All you have to do is read the resolutions of secession passed by the actual southern state legislatures to know what it was all about, read their top politicians stump speeches like the Cornerstone Speech, etc. Where they stood and why is in plain black and white and no room for argument. Simple facts. It is not the mythology the southern Democrats came up with to save face after they lost the Civil War.
Levin and Gorka are echoing the Claremont College, Harry Jaffa school of thought. They celebrate the central government supremacy that Lincoln made permanent by force of arms and then wonder how we ended up with a deep state regime that rules over its subjects and serfs.
The seeds of unopposable central government power were planted in the 1860s by reducing the importance of the States and eventually this played out as Anti-Federalists of the 1780s feared that it would. George Mason and Patrick Henry were among the prominent opponents of replacing the Articles with the Constitution and its more powerful national government.
It’s probably inevitable that we would end up with a centralized administrative regime that rules over more and more aspects of our daily lives. The Civil War and Lincoln just hastened the process. Jackson was headed in that same direction thirty years earlier. I don’t know that we should be celebrating and encouraging it though.