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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.
If I'm in a bad mood, I'll say the key failing was insufficiently humiliating the South, but the real failing was giving Southern elites a pass for trying to destroy the country. Within a few decades, the Southern aristocracy was back with its power and status only slightly attenuated.
It's easy to dump on the hillbillies and rednecks, but every corner of the earth has people like them. Somehow, it hasn't been a problem for the Midwest.
The Southern elites were of the same race and class as the Northern elites, so the Northern elites didn't feel comfortable holding a grudge against them.
It's much easier to hate the poor white people who didn't actually own slaves.
The scorn for ordinary southerners is largely retrospective and based more on the social history of the post-war South.
They weren't. Southern elites were agrarian landowners, Northern elites were businessmen and industrialists.
The gentle treatment of Southern elites owes more to war exhaustion, a general indifference to the fate and fortunes of freedmen, and specific obstruction by southern sympathizers than to class affinity between Northern and Southern elites.
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