Could the South Have Won?

NY Books ^ | June 2002 ed. | James M. McPherson

[lentulusgracchus]

Thank you for your extended reply. Having already spent some time on this last night and this morning, I'd like to look at your reply some more, but one or two things did strike my eye immediately.

If a rural society cannot help but be culturally conservative, even under a radical rulership, a post-industrial society, driven by information, sensation and design, tends towards cultural radicalism, even under conservative political overlordship.......Rural areas look to industry and commerce to provide work for those who can't support themselves on agriculture. As basic industries become less profitable in the developed world the temptation is to turn to high-tech, style-driven enterprises. That temptation is to embrace innovation, rather than stability or rootedness.

I think you overlook the facilitation of decentralization by improvements in communication. Nowadays it is possible to tele-commute, and the major impediment to its widespread adoption, IMHO, is the fact that American business is still dominated by "Red"/"dominative" personalities who like to bully their serfs in person, and who are threatened by the gains in personal space, freedom, and initiative for the employee that a telecommutation solution implies. Of course, people like Pete Peterson and various productivity gurus recognize that that is what the doctor ordered for quantum gains in real productivity (not the kinds of marginal gains produced by flogging the squirrels harder, by feeding them less, and by extending office hours by various managerial stratagems -- "casual overtime" is my favorite: the words are actually being used in a formal context now, defeating the users' purpose of evading Wage and Hour laws). But they still haven't sold the typical American executive on that proposition yet.

Decentralization plays to the strengths of the new-pattern cities like Houston and Los Angeles, and to exurbanization over the suburban pattern. Who needs ribbons of concrete if ribbons of fiber-optic cable will do? It will take a while, I think, but teleconferencing will do for the typical business Napoleon and his officing arrangements what xerocopied samizdat did for totalitarian ideology.

There is no link that I can see, moreover, between the adoption of high technology and the radicalization of organic (as opposed to manufactured) social arrangements. The great subverter of the Southern extended family is medical science, which extends life and overcomes the pests that bore people off in the 19th century and earlier after perhaps seven years of married life, leaving children to be reared by steps and half-siblings, aunts, cousins, and black domestics. But if the Southern family can become smaller, that does not mean that Southern society will automatically replicate the Puritan attitudes that drove young men out of the nest in their teens, to start pulling their own weight in the world as heads of family. In short, introducing high technology won't change social attitudes: just look at Stormfront. If anything, it will open out the South's options and deliver it from its captivity by Northern capital and management, and liberate it from this seeping, corrupting, coarsening Yankeeism.

The sophisticated urban types are likely to be much the same wherever you go, in Houston or Atlanta as much as New York or Los Angeles. Of course they would only be a small part of any Southern nation, but their numbers would increase.

One of the things about the South has been its propensity to export nuisances. People like these would probably migrate willingly, or be encouraged to migrate, in search of other places and people to inflict themselves upon.

[x]

The prominence of Clinton, Gore, Edwards and others suggest that the South has no trouble producing its own liberals. Democrat victories based on the lottery issue in the last gubernatorial elections suggest that running them off would be easier said than done. The solid Republican South is a result of the dynamics of the present political constellation. Take out the Kennedys, Boxers, Cuomos and the rest, and the popular appeal of running against them also disappears. Someone like Bill Clinton could well be your among your first Presidents. Not having to carry all the Northern liberal baggage, Democrats would be more competitive.

That's common. The people running Ireland, Scotland or Wales now would have been scorned and spurned by the old nationalists who would think them not Catholic or socialist or agrarian enough. The people running Poland and other Eastern European countries for much of the post 1989 period are the sort of collaborationists who would have been hanged by more scrupulous patriots. Representative government and free elections can produce some strange results.

Because of its size Britain carries some power in the EU. And it can afford to resist the rest and go it alone on some issues. Ireland, smaller and less powerful doesn't hold out. Nor would Scotland or Wales if they became independent. So it is with the US and the United Nations. We can go against the current because we are a superpower, and because our size makes it possible for us to be insular and insulated. Smaller, independent units would be caught up in the tides coming from Europe. On some issues the South might be able to hold out, but not on all of them. The question, "Why aren't we more like Europe, or like the 'rest of the world'," bulks larger in countries that aren't superpowers. Break up the country and the "American model" is gone, and it becomes a fight to explain why you deviate from "international standards." This is one reason why Franklin's old line about "Hanging together or hanging separately" still rings true.

Rockwellite radicals slam Lincoln for promoting an American empire and even the New World Order. But the transcontinental empire had already been advanced by Jefferson, Monroe, Jackson and Polk, and the overseas empire would wait until McKinley and Roosevelt. As for the New World Order, if it isn't just another form of the American empire, it would overcome us much more quickly if we weren't united.

But it's typical that these things don't always get thought out clearly. "Chronicles" Magazine embraces Italy's Lega Nord. In some ways it's a forerunner of the League of the South. Autonomy or independence for Northern Italian cities and regions may be a laudable goal. It may bring positive results in keeping taxes and immigration under control. But it's an open question whether devolution or independence or autonomy is really a conservative goal in itself. Severed from the more Catholic, peasant, and traditionalist South, what would make Northern Italian cities especially conservative socially, culturally or politically? What looks like a conservative taxpayers' revolt against centralization, may simply end up producing Europe's version of Ecotopia, an affluent, pleasure-seeking, not particularly conservative enclave. You can take Venice or Florence or Milan out of Italy, but that doesn't make them any different or more conservative than they are.

There are better grounds for assuming that an independent Southland would be more conservative than other fragments of the United States. But it's by no means a done deal. This is not a political age. Technology, economics and media call the shots today, striding over borders and overturning attempts to contain their power. Jefferson's yeoman farmer won't come back, just because a few theorists want him to.

The modern world offers countries a choice: either accept the modern economy or reject it. Accepting it means having the best possible means of social control and internal peace, at the price of losing traditional culture and values. Rejecting it means courting all the dangers of social conflict over scarce resources and social predominance. The South is too American, and too troubled by potential social conflict to reject modernity and the modern economy. But acceptance of them would remove the main reason for independence in the eyes of its supporters.

Your idea about telecommuting and decentralization is interesting. I'd say it's too soon to tell. Vermont, the Northwest, Northern California and places like that have a lot of telecommuters. It is a way to keep the family together and to keep the "bad influences" of the city out. But in those places it hasn't produced conservatives, just more insulated liberals who are that much more liberal for being insulated against the results of liberal politics. The effects could be different elsewhere, though.

One thing that may be coming -- or here -- is a new demographic pattern as married couples and families move out of cities, and young singles and divorces into them, with the old complicating the picture further. Another factor is whether those telecommuters home school, put up with local schools, or as is so often the case, jack up the tax rates in those out of the way places they settle in order to give junior the same kind of high school that they moved to get him away from. And that's another dynamic in American life and politics. No sooner do enough people move out of one area than they try to make their new home just like the old.

In some ways, it's a variant on what we've already been talking about. Telecommuters can revive rural areas economically and in other ways. But there will be a price, including some ill-feeling between locals and new arrivals.