How many southerners have you, personally, met who celebrate the peculiar institutions of the antebellum south? It’s really not quite as obnoxiously prevalent down here as you might think. For example, in the thread I started, a co-worker- who’s got a deep southern drawl and is a NASCAR and country music fan for that matter- is irked by the fact that her neighbor is flying a rebel flag in a Montgomery [first capitol of the Confederacy] neighborhood because she deems it inappropriate and potentially commercially harmful to the value of her housing.
As for northerners not celebrating their heritage as much, that again goes back to a General Lee observation- general-lee, y’all just ain’t as interestin’ as we are. 
That said, there are more than a few (more than a few thousand in fact) northern Civil War reenactors. An article I read recently actually said that Civil War reenactment is actually growing fastest among black northerners (particularly those descended from the 200,000 black northern troops I would think). If you’ve never been to Gettysburg, it’s a HUGE tourist town, and much of New England reveres its Calvinist heritage in spite of their witch hunts and proud intolerance, and I’ve no problem with that.
Far from disagreeing I’ve said exactly the same thing many times using the same quotes from better sources than wiki and even citing the cornerstone speech. I don’t deny the racism of the Confederate government, it just wasn’t limited to southern states. (There was, for example, another Jefferson Davis who was union but more virulently racist than the CSA president, while Sherman used the word nigger in his correspondence habitually, Lincoln wanted blacks resettled in Central America, millions of northerners were against the war, several Union generals were slaveholders themselves while many CSA generals owned no slaves (Robert E. Lee, Joseph Johnston, etc.).
My own ancestors served under General Joseph Wheeler, who though Georgia born was from a New England family and spent all but the first few years of his life in Connecticut, New York City, West Point, and New Mexico and owned no slaves. After the war he became a general in the United States cavalry and served at San Juan Hill (where at one point while chasing Spanish troops is said to have flashbacked and cried out something like “C’mon boys! We’ve got the damned Yankees on the run!”)
In any case, all asides aside, the war was an INCREDIBLY COMPLEX subject and it’s too greatly simplified and romanticized and misunderstood by BOTH southerners and non-southerners. I think that a modern southerner who flies the rebel flag is either racist or ignorant and either way being way too simplistic, and I think that a northerner who sees Confederate iconography on par with the swastika is as well.
The Nazis began a war for the sole purpose of seizing territory- southerners began a war for independence.
The Nazis intentionally wanted to “purify” the white race by killing Jews and non-whites, the southerners wanted to continue the undeniably racist practice of slavery (which had been practiced from Maine to Tierra del Fuego and from the Atlantic to the Pacific all in living memory of the war) because they feared their economy would collapse without it (which it did).
The biggest comparison twixt Confederate soldiers and Nazis is that in both armies, as in the Union army, most of the privates fought not because they were so heavily ideologically and morally and economically invested in the war themselves but because there was a war on and their friends and relatives and neighbors were fighting on the side they joined. (Of my Wheeler Cavalry Corps ancestors, both were poor white farmers and neither owned slaves- I seriously doubt that it was the Cornerstone Speech that moved them so much as the Conscription Act.) In the big picture the war was about continuing slavery for the Confederate politicians and preserving the Union (NOT ending slavery) for the northern politicians, but for the footsoldiers who are the ancestors of most southerners it was about fighting to protect their homes and then getting caught up in a maelstrom of just fighting to survive.
An important difference between southerners and northerners, incidentally, is that for northerners whose ancestry goes back to 1850 or before there’s a chance you’re descended from Civil War veterans, because not all northerners fought. They didn’t need to. (I did research on Laura Ingalls of Little House fame recently, for example, and though her father Charles was a native New Yorker who moved to Illinois and then to Wisconsin [all about as anti-slave and pro-Union as you get] and was prime fighting age (in his mid 20s when the war broke out) neither he nor his brothers ever joined the Union Army.)
OTOH, for southerners whose ancestral lines go back to 1850 or before, you can be absolutely assured that if you had more than one or two fighting age ancestors here at that time, they fought in the war. That’s one reason it is a bigger deal to us than it is to northerners- we’re a bit more connected to it.
There’s also the psychology of defeat which is as true in Troy, Alabama as it was for the great-grandchildren of the survivors of the sack of Troy. If you’ve lost everything (which so many did) and you’ve lost loved ones and there’s hardly a house in the land without its dead and everywhere you go for 50 years you see aging men with amputated limbs and the ruins of once fine homes and mounting poverty, it’s damned near a necessity to make the war a Lost Cause that was noble, regardless of the truth, and
Well, I’ll leave it there as nothing’s going to change minds in the pit, but the point is don’t do drugs, wear your seatbelt, and the rebel flag is an irritant but not a swastika.
