The sources of today’s crises come into focus once we understand that we are well into a war of Southern aggression — a neo-Confederate project to remake the entire country in its own image and win the war the South never conceded. As I’ve long argued, there is a geographically distinct “nation” within the American nation — the Neo-Confederate States—that refuses to accept the legitimacy of the United States as the pluralistic democracy that the rest of the country aspires to be.

Seen in this light, the brutal invasion of Minnesota is not an aberration, but the most recent maneuver in the MAGA military reconstruction of the North, a coordinated assault on not just the idea of liberal democracy, but on those living in states who, however imperfectly, still strive for it.