A fantasy Civil War for right-wingers

I find it appallingly creepy when right-wingers hold up the Confederate secession as a good thing.
Right-wing pundit Walter Williams has written multiple columns explaining that slavery really was a pretty good arrangement for the slaves, and that the country would be better off if the South had seceded because it would have limited the rights of that eeevil federal government, thereby increasing freedom (for a discussion and a link, see here). Conservative Thomas Lucente, in a column a few years ago, expressed the same theory: Successful secession would have been a net gain for freedom.
It’s possible they’d argue that slavery would have died with or without a Civil War. That’s a widespread belief (though I’ve heard some historians disagree) but I don’t think that a USA (or CSA) in which slavery is still legal would be a good thing, even if it weren’t practiced any more; race relations are bad in our timeline, but in this fantasy counterfactual, with slavery hanging over the heads of black Americans, I suspect they’d be a lot worse. And that’s assuming it wouldn’t be practiced: It’s possible it might be at least a few people with the money to make it worthwhile, if only as a status symbol.
Even without slavery, it’s hard to see how the civil rights movement would have succeeded without the federal government backing it up (albeit reluctantly at times). And that took support for the movement from outside the South. Maybe a CSA president would have sided with civil rights the way Texan LBJ did, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Williams has argued that secession wasn’t about slavery anyway, which is baloney. Read South Carolina’s declaration of secession: It doesn’t talk about tariffs or trade, only slavery. The north elected an anti-slavery president; the north refuses to return fugitive slaves; the north refuses to silence abolitionists; the north criticizes slavery. That’s the burr that chafed South Carolina, nothing else; you can find similar statements in the declarations of other states and by the Confederate leaders as a whole.
It’s even debatable that secession would have produced more “freedom,” even as regards Lucente and Williams’ limited definition of it. The Confederacy crushed attempts to secede during the Civil War (West Virginia was the only success, but not the only attempt). A new book called Confederate Reckoning argues that the CSA came much closer to 20th-century federal power than Lincoln’s government did.
I honestly don’t know if pundits such as Lucente and Williams really believe that a limited federal government is worth the continued existence of slavery, or if they’re just pandering. They appear to be writing for a right-wing audience and there’s a large chunk of the right wing that hates acknowledging racism in this country. They don’t want to admit it exists now; they don’t want to admit it ever existed or that blacks ever had a raw deal in this country. Being reassured that white America has nothing to feel uncomfortable about (or for the hard-core racists, that slavery was a Good Thing) is, I suspect, a smart move for a conservative pundit looking to build their brand.
But they’re still wrong, factually and morally.