Conservatism in a nutshell

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

My slave-owning ancestors probably said that just before they lost everything in the civil war.

The Civil War was fought because the U.S was quite literally broken. Therefore we fixed it.

Andrew Johnson and the Dixiecrats made it somewhat pointless with 100 years of Jim Crow, but that doesn't mean the war wasn't worth it.

That was my point. They were so trapped in their conservative thinking that they couldn't see things had to change. They didn't even learn after getting their comeuppance. They blamed African Americans & Jews (later Asians & Mexicans also) for what they lost; they switched parties when Democrats started embracing change; they hated the very labor unions whose policies allowed them to rise back up to the middle class. My father openly wished for the return of slavery--I haven't spoken to anyone on his side of the family in many years.