The Return of the Confederacy

Opinion: The Confederacy is Back—Just Not How You Think

The South will rise again? No, my dear, it never fell. It simply rebranded. The modern Confederacy doesn’t come draped in gray uniforms and battle flags. It wears tailored suits, owns media conglomerates, and funds political campaigns with the same old mission: power, control, and keeping certain people in their place.

I come from a long line of politicians—black, Southern, and steeped in the fight for civil rights. I grew up in Atlanta, the so-called Black Mecca, where wealth and legacy were supposed to insulate us from history. But history doesn’t die. It adapts. And if you listen closely, you can hear the echoes of the Confederacy in every "state’s rights" argument, every school curriculum scrubbed of uncomfortable truths, every voter suppression tactic dressed up as "election integrity."

See, the old Confederacy lost the war but won the ideology game. They figured out that you don’t need plantations when you have prisons. You don’t need poll taxes when you have redistricting. And you don’t need Klan robes when a tailored three-piece will do just fine on the Senate floor. The Lost Cause never lost—it just went corporate.

Take a look at the Supreme Court. The Confederacy’s intellectual heirs now wear black robes instead of gray coats, deciding which rights belong to whom. Take a look at the rollback of voting protections, the attacks on diversity initiatives, the quiet erasure of black political power. The Confederacy of 1861 fought to keep power in the hands of a few; the Confederacy of 2024 does the same, just with better PR.

And yet, I don’t hear the alarm bells ringing. Maybe it’s because the battle lines don’t look like they used to. Maybe it’s because some people would rather believe in a ghost of the past than recognize the very real specter standing in the present. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s because America has always been more comfortable with a slow regression than a sudden revolt.

But make no mistake: the Confederacy is back. It just swapped the musket for the microphone, the plantation for the boardroom, and the cotton fields for the courtroom. And this time, they don’t need to secede. They already won.

Jordan is a political heir, cultural critic, and Atlanta native who refuses to let history rewrite itself.