What part of “in the 1860s, the Democrats were the conservative party and the Republicans were the liberal party” do you not understand?

The Democratic Party of today has nothing in common, and no real connection, with the Democratic Party of the 19th century and those who are liberals or to the left of liberals today cannot in any sense be held responsible for what the Democratic Party of 1860 did.

And Abraham Lincoln, who kept up a correspondence with Karl Marx during his presidency, would never win a Republican nomination for anything today.

The Great Switch of the 1960s, when the Democratic Party thoroughly repudiated “states rights”-i.e., segregation and white supremacism-while the GOP embraced it under Nixon, was real.

There is no way you can seriously argue that opposing slavery was a conservative position, while defending it and defending Jim Crow was a liberal position.