But America has been a center-right country for a very long time. There are lurches to the left every 20 years or so, but the country comes to its senses sooner or later -- and sooner, rather than later. I may be wrong, but Obama looks incompetent more than anything else. Still, there isn't as big a base for a conservative America as there once was was, even in the South.
FWIW, I'm not sure Everett Dirksen was a moderate Republican. He supported civil rights, but he had been a supporter of Taft, rather than Dewey and Eisenhower, and was anything but a Rockefeller Republican. Apparently, he gets a raw deal from Southerners, though he was quite conservative in his day.
I'm also not convinced that blue state Republicans lost their states for the party, as you imply in another post. Immigration was decided at the federal level, and the other changes were also national or international. Look at Virginia and North Carolina now. As cities grow and spread, social attitudes also change, and it's hard for politicians to undo long term trends.
Moreover, there are a lot of differences in blue state Republicans that outsiders don't see. Some of them are as liberal as the most liberal Democrats, but others are as conservative as they can be in their time and place and still get elected.
Do we "hate Dixie"? I don't think so. If you're from the urban North and you post here you probably have a lot of complaints -- the weather, traffic, roads, drivers, politicians, taxes, government spending, crime, corruption, moonbat liberals -- but you probably like where you live for other reasons.
Southerners who post here seem to love everything about their state and to believe that what's native to the region doesn't have any flaws. It comes across as complacent and annoying. Of course there are complacent Northerners and Southerners with complaints, but they don't post here.
Getting rid of slavery was one thing our states did right. Some Southerners don't want to admit that their state or region did anything wrong, so mention of slavery or segregation gets under their skin. And that attitude ticks us off in turn.
Some of us were pretty sympathetic to the South when we started posting here -- I was -- but a onesided Southern "we're great and you're not" attitude turned us off.
I know what you mean. And it's hard not sympathize with fans of the CSA when they're subjected to unfocused, broad-brush, knucklehead attacks by the likes of Tyrone Brooks, but the Lincoln was a tyrant nonsense tends to dry up the reservoir of goodwill pretty quickly.