Perspective | Conservatives say we?ve abandoned reason and civility. The Old South said that, too.

The reasonable right includes people like Shapiro and the radio commentator Dave Rubin; legal scholar Amy Wax and Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic who warns about identity politics; the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt; the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss and the American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, self-described feminists who decry excesses in the feminist movement; the novelist Bret Easton Ellis and the podcaster Sam Harris, who believe that important subjects have needlessly been excluded from political discussions. Instead, they anointed themselves the defenders of “reason,” free speech and “civility.” The prevalent line of argument in the antebellum South rested on the supposition that Southerners were simultaneously the keepers of an ancient faith and renegades — made martyrs by their dedication to facts, reason and civil discourse.It might sound strange that America’s proslavery faction styled itself the guardian of freedom and minority rights. He alleged that any pragmatist could see that freeing black people into a cold, cruel world would actually cause their “annihilation.” Slavery, another Southern thinker argued, was natural, because if whites could work the sweltering South Carolina rice fields, they would. Instead, he lamented that he no longer felt comfortable expressing “my thoughts or sentiments” on slavery freely in good company.Let’s call this particular logic “antebellum reasoning.” Its appeal was that it identified pro-South rhetoricians as the upholders of America’s true heritage: They were, in their own reckoning, dedicated to truth — and persecuted by tyrants. Just as the early Americans found a sense of pride and worth in England’s inability to endure their dissent, so antebellum Southerners located their virtue in the passions set against them.All of this is there in the reasonable right: The claim that they are the little people struggling against prevailing winds. The depiction of their opponents as an “orthodoxy,” an epithet the antebellum South loved.In Dave Rubin, who says that “if you have any spark of individualism in you, if you have anything about you that’s interesting or different, they” — the left — “will come to destroy that,” I hear the pro-Southern newspaper editor Duff Green: Abolitionists’ intent is “to drive the white man from the South.”In Bari Weiss — who asserts that “the boundaries of public discourse have become so proscribed as to make impossible frank discussions of anything remotely controversial” and that “perfectly reasonable intellectuals [are] being regularly mislabeled … with every career-ending epithet” — I hear Josiah Nott: “Scientific men who have been bold enough to speak truth … have been persecuted.”In Ben Shapiro — who ascribes right-wing anger to unwise left-wing provocation (“How do you think people are going to react?”) — I hear a letter printed in the Charleston Mercury, which warned that “if the mad career of the hot headed abolitionists should lead to acts of violence on the part of those whom they so vindictively assail, who shall be accountable? … Not the South.”In Bret Easton Ellis — who complains that the left is “always” unreasonably “angry” about things, serves him “constant reminder[s] of my failings,” and expects total “silence and submission” — I hear the proslavery U.S. Telegraph, which warned that abolitionists plotted a “disruption of that fraternity of feeling” in America.[Five myths about Reconstruction]Is there truth to these complaints, such as the one from Amy Wax that America’s cultural cohesion “gets no attention, no discussion,” as she recently complained to the New Yorker? Instead, Douglas claimed he was duty-bound to defend the South’s rights on the basis of certain fundamental American principles, including the right to freely choose how you live.Lincoln understood that antebellum reasoning was more dangerous than straightforward defenses of chattel slavery. He feared that by claiming to stand for freedom, reason and civility, and by framing themselves as beleaguered victims, pro-Southern thinkers could draft new warriors who thought they were fighting for something fundamentally American, even if they were wary of slavery itself.[How people convince themselves that the Confederate flag represents freedom, not slavery]And that’s what happened. As they were more than 150 years ago, ideas like freedom of speech, diversity and respect are now being used to turn opponents of conservatism into helpless hosts, transmitting its ideas.If you hear somebody lament, as Bret Stephens does, that political “opinions that were considered reasonable and normal” not too long ago now must be “delivered in whispers,” it might be antebellum reasoning.