they dubbed 'white trash' 'sandhillers' 'pineys' 'hillbillies' etc. and viewed as barely a step up over the blacks (the feeling was mutual, hence the existence of West Virginia and there being 100,000 or so Southerners who signed up with the Union Army), so enslaving them outright would not have been a terribly big logical leap for the plantocracy. And skin color was already a thin defense against slavery before the war: 'high yellows' who looked most like whites were prized as pleasure slaves (the 'Yellow Rose' in 'Yellow Rose of Texas' for instance was a 'high yellow' woman),
and Union propaganda made absolute hay out of the white-looking slaves (especially the kids) they freed on the march, pointing to those as examples of why a Confederate victory would be a danger to the liberty of whites in addition to blacks.
Also,
the Southern fire-eaters (the most extreme pro-slavery and secession types) were so deranged that
they wanted to re-legalize the slave trade (which was outlawed by the US in 1807) even though that would've meant an unwinnable war with Britain (whose West Africa Squadron was seizing & blowing up slaver ships with no regard for ownership or sovereignty at this time, also the CSA was banking on the British helping them out once it became clear that they couldn't easily vanquish the damnyankees themselves). This faction was damn influential too, they weren't just some kooks with no power - they helped spearhead the fracturing of the Democrat Party in the 1860 election because Stephen Douglas wouldn't suck them off sufficiently and then engineered the early secessions, they only really started losing influence after the Civil War had started (thanks in no small part to their actions) and proved it would neither be short, easily won nor mostly bloodless. These niggers were so ratfuck insane that Jefferson Davis himself was unironically considered a moderate compared to them.
In broader society, the hard Medievalist (which was part of Romanticism as a whole) shift in Southern culture includes prioritizing the memory of Merry England over Greece and Rome (both of which were slave societies, but the point is the increasing comfort with authoritarianism and the identification of slaveowners with a caste of nobility), the revival of pageantry like jousts, profusion of honorary titles, the entire concept of "Southern knights" and "Southern chivalry," the retarded practice of calling Southerners "Southron" (a word cribbed from Sir Walter Scott), and so on.
Our Man in Charleston dives (as a side topic to its story about a British diplomatic agent) into how fucking insane the Charlestonians (as the vanguard of Fire Eaters) were getting by this point, including wanting to reopen the Atlantic Slave Trade and possibly colonize Africa and romanticizing the idea of restoring the monarchy.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/george-fitzhugh-honest-socialist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Fitzhugh https://harpers.org/2007/07/how-walter-scott-started-the-american-civil-war/
To your impressive post
I'll just add that the Southerners in particular identified with the Normans who conquered England, and the damnyankees as the Saxons who were conquered. The Norman Conquest, of course, was a brutal affair in which the Saxons were reduced to serfdom, robbed of their land and any meaningful political representation, leaving them under the boot of a new all-Norman nobility; the Normans further centralized power in England (into their hands, of course), abolished the Witanegamot (the Saxon proto-Parliament, England wouldn't have anything resembling representative government again until the Magna Carta) and
even effectively abolished private ownership of land in theory (all land in England was henceforth held to be the King's property, all the nobles were technically just renting it & the attached Saxon serfs from him).
And that's when they weren't outright genocided and their territories reduced to wasteland.
Suffice to say, this did not bode well for any poor white (Yankee or otherwise) - or 'Saxon' - who fell under the increasingly deranged planter aristocracy's power as time went on.
