WHAT IF THE SOUTH HAD WON THE CIVIL WAR? 4 sci-fi scenarios for HBO’s ‘Confederate.’

The general image of the Confederacy in most textbooks is a backwards, agricultural South that really didn’t stand a chance against the industrialized North. But it simply isn’t true that the Confederate South was merely a carpet of cotton plantations, and the North a smoke-blackened vista of factories. Both North and South in 1861 were largely agricultural regions (72% of the congressional districts in the Northern states on the eve of the Civil War were farm-dominated); the real difference was between the Southern plantation and the Northern family farm. Nor did the South lag all that seriously behind the North in industrial capacity. And far from being a Lost Cause, the Confederacy frequently came within an ace of winning its war. . . .

Social media progressives are probably right to draw back in horror from the prospect offered by Confederate, although not always for the reasons they presume. The Confederate economy, like the modern Chinese economy, was in the capitalist world but not of it. The Confederate elite of 1861 did not mind making money, but it was aggressively hostile to entrepreneurship and contemptuous of middle-class culture. The most famous advocate of the slave system, George Fitzhugh, frankly described slavery as “traditional socialism” and bitterly contrasted the cruelty of free-market “cannibalism” with the cradle-to-grave welfare provided by the slave owner.

The Confederate government centralized political authority in ways that made a hash of states’ rights, nationalized industries in ways historians have compared to “state socialism,” and imposed the first compulsory national draft in American history. If Benioff and Weiss are successful in creating an alternative world in Confederate, it will shock us fully as much as Game of Thrones has — not for how much of the Confederate future we avoided, but how little.

Ouch.