By Jove, I think you've got it. LaBelleDame
Let me put it another way:
It's astounding to watch the Southern revivalists devour themselves in an attempt to extract "justice' from the court of history.
First they embrace the marxist critique of Lincoln after the failure of reconstruction
Then, when the South became just one more piece of collateral damage on the road to marixst utopia, they decided to pretend that the ante bellum South was the last best hope for small, localized govenment. That myth, of course, is easily disproved as the South was a great believer in Federal power in our wars and filibusters to expand the lands of the US in order to shore up the slave economy; in their use of the Supreme Court to defend their "way of life"; in their love of trampling State law when hunting down fugitive slaves.
And now, in the final throes of self-mutilation, Southern revivalists have embraced the identity politics of the New Left. By some strange process of reasoning--or anti-reasoning--they calculate that if they can demonstrate that ALL white men in American history were racist, hypocritical bigots and mass murderers then, somehow, a new day will dawn and justice will be served. It reminds me of the sorry spectacle of republican activists, in the wake of the Trent Lott afffair, fanning out into the media, to perform post-mortem inquisitions upon dead white Southern populist politicians in order to demonstrate the hypocricy of the attack upon Lott.
The self-destructivenes and myopia, is breath-taking. And the historical method is laughable. No, General William Tecumseh Sherman was not a man in the mold of General Wesley Clark. Contemplate that, if you dare.
But instead of expending their energies excoriating and exorcising contemporary perfumed princes like Clark, Southern revivalists prefer to exhume and mau-mau the dead.
Impotent cowards....