J.D. likes to tie “Heritage American” status to the Civil War, which raises a question: how does he feel about the Confederacy?
From the reviews of his latest book, the answer is pretty clear. He will concede that slavery was wrong and that the Confederacy was fighting for a bad cause. Individual Confederate soldiers, on the other hand, were as brave and noble as those fighting for the Union. After the war, they came together to inhabit and develop the West and to build the country we know and love today. They consequently bear no blame for slavery or the war. Whatever sins they might have committed have long since been redeemed.
Really? They actually built a new South that was as close to the old one as possible. It was a backward, Third World land with a plantation economy premised on cheap labor, low taxes on landowners, the denial of political rights to black people, agriculture, and the extraction of natural resources. As I’ve noted before, that economy still exists in some areas of the former Confederacy today.
The Civil War, regardless of what J.D. thinks, was about treason and slavery, and he is siding with the traitors for reasons of political expediency. Were they really better Americans than today’s immigrants? Not by any reasonable standard.