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.
The people who run things in the world today are more and more similar. A crank, eccentric or original can be elected to the state legislature, perhaps to Congress and very rarely to the Senate. But governors are almost always solid, conformist types. Nations, states and cities are all in competition with each other for investment. Those who win are those who make the best appeal to bankers and CEOs, and the culture of bankers and CEOs today is very different from what it was fifty or a hundred years ago. It is much more of a "liberal," permissive culture. The media and technology also play a role here.
So I don't think that an independent South would be that much different or more conservative. For a time, perhaps, there might be a more conservative mood, but look at Ireland and Scotland. Once people attain independence or autonomy, the new "national elite" takes over, and these elites are pretty much the same. To be sure, business, technological, political and artistic elites differ from each other, but those in each group are pretty interchangable from country to country.
Your Bush example seems to support my point better than yours. Popular movements spring up on the fringe and owe little to established elites. In the end, either they are co-opted and taken over by those elites, or they wither.
In Jefferson's day, you had to be able to appear at ease in a drawing room to succeed in politics. Today, you need to master all the arts of media and economics. An outsider can make a splash. Look at Le Pen in France, or at the various taxpayer revolts here. But those outsiders don't have sticking power at the top. Your comrades act as though they are creating a new order or restoring an old one. In fact, the new order is here. It's quite different, capitalistic and liberal or libertarian. Populist rebels are the system's way of purging itself, temporary corrections, rather than new beginnings.
You're right that I don't know Southern populism first-hand. But every ten years or so Time Magazine brings me the "Face of the New South," Carter, Clinton, now Edwards. If you ever do get a separate country and are no longer kicking at New England or the North, that whole North-South opposition is neutralized, and the passion dies. Maybe not immediately, but after a generation, the slick technocrats take over from the less polished populists.
Indeed, if you look at what sustained Southern populism from the 1890s to the day before yesterday, it was that the South was poor and the North rich. For the past thirty years the culture wars and the struggle against the sophisticated or decadent Northern urban elites have also contributed to Southern populist sentiments. But if you really are to be an independent and prosperous state, what political base is there for the Tillmans, or Watsons, or Wallaces?
If the door to fortune lies in Atlanta or Houston and not in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, if your own powerful corporate elites are given a nation of their own, what remains of all the League of the South agitation and propaganda? There may be a generation's delay, a tumultous interregnum, but by pursuing the goals that all free capitalist states do, you become more like them. An independent South would be less multicultural than the nation as a whole, but it would probably be moving in the same direction.
When Ireland was poor, there was much talk about an Irish national essence or culture that had to be defended against the English. When wealth stood within reach, all that was abandoned. It was regarded by individuals as too much of a burden.
And consider the decline in the Irish birthrate that's led this people which once sent emigrants out in drove to take in immigration from other countries. If you take the capitalist road, that will be your fate. The other option -- to chose poverty voluntarily in the interests of culture or morality -- isn't likely to make much headway. There are doubts about whether it works, and no doubt that it doesn't satisfy the public.
"It's ours" is the reaction of successful nationalisms. In the beginning one thinks that the new government will reflect some national essence or enduring national character. But most often in the end, one simply comes to accept that government as one's own and to take whatever it decides as a reflection of what the nation is.
And this is what's most infuriating about the Rockwellites. They toy with all of this Southern kitsch. But the principle of individual freedom and personal fulfillment that one supposes they espouse as libertarians, is one that will make short shrift of Southern nationalism and "metaphysical" Southronism. "Nationalisms" as political philosophies only make sense when there is a strong enemy to be dethroned. Once one is master in one's own house and at ease, there's no binding power in nationalism, so people begin to adopt other ideologies.
I can see why so many Southernists say that they didn't sell out to capitalist development as much as Northerners did. There is that puritan strain in the North that wants everything to be useful and profitable. But the capitalist strain was also present in the South, though slavery and the plantation system diverted it and repressed some of its manifestations.
I wouldn't argue that the postbellum South didn't sell out to the corporations. Some people very surely did. They just got less for it than successful Northerners did. Many others didn't get the offer. So much of what one reads about Southern culture has to do with circumstances that no longer exist. Poverty, most recently. That doesn't mean that the post-bellum South didn't have virtues and a rich culture, but it does suggest that it will be hard to maintain those virtues or that culture in an age of affluence.
I suppose you could argue that the South was less materialistic than the North, but only in comparison. It's the opposition that hightened the characteristics of both sides. Separate the two sides completely, and you may find Yankees less ambitious and Southerners more acquisitive. Southerners played a Yankee role with regard to Latin Americans and would have done so on a larger scale had the Confederacy won the war. More than a century of practice has made the South as capitalist as the North, it's only in comparison that the cultural survivals bulk large. Ambition and activity aren't anything to be sneezed at, though.
I do read in the papers this week that American nationalism, patriotism and identification with the nation have greatly increased since 9/11. With the nation threatened, "hyphenation" is supposedly becoming more unpopular, and with it, perhaps, separatism.