Read it. A lot of hot air from someone who couldn't be bothered to get a real understanding of his "enemy", but is very excited to knock down whole armies of straw men.

It really didn't take long to realize that whole thing was a load of crap...

I was kind of with him through his tour as a historian, but when he switched to interpreter mode (especially interpreter-of-present-day-events-through-large-logical-leaps-and-premise-freighted-more-with-assumptions-than-historical-foundation) he lost me completely.

Come it was written by a product of the modern education system that teaches a few facts and very little interpretation of historical events. This writer had less of an education than I got during the 1970s in elementary school let alone American History 101 at a college level.

A mathematician who blogs for the Daily Kos....yeah...I"m going to waste my time pretending this is valid opinion as soon as Thucy posts a link from Fox News and says, "Interesting point made on Fox News today"...

Tea parties are not confederate. They've been on going for centuries in Europe. Especially England and France. I think you owe tea parties an apology for calling them confederate. Wen though those crumpets do enslave my taste buds.

"My opponents are racist, so I don't have to address their arguments." Come now, didn't I teach logic around here?

Seeing all these negative comments, I decided to read the long-winded article. To be honest, I had the opposite reaction of OutsideSmoker27.

I saw two issues with the history:
1. Lincoln started the war. That is unavoidable. Except for Fort Sumter and the Border States, the South had seceded and the only way to recuperate the lost territory was through massive bloodshed (as it turned out, perhaps a million lives). While the secessionist leaders were also willing to see bloodshed, they (to my knowledge) did not have to resort to bloodshed to ratify their state secessions. Lincoln, on the other hand, did make the decision to march armies south into battle and was not afraid to use force to keep the Border States in line.
2. To say that the Confederate elite won the Civil War because of how Reconstruction played out requires that the motives behind secession be laid bare. The author instead simply equates the interests of the Southern aristocrats in the Reconstruction era to the aims of the Southern aristocrats during the secession movements at the eve of the Civil War.

In short, the article seems logical and straightforward enough, but for me, tracing the modern 'Tea Party' to the Civil War is a stretch. The author could have started the story in the Reconstruction era without any problem.

His assessment of "minority rule," if nothing else, is spot on. I was raised among white Southern Baptists, for whom the "silent majority" is an article of faith. If that's not a tacit admission of your own minority status as an un-democratic actor, I don't know what is.

@JECE

Do you not think that Jim Crow and the KKK were the pre-war planter aristocracy attempting to re-establish some elements of the previous racial order after Reconstruction? Why is there no continuity there for you? It's not as though Jim Crow came out of thin air.

I'm not saying that there was no continuity. The actors – or at least the Southern aristocracy as a class – were still the same. But for the author to claim that the South won the war by the end of Reconstruction requires at least two steps which the author skipped. First, the author should have defined Confederate war goals at the start of the Civil War. Second, the author should have compared these Southern aims at the start of the conflict to to the end results at the close of Reconstruction. Instead, the author simply says that the South won the war because the Southern aristocracy kept dominating other social classes.

Now that I am writing this, I realize the author may have been trying to say that wartime Northern objectives failed by the end of Reconstruction. But even so: the same problem crops up. Were Northern war aims really racial equality from the start of he War? The author doesn't go into that either. And why should have he? Northern motivations for pursing armed conflict do not form part of the ideologies he is trying to trace. These sort of issues illustrate why the author could have more safely started his story in the Reconstruction era with disgruntled losers (I mean that descriptively).

of he War --> of the War