hi clo,
i believe there was more than one thing in play. and these things together caused the civil war.
the General Lee quote i shared earlier neatly encapsulated his view of things and their priority: top was his loyalty to Virginia; second was the Union; third was slavery. Lincoln explained his priorities as first, the Union, second, the abolition of slavery.
my own view, as you know, is that the constitution's inflexibility is the deep underlying cause of much of what ails the USA. the world evolves. organising principles must evolve with it. if you write things in stone, or if you write them on paper and make it hard to deviate from them, then you gradually end up with archaic ideals. the imposition of archaic ideals frustrate the moral development of any society.
in the late eighteenth century, at the inception of the US, the anti-slavery movement was not powerful. by the mid-nineteenth century, it was powerful, it was international and it was promoted by the nineteenth century superpower, the British Empire. but the US Constitutional architecture was unable to address the need for change to reflect an evolving morality via either a political or a legal (Dredd Scott) procedure.
the inability via the constitution to forge a non-violent path to abolition created the environment in which the argument about secession from the Union was central. these issues are commingled. but the contemporaneous record elevates secession above slavery as the motive on either side.
people rarely fight for virtue's sake alone. take your comparison of the second world war. the US entered the war because it was attacked by Japan (the history), not because it made a moral decision to oppose Hitler (the mythology). even so, the cause of the allies in world war ii (the US included) appears just. things are complicated.
some nazis will always be with you. but there aren't many. and they are more a sort of macabre joke than anything.
folks should be more concerned by nazism's distinctions with the (mostly male) white supremacy movement than its similarities, in my view. the latter has a wider appeal. i think it's a reaction. white people may think, if black lives matter, and folks reject the notion that all lives matter, then there's room for the view that white lives matter too.
i do think the notion of all sorts of groups claiming victimhood has its natural end-point in white men joining in. as i have said previously, i don't really admire persistent group claims of victimhood. they are used as a lever against other groups. inevitably, the supposed oppressors develop their own claims.
i prefer groups that might claim they are subject to disadvantages but who go ahead and make things work for themselves regardless. less whining, more winning. we admire the roman republic not because it was full of whiners but because its people sacrificed themselves to a larger cause.
heck, cincinnatus was so much of a self-deprecating roman hero that, more than two millenia after his death, he has an american city named after him. the founding of cincinnati suggests that previous generations of americans had civic aspirations above and beyond self-interest and victimhood. maybe it's time to seek out these sorts of ambitions again. i hate the pretentious wording in his "ask not" speech, but jfk was right to ask what folks can do for their country rather than for themselves.
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