Ann Coulter wrote this in Slander:

...liberals prefer to keep reminiscing about the last time they were giddily self-righteous. Like a senile old man who keeps telling you the same story over and over again, liberals babble on and on about the “heady” days of civil rights marches. Between 1995 and 2001, the New York Times alone ran more than one hundred articles on “Selma” alone. I believe we may have revisited this triumph of theirs sufficiently by now. For anyone under fifty, the “heady” days of civil rights marches are something out of a history book. The march on Selma was thirty-five years ago.

Coulter’s statistical analysis has been amusingly debunked, of course (Tapped pointed out months ago that many of those “Selma” references are references to women named Selma or are otherwise unrelated to civil rights) -- but substitute “the Civil War” for “civil rights marches” and make a few more minor changes, and Coulter’s words could well be accurately applied to neo-Confederates like Trent Lott and the Council of Conservative Citizens, as well as many ordinary Southerners with similar views.

“Reminiscing about the last time they were giddily self-righteous”? These folks do a lot more than reminisce. They literally re-fight the battles of the Civil War. They brandish (and vehemently defend) the banner of the losing army long after that army’s defeat. They become dewy-eyed at the thought of leaders of that failed struggle (“Sometimes I feel closer to Jefferson Davis than any other man in America,” Trent Lott said).

Or substitute “opposition to civil rights” for “civil rights marches”: Like a senile old man who keeps telling you the same story over and over again, Trent Lott says, over and over, that if the pro-segregation candidate had been elected President in 1948, the country would be a better place.

For anyone under 140, the “heady” days of the Civil War are something out of a history book. Even the vote to keep Trent Lott’s fraternity all white was forty years ago. I believe we may have revisited this obsession of theirs sufficiently by now.