When This Blows Over

…Southern antebellum chauvinists once
claimed that the culture south of the Mason-
Dixon Line was innately superior to the
grubby, industrial wasteland of the north. A
two-class system of masters and slaves
allowed an elite the leisure and capital to
pursue culture without the rat-race
competition of a striving middle class. So
blinkered was southern arrogance that its
pre-war youth insisted that southern
manhood, with its innate moral superiority,
could defeat a much larger, richer, and more
industrial North — a myth dispelled early on
at Shiloh.
Now the new cultural divide is not North vs.
South, but the blue-state coasts versus the
red-state interior.