Somewhere in the course of the evolution of the American Left and its party, the Democrats, the offering of formal apologies became an important political ritual. Most likely this grew out of the transition from an attitude of pride in America to an attitude of shame, a feeling that this country is the world's primary villain.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the trend toward a sense of America the evil, a polity requiring apologies, accelerated when the Soviet Union was vanquished in the Cold War, collapsing of its own internal contradictions (as the Marxists would say), leaving American the world's sole superpower. Conceding the point that President Reagan led America, the good to victory over the true Evil Empire just raises too many awkward questions about the activities of those who opposed  his policies at every step.

1. Preserving and enhancing the legal-standing of the institution of slavery in the ante-bellum South against all humanitarian calls for reform;
2. Extending the peculiar institution of slavery into Texas and Missouri;
3. Attempting to extend the institution of slavery into California, Kansas and other US territories and states;
4. Extending into free-states the slave-masters' legal right to retrieve their "property", escaped slaves. (Dred Scott);
5. Initiating the secession of the Southern states to preserve slavery upon the election of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican with abolitionist views;
6. Undermining the North's resolve to preserve the Union and emancipate the slaves (Democrat Copperheads);
7. Terrorizing freed black Republican politicians and voters during Reconstruction in order to ensure election of white Democrats;
8. Disenfranchising black voters to make the entire South a one-party state (Democrat), a political monopoly not broken until quite recently;
9. Via their control of Southern state governments, instituting Jim Crow laws in the 1880s and preserving them until 1965 (America's apartheid);
10. Governing the South in a manner that tolerated, concealed and surreptitiously-supported racial terrorists such as the Ku Klux Klan, who murdered southern civil rights activists;
11. Resisting Federal enforcement to end racial segregation as initiated by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. 

1. Sen. Robert Byrd has admitted having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and he filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights act supported by Republicans in greater proportions than by Democrats;
2. Al Gore's father, Sen. Albert Gore Sr. also joined Sen. Byrd in the filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act;
3. Sen. Ted Kennedy's father, Democrat Joseph Kennedy, the US Ambassador to Britain, was rabidly anti-Semitic and considered by the Nazi Ambassador to be "Germany's best friend" in London."
4. President Clinton's mentor, Sen. J. William Fulbright, opposed Civil Rights legislation proposed by the Republicans, as reported by PBS Frontline: "the early civil rights legislation, Fulbright opposed that and went along with the majority Southern (Democrat) view"