So, in summary, you do not get to accuse me of historical crimes I didn’t commit simply because I oppose the direction from which you would like to go from the present day, e.g. because I don’t support “affirmative action” being extended in perpetuity doesn’t mean I would have fought for the South in the Civil War.

This is specious reasoning. I never accused you of doing any of these things. In fact, I focused my critique on the ideas you’re aligning yourself with. There’s a pretty big credibility gap for the founders. They had some good ideas, but if the US could ever be looked at objectively by people like you, it would be clear that it was a disaster of human rights, not unlike S. Africa and even Nazi Germany. The ideas failed to be put into effect in a meaningful way–the constitution and the bill of rights were a sham until just recently, and the changes that made them worth the paper they were written on came largely from non-conservative, non-mainstream actors. They were told to slow down, or that they were pushing too hard. They were also told to let go of some of their demands–those that would guarantee a better life for their children, such as affirmative action. Mostly by people like you–conservatives afraid of change. You’re no classical liberal, any more than the men who consigned entire populations to slavery were liberals. Relegating one group to second class citizenship by law is the exact opposite of liberalism.

Anyone who seeks to align themselves with the concepts and frame of mind that produced the country as it was for the first century and a half of its existence as if it was some glory day we all need to harken to–or as if its slave holding hypocritical elites were some kind of enlightened saints–need also take responsibility for the mind-set that produced the atrocities of the 19th and 20th century, for they have made those their own.

Simply put. You can’t say you agree whole-heartedly with Jefferson, a man who enslaved his own children, without explaining where you diverge. And you can’t expect me to assume you reject everything from the past which is currently unacceptable de facto, without having to endure some questioning along those lines. No, its not obvious to me that you wouldn’t have fought on the South, though I would wager that you wouldn’t have fought at all, but simply paid a poorer person to do it for you.