That's cute, but Lee defended his state, which was one of the foremost principles of The United States until Lincoln came along, while Benedict Arnold switched sides due to personal pique more than self-sacrificing principle.

However, I'd never heard that the British offered the colonists self-rule and a Parliament in 1778. Which after all, the colonists were disloyal to the crown, which we look at as a good thing, but disloyal to the Union 85 years later as a bad thing. Moral values are typically malleable and easily adaptable to new situations - usually according to who wins. I think it was some old woman in the Balkans or Caucusus that kept a trunk full of 14 or 15 flags depending on who might invade that year.

Doc, the Confederate flag can easily mean different things to different people. I've explained before that some people in Europe wave the rebel flag over their weekend cottages or tents as a sign of rebelliousness, country music, symbol of the US. I can tell you that growing up in the south, most of the people I knew thought of the flag simply as a symbol of the south and a trapping of southern music, a bit of rebellious nature, not any nostalgic longing for slavery. Same in western states like Colorado. Yes, it's possible for that to happen even as a Strom Thurmond or George Wallace or the post-Newt Gingrich appeals to white sheet-wearing racists with the same symbol at the same time. What was the breakdown of people who had it as a racist symbol vs. those who simply had it cultural? No clue - maybe someone ran a survey. Did it matter so much to blacks at the time vs now? I also don't know - just because they weren't protesting it doesn't mean it didn't bother them, doesn't mean it did. Strangely enough or not, the use of the rebel flag has become much more racist and political in the last decade than it was in the 70's and 80's - funny what figures like Lee Atwater can do, king of the racist dog whistle.

If you're a Native American, the US flag coming over the hill hardly stimulates feelings of Democracy and freedom - it likely means the cavalry coming to wipe out your tribe, genocide. If you're in Northern Ireland, the Union Jack or walking down the street wearing orange mean something much different than anywhere else. The US flag at a Trump event looks more menacing than I've ever seen the Stars and Bars. (I did get stopped by a Klan march one time way out in the boonies, but was so surprised & eager to get out of there, I didn't bother to note what kinds of flags or anything else they had)

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I thought of anyone here you could deal with contradictions and some ambiguity, even knowing that ambiguity doesn't count as absolute proof. It'd be much harder for an Orangeman to deny pro-Brit significance of his color than a southerner to say his flag had no racist intent, though if that southerner is also clamoring about welfare queens and voting fraud and other dog whistle stances, I'd be skeptical.

From recent flareups in the news, I think we're all informed that Woodrow Wilson was rather a dick towards blacks through reversing progress in government service among other racist actions. That of course doesn't mean everyone who regarded Wilson as a good progressive is also racist, though the more we know about Wilson we will expect people to not gloss over his racist tendencies, and we might find that there's not that much to admire about Wilson after all.

On the other hand, same-sex marriage has become a goal in LGBT circles in the last 20 years - not so much beforehand. But it's become fashionable to judge people on when they supported gay marriage, as if one's ability to leap off a new bridge without thinking or time for adjustment is the only sane adult reaction to change and new proposals.

I'm reading some stuff on heuristics, common iffy patterns we use to simplify our lives. One is Confirmation Bias, which with campaign season it's easy to magnify every offense and every attitude as universal, just as with a modern media echo chamber a news story will get repeated in an infinite feedback loop that will harden opinions and trip away any ambiguity in short time - everything's A or B.

I'm sympathetic to Danny's experiences and the black guy attending the Iowa Trump event (which by the way isn't the south), and others - I would have thought racism would decrease quite a bit by now, but then I see horrid acts that even racist southern cops probably would have been slow to carry out back in the day.

There were supremacists back then - people who believed stuff they thought the Bible said, that intermarriage was a threat, that they were defending the life. Not equally spread, but huge across the south I really have trouble believing there are so many today - I think it's more fashion, an awful kind of Dukes of Hazzard that pumps up fake emotion past the usual bullshit cowboy boots and hats and exaggerated accents and swagger. Randy Newman did "Rednecks" around 1971, and it's not like there haven't been enough southerners college-educated since then to know the real score, that the south's future isn't a bunch of cotton and corn fields, but in places like North Carolina's Research Triangle, Atlanta's tech & manufacturing, the various NASA branches scattered about the south, the relocated car factories from the Rust Belt... The US is 80% urban or suburban these days, and even the stereotypical dumb Southerner is smart enough to figure that out (even though the south is probably only ~65% urban).

One area MLK likely would have found common ground to discuss is endemic poverty in the south - they have 9 out of the 10 poorest states. And he was smart enough to know that poverty breeds division, jealousy, hatred. Here's the map - instead of the Cotton Belt, we've got the dirt poor belt. And with the south's leaders determined to keep people poor, bitter, uneducated, it's a bit of a quandary what to do about it.