I don't share your conviction that an independent South would keep out or throw out Mexican immigrants. It looks like they're bound to end up where ever there is ill-paid menial labor or dangerous, poorly paid, non-union work, or a demand for servants. Or the work will be performed by other immigrants from Latin America or Asia. Tightening borders could stop or slow down the process, but it would be a mistake to assume that the kind of people who would rule the US's successor states would be the kind of people who would do that, if those successor states were to be of any size. The people who end up running things above the county level are the same sort of people wherever you live. And that would be true of an independent South. It won't be those who are propagandizing for it who will end up running things. And if the libertarian component is large in any of those new countries, they certainly wouldn't cotton to what it takes to keep borders under control.
In general, there's a tendency among some to view the South as more devoted to loyalty and solidarity, and the North as hostage to market forces and money making drives. The latter may be quite true, but the former is doubtful. Slavery itself grew as a response to market forces and the planters' desire for a cheap and secured source of labor. Some emotional ties may have grown up by living together with household servants, but one can't leave the economic calculations which were more important in managing the field hands out of the picture. Nor can one ignore the macroeconomic considerations that led to Southern expansionism.
After emancipation in Trinidad and Guyana, when the costs of labor increased and the willingness of Blacks to toil on plantations decreased, indentured servants were imported from Java, China, and especially India. This could have happened, and I believe on a very small scale did happen, in the American South after emancipation. Agriculture doesn't need the kind of large settled populations it once did, but one can expect, unless people radically change, that much of its labor requirements will be met by cheap, exploited immigrant labor.
Today, as in previous centuries and for good or ill, we are more one country than many have thought. First slavery, then defeat, poverty, and an enduring racial problem convinced many of a Southern uniqueness. To be sure, there are persisting regional differences, but our regions have more in common with each other than separatists will admit. For a century, poverty and racial conflict kept large-scale immigration out of the South, and indeed slavery discouraged free immigration to the South even before the war. But now those problems won't hold back immigration to the South any more than to other sections. Nor will political and economic elites in an independent South -- we are learning that they have far more power and are far more alike from country to country and party to party than people would have thought.
But then again, if immigration and other forces help to produce a more homogenous world we may find nothing to unite us together as a nation. A truly global free market will make national loyalties and nation states seem redundant or superfluous to some. I would call that a mistake -- even a tragedy -- but I'll get a big kick out of watching Rockwell paleo-libertarians and metaphysical Southern nationalists fighting each other over the size and role of the state in culture and society.
Southerners have a sense of "their own", and will insist that such jobs as are needful be filled at a fair wage, or that employers do without. Southerners know that it doesn't benefit the community when employers are able constantly to undercut wages (as they are doing now in Georgia and Texas with green-card and illegal aliens), and they know that employers will always attempt to reduce wages and employment, on any pretext, just because they want the money themselves. It doesn't take a rockets scientist to figure out that what the community needs isn't a transfusion of Yankee smarts and immigrant hands, but populist political leadership that won't collaborate and won't scalawag.
You underestimate Southern populism -- it's the home of Jacksonianism, remember, and of numerous farmers' movements to protect themselves against rent and crop-price exploitation. Anti-black sentiment was part of that: the sense of community broken by wage exploiters using the black worker to break wages, of livelihoods lost to the last starving man still able to raise his hand and bid the share, or the wage, lower. As much as the tradition of "great man" deference may persist, which we've discussed and which is epitomized by the glorification of Robert E. Lee, Southerners know who is The Problem when it comes to the ability to get a living: it's the Man in the Big White House. It's always been the Man.
Your depressing construction of it aside, the South's future will be better than its past, but for the South to have a future, Southerners have to reject the collaborationist sociopolitical apparatus that exists now (which you referred to), which consistently divides Southern constituencies, neutralizes them through race politics, and overrides the interests of the constituencies. The constituency, which votes, is beaten in policymaking daily as we discussed earlier by the "audience" of the national clerisy employing corporate influence, federal subsidies, federal strictures, racial politics, and federal court decrees to secure the cooperation of "decisionmakers" in the South. Operating through corporate, media, and political conduits, the Northern elites work to destroy the cultural attitudes of the South and to substitute for them the competing meme of their own urbanized and thoroughly domesticated Northern society with its themes not of personal freedom, but of social and opportunity inequality spuriously validated by meritocratic pretensions of fairness but driven in fact by avarice and classism.
But, as they say, that is a whole 'nother thread.
Not true. In Texas, the State School Board saw several strong cultural conservatives like Donna Ballard elected to the Board as a result of the repeated attempts of NEA allies to introduce liberal propaganda into Texas schoolbooks. The first to oppose NEA and its affiliate, the TEA, were Mel and Norma Gabler, a pair of peppery, religious people who raised powerful objections to the moral values being propagated in school, and were able to back up their moral claims with good examples of NEA moral pap that were reprinted in the newspapers and stirred up other conservatives. They attracted even more attention by reviewing the books closely and holding press conferences in which they drew attention to numerous errors of fact and other evidences of slovenliness in the writing of the books they reviewed, to which complaints they appended more examples of value choices being propounded which the Texas community wouldn't accept. They attracted enough attention to bring Norman Lear's People for the American Way to Texas to try to discredit them, but they also energized numbers of smart, dedicated conservatives to get involved with State School Board politics -- they ran, and several of them won.
