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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1361 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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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).

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