So, what do you think- are these Republican leaders just playing around- like a kid with a box of matches, or do they really want to bring back the old Confederacy and split the United States?

Would a reborn Confederacy be a viable nation- or would it swiftly slip into third world status? Maybe I'm out of touch, but I'm thinking most of the parts of the States that generate money would stick with the Union- and there'd be a mass exodus to the North and West of Southerners with brains.

These Republicans are mostly just children playing with matches, best I can tell, albeit greedy, stupid children, with a truly breataking indifference to the suffering of their fellow man. I suspect they lack the self-awareness required to understand the shamefulness of what they do. Men like McDonnell, the newly-elected governor of Virginia, are opportunistic parasites, not neo-Confederates as such.

Poor and middle-class whites in this state do indeed have serious grievances - rural poverty, sub-standard medical care, rampant drug abuse, decrepit infrastructure, industrial flight, gentrification, the list goes on and on. They are all the sort of problems that could be addressed successfully by the state and Federal government, but it would involve increased taxes and public spending on social programs, something these reptiles are obviously opposed to and violently so.

Consequently, in order to remain in power and continue shilling for their corporate masters, the Republicans must substitute these imaginary grievances istead, the lost cause of the Confederacy and the system of institutionally enforced white supremacy it represented. Shocking as it might be in this day and age, at least out there in the civilized world, these symbols have amazing power among certain voter groups and not just in the South, either, I'm am very sad to say.

There's nothing like a lost cause to get people going.

It's like Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Highland uprising. Charlie was a weak, arrogant, stupid man and his victory would have been a disaster for the country- a return to Stuart autocracy with theocratic trimmings- but all the romance, all the good songs, are on his side.

Bonnie Prince Charlie is an excellent parallel, in part because his supporters and the core of Confederate dead-enders are ethnically, and in some sense culturally, the same people. The Highlands were pacified by relocating the population to Ireland. From there, they came to the Colonies in overwhelming numbers, landing mostly in Pennsylvania and then traveling down the Valley Road to Virginia and North Carolina and subsequently to Ohio, Kentucky, Tennesse and beyond.

Among other things, it's one reason the Indian wars were so incredibly vicious. One tribal society started a blood-feud with another and the result was entirely predictable. As a friend of mine of both Native-American and Scots-Irish descent once noted, the problem was not the disparity between the two cultures. The problem was that they understood each other's motives all too well and were both capable and eager to respond in kind.