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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1363 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 20, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Let's say you're redoing the Civil War and you get to play one of two characters: Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis.

Would it actually be easy to win the war playing as Jefferson Davis?

Obviously, the South would never have been able to conquer the North. The North had immense economic, technological, naval, and manpower advantages. But they didn't need to. They just need to impose enough of a cost on the North that the North would come to a settlement. This doesn't appear that far-fetched. The re-election of Abraham Lincoln was no sure thing in 1864. Had the war not turned decisively in favor of the Union, its possible that McClellan could have won. In the end, he still captured 45% of the votes and won three states (NJ, DE, KY). If McClellan prosecuted the war as President like he did as a General, its likely the South could have held out for a long time. Situations like the starvation of Union prisoners in Andersonville, and the sheer awfulness of the conflict would have likely have proven intolerable without a sure path to victory.

So what could the South have done?

Fabian tactics. They should have simply refused to give battle whenever possible, and harassed Union communications. Johnston did just that as he retreated in the face of Sherman's army. But then he was replaced by the Confederate government because they preferred someone who wanted to fight. Then Sherman took Atlanta.

Lee's incursion into Pennsylvania was a fatal mistake that did more to weaken the Confederate cause than anything. He may have been a good tactician but this strategic blunder is unforgivable.

But the real weak point here is Jefferson Davis. He often involved himself in military decisions and wanted commanders who took an aggressive posture. While appropriate for a stronger force, this is entirely inappropriate for a weaker one. Confederate doctrine should have been preservation of precious manpower, avoiding giving battle, never fighting when not intrenched etc... That last part is also key since the Civil War showed some signs of a proto-WWI type environment.

In any case, in hindsight, the war seems eminently winnable for the South. Which character would you play: Lincoln or Davis?

I think the more interesting question is: the North won the war and you play as Andrew Johnson. What do you do so that 130 years later people no longer identify with the cause of the South?

Do people really identify with the cause of the South now? The Confederacy fought for a very specific slave based political economy. That economy was destroyed by the war and never came back. All political fights in the US are within the political-economic universe created by the victorious Union.

I consider modern people who use Confederate imagery as similar to Ukrainians who dress up like the Nazis; they are appropriating the dress and iconography of a previous movement despite not advocating for that goals of that previous movement.

I’d use a test along the lines of “would believers in the original cause endorse my goals?” Or maybe “would I care about endorsement from the original cause?” So neo-Nazi groups might count even if they don’t have a specific opinion about Versailles. But they’d have to deploy that iconography in service of a Nazi-approved goal like, say, purging ethnic Russians from a region. Merely defending Ukraine’s territorial integrity wouldn’t count.

By this standard, there are definitely people who still identify with the Lost Cause. They’re not expecting to bring back plantation economics but they do still want to maintain a black underclass. Or they have strong opinions on federal authority: courts, banking, interstate commerce. It’s a different world but I think you can still show continuity, especially when it comes to civil rights.

There are two versions of the "cause of the South" that were live issues in living memory and which Yankee elites would have preferred to suppress for good reasons.

The notorious one is race-based citizenship rights. Jim Crow was a live issue for a century after Appomattox, and the last unrepentant segregationist in active politics was Trent Lott as late as 2007. The strand of MAGA thought that talks a lot about "heritage Americans" is being deliberately ambiguous about where ADOS blacks (and feather Indians) fit into their ideal America. The Confederate Battle Flag and the veneration of Confederate veterans was, in fact, used as a symbol of opposition to the Civil Rights and an attempt to link Southern regional pride to the political project of opposing Civil Rights, which is why the symbols are as controversial as they are.

The more serious one in the 21st century is the idea of the United States government as a foreign invader. PJ O'Rourke writes in the introduction to the British edition of Parliament of Whores that the genius of the Anglosphere is that we see bad government as more like a broken toaster than a hostile god. Seeing the government as a foreign invader (either in general, or only when it does something you don't like) isn't that. My (limited by youth and distance) understanding of the symbolism when I was growing up was that the Confederate Battle Flag was used as a symbol of this kind of anti-government sentiment (in much the same way that the Gasden flag is used now) in the 1980's and 1990's before it became a red rag to anti-racists.

