If you read Bork's work, especially The Antitrust Paradox, and if you study the caselaw prior to and post 1970's, you'll see a stark difference.
It was really a conservative idea at that point but I'd say it's more neoliberal, which has a strong backing in the democratic party and has for decades, beginning with Carter.
The per se analysis and application, particularly, is just massively different from the pre-Bork era. He's the single largest reason that the three main elements of cost, quality, and quantity as a standard for antitrust analysis has eventually boiled down almost entirely to cost, partially because it's so much easier to measure but also because he advocated for it as a mechanism to measure business efficiency.
One of the big problems of this is the change in fundamentals since Bork was writing in the 70's, particularly with union membership declining so heavily. He was countering a very strong and powerful union system and factored that into his analysis, and we just don't have that in the private sector any longer.
I've been working on a paper for a while about theoretically adding in wage and labor market analysis into the mix, particularly with monopoly and monopsony situations, but it's kinda stalled since I've been clerking.
Honestly, read the guy's book and read some cases if you're interested. You'll see it fairly quickly.
Why would racists mad about Democrats supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 respond by switching to the party that had pushed through every other Civil Rights Act before it? Of course, they didn't. Of the 21 Democrat Senators who had opposed the Civil Rights Act, just one became a Republican.
The landslide GOP wins in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988 obscure subsequent trends, but in 1976, Carter still won the usual southern states. Even in 1980, a generation after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Reagan won New York by a larger margin than he won Alabama and South Carolina.
Southern realignment was driven by economic development. The south voted democrat in 1950 for the same reason black people did: because they were poor and Democrats were the New Deal party. In 1950 Illinois's pre capita income was double that of Alabama: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?eid=257197&od=195.... Staring in the 1960s, the south experienced rapid urbanization and economic development (the "New South"). The south's competitive advantage against the north was lower taxes, lower regulation, and Right to Work laws--all Republican policies. By 1990, Illinois's per capita income was only 33% higher than Alabama.
This is clearer by looking at Virginia--the Capital of the Confederacy. Virginia was part of the Solid South in the early 20th century. It voted for FDR by more than double the national margin in 1944. But by 1960, Virginia was pretty reliably Republican, voting for Nixon in 1960 over JFK (even though JFK won deep south states like Georgia by 25 points). You can't explain Virginia's flip by pointing to racial politics. The reason it flipped was because Virginia industrialized earlier than the other southern states. In 1950, Virginia's per-capita income was already halfway between Alabama and Illinois. In 1970, Illinois was only 10% ahead of Virginia, but was still 50% ahead of Alabama. The other southern states followed the same GOP shift, they just did so decades later because their economies industrialized decades after Virginia's.
The "southern strategy" narrative is a tremendous example of white people's gullibility when it comes to race issues. It's based almost entirely on one 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, who didn't even work on the Nixon campaign, or on Reagan's 1980 campaign. And it's based on a premise that's simply absurd if you think about it for a minute. The south flocked to republicans in the 1980s to punish democrats for a law that Democrats had voted for in 1964 (but which Republicans had voted for by an even larger margin)--nevermind the fact that, during this time, the south built an economy on siphoning jobs from blue states through business-friendly GOP policies. Also ignore the fact that the major issue in the 1970s and 1980s when all this was happening was the threat of the communist, atheist Soviet Union, where southerners naturally fit into the GOP bloc.
Carter being a Georgia peanut farmer made a huge difference in GA, AL, and SC voting in the 1976 and 1980 elections. You have to remember, he was the first deep south president since the civil war - white voters especially really cared about that. He was just also a disaster of a president, which is a big reason he lost anyway.