The Confederacy Is Dead

It has become fashionable in some circles to liken the Republican Party to the Southern Confederacy—the same Confederacy created out of the throes of sectionalism and secession to preserve racial slavery, and the same Confederacy that in 1861 inaugurated violent civil war against the lawful government of the United States. Recent essays in Rolling Stone and the New York Review of Books have given the clearest expression to this comparison. But the analogy is false, and it demands a corrective.

It is self-evidently false because no American today sanctions the...