Thinking about the whole Lost Cause/states' rights mythology.

There's really no way you can sell "middle and lower class people got themselves and their homes trashed so that rich people could *literally own other humans." But you CAN sell a heroic struggle for independence against [targets of regional prejudice]. And if you didn't win it's easier to sell something that doesn't exist as this idyllic situation (c'mon guys, by the end Confederate politics had become a weird pissing contest between Johnston and Davis - these are not folks who are going to usher in a bright new day for the south).

This could get rambly about slavery and African-American experience. A population who'd be horrified by the idea of *rich people literally owning and swapping humans* will accept *in theory there are ways to escape being poor let alone dead poor, even if realistically those options don't exist*. As a personal is political thing, this shifts the issue from a completely fucked up society to individual responsibility to somehow overcome stacked odds, Americans love that myth.

This is actually a subset of stuff I was thinking about, pretty cynically, but I should drop it rather than post about it.