They're Not Racists; They're Traitors Defending Slavery

Because opposition to the federal government has always been about protecting and preserving slavery, and nothing else.

We still haven't defeated the Confederacy, and we won't until its latest incarnation in the post-Goldwater GOP is exposed and eliminated.

Charles Pierce explains:

This view of things was litigated at the Constitutional Convention. It failed. It was litigated over the tariff. It failed. It was litigated at Cemetery Ridge. It failed. It was litigated prior to the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. It failed. It was litigated at Central High in Little Rock. It failed. It was litigated on the campus at Ole Miss in 1962. It failed. It was litigated at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It failed. It is the connective tissue that binds modern conservativism inextricably to the remnants of American apartheid because this view of the nature of the nation always was the expression of threat that the slaveholder felt about his way of life. It camouflaged itself in a number of ways involving a number of different issues, but always it was about the fear that, sooner or later, the federal government was going to come and take away the chattel from which you derived your personal economy, and so even what might be beneficial to the nation as a whole must be resisted on the pretext of sovereign states. As the Heidlers point out in their exemplary biography of Henry Clay, even roads and canals were considered to be dangerous encroachments by the central goverrnment on the peculiar institution:

SNIP

States rights always was the constitutional camouflage for white supremacy, be that during the time of slavery or the time of Jim Crow. It has been the single greatest impediment to the intellectual and political progress of the American nation almost since that nation's founding, and it always has been the last refuge of the truly retrograde.

 Thanks to Pierce also for this:  from now on, we are calling it The War of Southern Secession.

And Ed Kilgore has the video of Rachel Maddow's terrific segment on Posse Comitatus, which is directly on point.