The modern Republican culture war has roots that reach back more than half a century, yet its ideological core stretches even further, to the unfinished business of the American Civil War.

What began in the 1970s as a strategic push to mobilize voters around issues of race, religion, and morality has, by the rise of Donald Trump, evolved into an existential clash over the very definition of the nation.

The culture war has become not merely a contest of policies, but a continuation of an older conflict that reshaped the country once and now threatens to unravel it again.

In the aftermath of the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865, Southern leaders cultivated a mythology known as the “Lost Cause.” By portraying the Civil War as a noble fight for states’ rights rather than the preservation of sla

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