I mean it is a good filter to understand someone with. When I moved from the midwest to the south as a teenager and learned there are still plenty of people that were unhappy the south lost the civil war and want to remedy that you begin to understand there are some people that are deeply entrenched in their views and you have to make a judgement on how much time you're going to spend dealing with that.
I agree and I’d think we’d have a good time chatting about it.
To me, the concepts of self-determination and owning humans are in conflict. I think it’s appropriate and important to honor the gallantry and sacrifice individual soldiers.
But it’s important to appreciate that the Confederacy was explicit in its evil, and the labor of those soldiers in civilian life was cheapened by the aristocrats who founded the Confederacy to preserve their human property. And the (specious) ideals of self-determination were discarded as the demands of the first modern war demanded centralized control.
> learned there are still plenty of people that were unhappy the south lost the civil war and want to remedy that
Did you peel that back to the next layer? Did they want to reintroduce slavery? Or did they want independence from a distant government?
I knew folks in the South who thought some of the craziest racist things and probably would've been OK with slavery (I did hear them promote segregation).
At the same time, the vast majority folks I knew who defended the Civil War or wanted secession didn't want slavery or segregation, but local (and often less) government. Did they misunderstand the role of slavery in the Southern secession? Usually. Does that change their _current intent_? No.
The latter group (which was much larger) should be engaged with on the issue of local government and secession, especially in the context of folks in Blue States who've been rattling about secession under Trump.
The particular problem with class 1 ( want independence from a distant government ) is to gain enough political power to effect change is they necessarily incorporate class 2 ( want to reintroduce slavery ), this necessitates the use of POSIWID
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
Unfortunately I don't think the group of 'just want to secede' is "much larger" than those willing to commit civil rights violations after years of practical experience living in the south. The people saying it in the context of the blue states doing it mostly realize it won't work, and the amount of civil rights violations either way skyrocket in the process.
I think entrenchment is a description of both sides, has neither I really willing to budge. I think the critical I think the critical criteria is how much you have to deal with it at all. Is it an interesting conversation that you can have once in awhile, or something that gets inserted into every conversation.
I think the civil war is interesting and nuanced topic to interrogate once in awhile, and can usually find some points of agreement with most people.
The legal, moral, and philosophical questions around it are fascinating. For example, how do you reconcile people's right to self-determination with a desire to carry out abhorrent actions. Historically speaking, the civil war and failures of reconstruction are probably the single most defining aspect of modern American political life.