Cass Sunstein says "Gone With the Wind should not be mistaken for a defense of slavery or even the Confederacy."

"[Margaret] Mitchell is interested in individuals rather than ideologies or apologetics. She parodies the idea of 'the Cause,' and she has no interest in 'States’ Rights.' She is elegiac not about politics, but about innocence, youth, memory, love (of all kinds), death, and loss (which helps make the book transcend the era it depicts). Irrevocably stuck in the past, and a bit of a ghost, Ashley Wilkes reminds Scarlett of 'the sad magic of old half-forgotten songs,' and 'the far-off yelping of possum dogs in the dark swamp under cool autumn moons and the smell of eggnog bowls, wreathed with holly at Christmas time,' and 'Stuart and Brent with their long legs and their red hair and their practical jokes,' and 'a whisper and a fragrance that was Ellen,' Scarlett’s mother, who died during the war. Mitchell draws a sharp distinction between those pathetic souls who keep hearing that sad magic, like Ashley, and those who want to move forward, like Scarlett and Rhett. Her own heart ultimately sides with the latter. But she also cherishes, and tries to capture, the magic, the yelping, the practical jokes, and a mother’s whisper.... [The Confederate flag] should be taken down. But even so, it would be a mistake to disparage the sad magic of half-forgotten songs. Americans have good reason to remember the sweetness, and the deaths, of the countless real-world Tartletons—and never to dishonor those who grieve for them."

From "Finding Humanity in Gone With the Wind/The classic novel shows that individual lives cannot be reduced to competing sets of political convictions."