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The current War of Northern Aggression "discourse" has brought to mind the top 100 first place greatest mistake in US state craft: not letting Burnen' Sherman just march back and forth for a couple years or finishing hardcore full reconstruction.
Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from the South's special position as a rebellious territory that was allowed to maintain it's cultural legitimacy, or second order effect from it. Imagine the conservatives we could have in this country if the wellspring of the tendency was John Adams and the federalists; rather than Rutherford and the lost causers.
Wrapping up the entire holographic southern cultural package with opposition to Washington eg. the North, eg the technocratic, rich part of the country has led to a situation where Technocratic Tech-billionaire Technologists are shackled to the cultural traditions of south, either Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension lacking any of the actual cultural roots that european aristocrats have; or hill people proud ignorance and shiftless rebellion against anyone who might have gotten any of that big city 'lernin.
You can watch these tendencies poison Republican politics live all the time; it's why even though the Democratic party is jam packed full of passionless ossified corporate aphorism chat bots, when republicans have all three wings of the government they STILL can't get anything done. There is a deep state problem, but it's not the 'unelected bureaucrats' in washington, it's the decaying corpses of Jefferson Davis and Johnny Reb clinging on to conservatism's ankles and dragging it down into the mud.
Here's one thing I've been wondering about about this question, as a non-American..
You've got the paleoconservatives and the related tendencies (ie. the paleolibertarians, the more openly racist ones like the alt-right etc.) in US politics. One of the things that unifies these is that they are non-interventionist. They don't think the US should be participating in foreign wars of the sort it's done since, well, forever, or giving foreign aid or being involved in international organizations. Often they've got a precise analysis tying the US interventionism, especially after WW2, to the other things they hate, like civil rights laws or "wokeness", whatever whichever speaker in question means, or the general ballooning of the US government or so on.
Right, while I don't agree with them, this seems like one of the things that does have legs; I feel there is a genuine connection between the US becoming the global hegemon and the world policeman and with various tendecies that have contributed to American liberalism, like secularism (to compete with the Soviets for the hearts and minds of the secularized global intellectual class), quest for racial equality (to compete with the Soviets for the Third World), the Great Society and other post-New-Deal welfare programs (to present an alternative for socialism to working classes all over) and so on.
However... the same paleoconservatives also adore, love and defend to pieces the South; the region that has never seen a war fought by the US that they didn't love, expect the one where they fought against the US, and they love to dwell on that war, too. My studies in American history would indicate that whether we're talking about the war of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the World Wars, Vietnam, Iraq, whatever, the South has always been the region to fight that war, both concretely (ie. sending in the soldiers) and in the Southern political class being the one voting the involvement in those wars through and advocating for those wars.
It's the northern states that have been far more reticent to participate in foreign wars - again, whichever the war is in question. Even though the America Firsters opposing the WW2 or the college students marching against Vietnam and Iraq might have believed in vastly different ideologies, they still represented the same broad American region.
Of course, a lot of the paleo types come from the South, so there's the nostalgic attachment at the least, but many others don't. What are they also so insistent on loving the Confederacy and getting weepy about the Lost Cause?
Part of it might have to do with the Civil War and Lincoln's lasting legacy being a vastly expanded central government and greatly weakened states.
That's pretty much Thomas DiLorenzo's shtick
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