“Race made Reaganism possible”. So said Paul Krugman in a June 25, 2015, commentary. Previously, probably in 1962, when the country was finally waking up to the scourge of racism that had plagued the southern states since Reconstruction, southern whites needed a symbol to identify their resistance to the very notion of equality of the races, so they chose the Confederate battle flag. Previously, the flag had not been widely displayed except in museums. Then LBJ’s great Society was enacted and desegregation became the law of the land, but this “Great Society” was a set of laws that were never accepted by Southern whites. So, when Ronald Reagan came along with his anti-government message, here was the perfect champion for the cause of bigotry throughout the South. States that had been Democratic for generations suddenly became Republican and have remained so ever since, with “the flag” as a symbol of their determination to resist everything “federal”, and Ronald Reagan as their cheerleader. So the scourge of racism begat the scourge of Reaganism.