Dixie, your history sucks. The South was the birthplace of American liberalism, from Jefferson to Jackson to Wilson (a wannabee from SoCal). Southern Populism is not, nor has it ever been, conservative. It opposed free market capitalism, republican moral principles and principles of government, free trade, and so forth.
The South was the biggest support base for the New Deal and the Fair Deal, which came out of very liberal presidents FDR and Truman. Truman's Cold War policy was strongly opposed by conservatives such as Robert Taft and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
As the Democratic Party embraced New Left politics, the South entertained Republicans such as Goldwater, Nixon, and finally Reagan. Reagan himself, a former Democrat, never practiced populism as president that Southerners claim he represents. One can see that he tried it as governor and learned from many of the mistakes he made then. For example, populists have repeatedly broken Reagan's 11th Commandment of not attacking your primary season opponents, and they have defended Reagan's presidency while slamming McCain for more moderate parallels such as Immigration (interestingly, they are silent about Bush's support of the same piece of legislation, just as when he signed McCain-Feingold into law).
The fact is, the GOP had always been the conservative party since 1854, but that seems to be changing since 1992. I think its obvious that the difference is that Southerners used to collectively hate the party of Lincoln, and now they dominate it from within. Further proof that the most disastrous decision the GOP ever made in the long-run was to preserve the Union.