Do people really identify with the cause of the South now?

If by "cause of the South" you mean "very specific slave-based political economy", maybe.

But if by "cause of the South" you mean "anti-do-what-anyone-else-tells-you, accepting that you go your way and I go mine, and [to a lesser extent] that fighting if neither of us can do that is good and necessary, even if we die on our feet rather than living on our knees"? That's the reason the General Lee has the Stars and Bars on it (and why it's the symbol of the Dukes of Hazzard in the first place), and is also why even in other nations people reach for this symbol (for they have no native culture of their own) to evoke that particular kind of childish American-style liberty.

That's kind of what "States' Rights (to [insert your favorite moral opprobrium here])" misses- the entire point of that is so that you may do in your area what you and your people have decided to do (i.e. good faith is assumed, per liberalism). One notes that "States' Rights" also includes "to murder your children and get away with it so long as you are a woman", but most don't actually realize that because they're focused on Muh Slavery.

despite not advocating for that goals of that previous movement

I mean, yeah, the Nazis would have put all of Ukraine in concentration camps if they could. The Ukrainian Nazis are generally fighting the Russians (re: Azov) so obviously they don't advocate for that goal; so does the "never ask a white supremacist the race of his girlfriend" thing.

I think there's a lot of emphasis on words and not really on actions, but you have to be paying attention to said actions to know that.

I've met at least one guy younger than me who was like "yea I'd fight for the Confederacy." It wasn't a pro-slavery stance, it was essentially regional patriotism.

You've got to understand that a lot of the people who fought for the South didn't fight for slavery in the sense that they did not stand to benefit by it and had little or zero economic investment in it. Like, plenty of poor people who basically did not benefit from slavery at all still fought for the South because they were invaded by a hostile foreign power. And by 1860, the culture war over slavery had grown beyond slavery in the sense that it had become about whether slavery was right or wrong or should be legal or illegal, but about a clash of cultures and ways of living. (You can see this in today's culture war as well, arguments as soldiers and all of that.)

And in the South, moreso than most other parts of the United States, those people didn't go anywhere, they had kids and grandkids and those great-grandkids still live there and still have an emotional attachment to their ancestors (who fought bravely despite very long odds and were defeated) and their land (which was economically devastated by the war) and their culture (which has been mocked in popular culture ever since). So (despite your assertion about political fights in the US today) the differences in the cultures and ways of living never really went away. Many, perhaps most people in the South, are still regionalized patriots. I think (particularly in the past) people were likely to display a Confederate flag similar to how someone in Texas might display the Texas flag instead of the United States flag. (Not that I would suggest there was zero correlation between wearing the Confederate flag and certain beliefs about race...!)

Perhaps the best way I might explain this to someone who is either too close or too far from the question to understand it might be: imagine a patriotic Englishman who strongly supported the Saxons at Hastings (I suspect a pretty common position) despite modern England being fundamentally a Norman invention.

This is not Confederate apologia, by the by, I'm just trying to explain something to you. Happy to elaborate to the best of my ability.

I think all of your arguments are true, and it tracks my experiences with Southern family and living in the South, and I think we may have a bit of a terminology dispute. When I read, “the cause of the South”, I interpreted it as specifically “the Confederate cause” rather than “fighting for Southern wellbeing in general.” While people fought for both the Union and Confederacy for tons of individual reasons, the Confederate leadership was pretty unified that the purpose of secession was the maintenance of the slave system and planter dominance in the South.

Tons of later Southerners viewed themselves as having kinship to the Confederacy, but almost none of them wanted the socio-political-economic system that was the raison d’etre of the Confederacy. Even the Redeemers after the Civil War had a very different class and social basis than the pre-war Planter class. They may use Confederate iconography or argue for the nobility of certain Confederates or even the cause as a whole, but I don’t consider that really supporting the Confederate cause.

