Absolutely. And honestly, that’s a big part of what I’m talking about when I say “old-school Southern Democrat.” I don’t mean the Confederacy or the KKK. The South had a very real tradition of populism, agrarian radicalism, labor politics, anti-monopoly politics and Progressive reform that gets flattened when people treat “Southern Democrat” as synonymous with segregation.

If you want to dig into it, I’d start with C. Vann Woodward, especially The Origins of the New South and The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Woodward was particularly interested in the South’s class conflicts and the ways its political history was much more complicated than the usual Confederate-to-segregation narrative.

Populism in the South Revisited is another great starting point. It covers the Farmers’ Alliance, People’s Party, Knights of Labor and other Southern reform movements and specifically examines their economic and political radicalism.

A lot of older Southern Democrats came from a much less evangelical Southern culture. But as the South became increasingly conservative from the 1960s through the 1980s, partly influenced by Northern transplants moving into the suburbs that many white Southerners were relocating to through white flight, many politicians adapted to that changing political environment. Some politicians who had previously opposed segregation adopted segregationist rhetoric or positions to appeal to an increasingly conservative electorate. Later, some abandoned or softened those positions while retaining or embracing elements of the emerging conservative Southern culture, particularly evangelical fundamentalist Christianity. That evolution is part of what makes the old Southern Democratic tradition so complicated.

Eventually, that conservative wing of the Southern Democratic coalition was largely absorbed by the Republican Party. As the Southern realignment accelerated, many of those older conservative Democrats switched parties, while younger Southerners who inherited that increasingly conservative political culture often became Republicans from the beginning.

One thing that gets overlooked is the generational divide within the South. The older Southerners I grew up around, especially those born before roughly 1941, were actually considerably more Progressive and economically liberal than their Boomer children. My own great-grandparents voted for Obama twice, while all of their boomer children became Republicans. I even remember my great-uncle ripping an Obama bumper sticker off my great-grandfather’s truck. That kind of generational reversal is a huge part of why “Southern = conservative” doesn’t tell the whole story.

A lot of older Southerners remained loyal to the Democratic Party and retained more of the older Southern tradition of economic populism and Progressive government, even as the region around them moved rightward. Meanwhile, the remaining younger Southern Democrats and Progressive voices were increasingly squeezed out as the Southern political realignment reached its final stages. By roughly 2012–2016, much of the remaining Progressive and moderate Democratic base had either shifted into the Republican Party or been absorbed into its coalition, leaving Southern Democrats increasingly concentrated among the region’s more genuinely black and urbanite voters. That generational transition is a big part of why the old Southern Democratic identity can seem almost incomprehensible from today’s political landscape.

That generational divide itself became a source of contention and resentment because boomers and younger Southerners had absorbed a simplified, rewritten Republican version of Southern political history and couldn’t understand why their parents and grandparents still considered themselves Democrats when that identity no longer fit the political narrative they had inherited.