The apologists and excuse makers for the Confederacy are always whining that the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. They talk about State's Rights, economic factors, and a host of other reasons, all of which no doubt played some role, but slavery is what made people want to fight and ready to die, on both sides of the line. What is not immediately obvious is that those factors (and race!) continue to play a role in what divides this country, the current division pretty much was foreshadowed and predicted by the issues of 1860.

One overlooked factor is the cultural one. The South, and its current inheritors, the conservative Right, came from the same mind-set. They have always considered themselves the true native Americans, and felt culturally threatened by the urban, immigrant, industrial North. Back then it was Jews, Italians, the Irish and other European immigrants coming to the North's factories they found objectionable, and so easy to blame for their troubles (besides their own slaves, which they were terrified of for very good reason). Today they have a whole new catalog of immigrants to hate and blame for their troubles. They always conveniently forget that these "foreigners" are here by invitation, even the blacks. None would be here if they hadn't been brought in as cheap labor by the very people who now despise them. The traditional South also resented the freeholding, tolerant, liberal farmer and small businessman of the North and Midwest and the ferocious independence and iconoclasm of the West because of the threat they felt they posed to the plantation/sharecropper and essentially feudal and pseudo-aristocratic culture of the South. The divisions are no longer as geographically determined these days, but the historical roots still operate.

I was born and raised in the Deep South, and I'm old enough to remember the Civil Rights movement as it swept across the land during my high school years. I also remember extremely well the obscenity that was Southern segregation and Jim Crow, and even worse, the self-serving rationalizations and excuses that were constantly being made to justify them. My grandparents were immigrants, they suffered from that hatred. I was brought up speaking a foreign language at home, but I look "American" and I can quickly drop into a very convincing Southern drawl when I have to. I can pass for white. This combination gave me both the perspective and the camouflage to understand what was going on around me and make sense of it all.

The Southern/Conservative constellation of identifying characteristics; religious fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism, militarism, fascism, nationalism, laissez-faire capitalism, and racism isn't shared by all there (there are always exceptions and special cases), and even those who share some of these traits do not necessarily carry all of them, and there are many, many good and decent people in the South, too. But you see the pattern often enough to trace the unifying and identifying factors way back, to the Civil War and beyond, to the earliest days of the Republic.

But to these folks, it doesn't matter how long you've lived there, or even how long your family has lived there. You are not entitled to their much-vaunted hospitality if they think you are an outsider. And no one who doesn't look or think or act exactly like them can ever be anything but an outsider. I know these people, even with their flaws, they are MY people. I am a Southerner, too. I know them better than they can ever know themselves. But they are dumb, and they are mean, and what's worse, they are proud of it. And they are cowards, that's why they wear hoods and only come at night in great numbers.