Antebellum orators used to make logically consistent and rational arguments about life in the South before the war.
But because it is put forward by a fatuous Charleston, S.C., college professor, we hear it for what Horwitz rightly calls  a clever glide around race and slavery, rather like the slick-tongued defense of the Southern 'way of life' made by antebellum orators, South Carolinians in particular.