I don't get it. Did people really not understand my sarcasm? As for post-Nixon changes in voting patterns, saying "the polarities reversed" is both reductive and inaccurate. Granted, the vote skews Republican in the modern South. However, It's inaccurate because the party attachment is nothing like it was in the Solid South, where Republicans were always completely butchered electorally. It's reductive because the constellation of issues facing voters - and in fact our the basic nature of national government - is so radically different now than it was at the time of the Civil War that trying to assign these voting patterns to strictly Civil War/Race/Reconstruction issues is absurd. No matter who one votes for nowadays, you're still voting for a post-New-Deal egalitarian administrative state candidate, which would have been unrecognizable to a citizen of the Confederacy. Besides that, a thoroughgoing advocate of states' rights would be pretty repulsed by the aggregation of federal power called for by President Bush's neoconservative policies.
Please understand that this is not meant to be political, and I'm not expressing an opinion about any of the above philosophies or policy choices. Only trying to point out the silliness, unnecessarity, and needless provocativeness of trying to relate a video game representation of a long-extinguished nation-state to the region 150 years hence.