Your average guy who has a Confederate flag is either a Southern regional patriot or Red Tribe person who dislikes Blue Tribe and/or people who don’t like the South. I view it as similar to a Ukrainian who uses Nazi/Banderite iconography today; they don’t support Nazi Germany or probably even the politics of Stephan Bandera. They are just using the symbols of a previous fight for their use in a current fight without endorsing the politics of the previous fight.

One thing I don't understand is that, at some point not too long ago, Confederate apologia was relatively common in the North. I mean, for Pete's sake, a Canadian band wrote a sympathetic song about the South, "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".

Now the common take is that the south was evil, no good, they sucked in every way, etc... The Dixie Chicks are just the Chicks. Lady Antebellum is Lady A.

What changed?

Its not what we would normally expect. In the 1920s I would expect the antebellum South to be the outgroup. In the 2020s, they are the fargroup. You would typically expect hatred to lessen as the conflict becomes a distant memory. Instead, it has increased.

Regardless, I thank God for the defiant oppostionalism of the Borderers. They guard my right flank. Without them, the leftist hate mob would be after me.

I think it was Dylan Roof shooting up a black church while wearing Confederate and Rhodesian flag patches. It was pretty soon after that, that Amazon and such stopped selling Confederate flag merchandise, and streets and schools started getting renamed.

Literally who?

I don't doubt the chronology, but the stage has to be set ideologically. The spark didn't really cause the fire, it was inevitable with enough dry timber. If Dylan Roof, who I honestly don't remember, had never existed do you think that the schools wouldn't have been renamed? Of course they would have. And if a Dylan Roof didn't exist it would have been necessary to invent him. Like we have now with the lynching hoaxes.

The civil war wasn’t really about slavery- I mean sûre, slavery is how I’d explain it to children, it was the proximal issue, so it’s not totally unfair to call it that. The civil war was about whether southern elites should have a veto over US policy on the whole. This is, in the minds of liberals(and perhaps nowhere else), a live issue again. You should just read liberal propaganda and connect the threads.

What changed?

A cynical and short answer is that American politics did (the South stopped voting for Democrats).

There's always going to be a sort of romance and pathos in defeat that I think is attractive, and I think that US culture went from elevating rebels to viewing them as an insidious threat. In fact, I think it's super interesting the degree to which US establishment culture grew extremely censorious while still pretending to be the old rebellious culture, but of course the easy answer is that they are the same culture, just all growed up.

Reconciliation between the North and the memory of Dixie was a symbol of reconciliation between the two halves of the country, so naturally it ratchets back up with the culture war (the 1920s culture war was along different lines, like prohibition, that didn't match to North/South, but nowadays the South, as well as anywhere up North that would fly the flag, is Deplorable country).

I don't know for sure. Until 2015 the creed of the "Children of the Confederacy of the United Daughters of the Confederacy" stated that the war was not fought to sustain slavery, which means you can identify with the CSA without advocating for slavery.

I think it’s important to disambiguate the cause of the CSA from the Redeemer and post war conservative Southern causes. The core telos of the CSA was the maintenance of slavery and planter dominance. All of its leadership agreed on that. Post war Southern conservatives from the Redeemers onward desired different things. There is overlap, such as both wanting to limit Yankee power more or less and support for white supremacy until the 60s, but they are different political projects.

Groups like Daughters of the Confederacy use the history of the CSA for their own purposes, but they don’t share the same ends. The CSA response to the question of “Was the US Civil War about slavery?” Is “YesChad. Slavery needs to protected.”

The confederacy fought because they believed the planter class was owed a veto right over federal policy, and they had pre-abolitionist dust ups over this regularly. They seceded after losing control of the senate and then the presidency in quick succession, not in response to any specific policies.

In the 1860’s, this was specifically manifested as slavery. But they’d previously gotten into it with pro-slavery presidents. The non-slavery parts of the CSA constitution are also revealing- all about Plutocracy and the natural rights of large landholders to govern.

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