Then the Bush Machine stepped into the picture, and drove the conservatives out by burying them in the primaries with money and patronage of Governor Bush himself, who explicitly endorsed business-wing RINO's against precedent in the primaries.
So your fatalistic, pessimistic-unto-suicide statement about the inevitable domination of Southern politics by the usual suspects holds water only if you assume that conservatives can't or won't organize against the RINO's and their double-dealing successfully. And yet you have against you the precedent of the 1964 Goldwater campaign and two Reagan campaigns for the nomination, in 1976 and 1980, that show that the East Coast topsiders can be unhorsed when the people's values are engaged. And both Goldwater and Reagan got their best boxes in the South, whether in primaries or in the general election.
Viewed against that background, your statement sounds more as if you wished I would believe it, and stop struggling, and just lie down and die peacefully -- what the North has always wanted from the South. It reminds me of the penultimate scene in American Me, in which the elder brother is ordered to garotte young Little Puppet, and he tells his younger brother whom he is betraying to death, "Don't look at me! Don't look at me!" even as he draws the noose.
In general, there's a tendency among some to view the South as more devoted to loyalty and solidarity, and the North as hostage to market forces and money making drives. The latter may be quite true, but the former is doubtful. Slavery itself grew as a response to market forces and the planters' desire for a cheap and secured source of labor. .... Nor can one ignore the macroeconomic considerations that led to Southern expansionism. [Emphasis supplied.]
As I said, The Man and his ambition have been the fountainhead of many miseries North and South, and in the South no less than in the North. But you project Northern cynicism on the South when you assert that the South can't stand up to money and power. In 1861, it did, and what's more, it was led by men who knew both, and who in your rationale should have been first for compromise and least willing to expose their country to the hazards of war. That's what browns Northerners off so royally about the South: Northerners happily sold out to the Machine, the "Age of Combinations" Rockefeller called it -- and the South didn't.
After emancipation in Trinidad and Guyana, when the costs of labor increased and the willingness of Blacks to toil on plantations decreased, indentured servants were imported from Java, China, and especially India. This could have happened, and I believe on a very small scale did happen, in the American South after emancipation.
What happened in the Texas sugar cane country is that the plantations were served for a little while by prison labor, and then the State took the plantations for taxes, in order to operate them directly as prison farms. The State screwed the planters, in other words. Elsewhere, sharecropping was common, but there was no mass importation of drudge labor. Until now, courtesy of the Bush family and the Clinton-Gore political machine.
indeed slavery discouraged free immigration to the South even before the war.
Is that true? It would be hard to prove, but I suppose you can back that statement up with census data or a study. Free migration after the War would have been net emigration, but then the South was a net prewar contributor to the Territories and Texas just like the North. Abraham Lincoln himself was born in Kentucky, as were many inhabitants of downstate Illinois and Indiana.
....Nor will political and economic elites in an independent South -- we are learning that they have far more power and are far more alike from country to country and party to party than people would have thought.
So far, it's been Northern money and Yankee ties that have kept people like the Bushes in the saddle in the South, and business ties to local leading firms and newspapers. The Houston Chronicle left the sidelines to become a player in the desegregation controversy of the early 1960's, working behind the scenes to spike stories in the local media -- all the media -- while negotiating a Downtown Deal with the local NAACP and the ministers of the largest black churches. The Chronicle and the Downtown Boys imposed a total blackout of news, just as if they were organizing a coup d'etat, and also worked to keep the idealistic young black protestors out of the news, too. And if I recall correctly, it was a Hearst paper at the time -- or was it Chicago's Tribune Corp.? At any rate, the paper reflected Northern values, like the Atlanta Constitution (whose editorial-page editor, Cynthia Tucker, follows a Crow Jim hiring policy of her own), and the Downtown Boys followed a Machine line on integration. Which, seen from the perspective of 40 years, and in view of even the black community's beginning to abandon integration as a nostrum, begins to look more and more like playing to the "audience" rather than to the "constituents", and a betrayal of the public by the local squirearchs.
But then again, if immigration and other forces help to produce a more homogenous world we may find nothing to unite us together as a nation. A truly global free market will make national loyalties and nation states seem redundant or superfluous to some.
You sound like my cousin's Canadian wife: who needs countries? We have everything we need. Let's be citizens of the World! We can have a World Government -- it'd be open-minded, tolerant, and liberal just like the Canadian government, right? Why would it not?
I would call that a mistake -- even a tragedy -- ...
Ah, so there is something to subsidiarity after all! I'll send a note to Bill Buckley at once -- he has preached it for years. Something to be said after all, for not micromanaging the South, the conquered province, directly from Washington after all. Thanks, I'll take that to the bank.