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I don't know about interstate migration, but the Germans and Irish shunned the South. People make this a question of race prejudice today. Race would have had to have been involved, as it was with everything else. But slavery itself was the problem. Who could compete against unpaid, compelled labor? Who would put up with the disrespect for physical labor and working people that slavery inspired. Most British working class immigrants also headed North, though gentry from the British Isles did head South.

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.

At some point, one has to say, "I don't think so", when confronted with a determinism such as you present, for which you seek universality, uniformity of application, catholicity in its explanatory power, and, I think, certainty of results.

Let me see if I can reprise your arguments.

1. The South isn't really different.

2. If the South is different, it really doesn't matter, because class is determinative, and upper classes are uniform in their interests and policies. They will pursue the same outcomes as Northern Liberals, because....(unspecified)....and then the South won't be different.

3. If the South is different, and if class momentarily isn't determinative in Southern politics, never mind, because it inevitably will be, and so the South really won't be different in the end.

4. If the South is ethnographically different, it won't be, because the inevitable machinations of the inevitable upper class will inevitably drown the South and its people in swarms of dark, cheap, starving inevitable people who speak no English -- and so the South won't be different after all.

5. If the South is different in its value set, the difference is illusory, because upper class will emerge, and its upperness will determine future values, driven by the same ambitions as Northern Liberal elites, and so the South really won't be different.

6. After 9/11, the elites won't let the South be different because they're threatened, and so the South won't really be different.

Gee, x, is there a tendency here, or is it just my imagination? ;^) It's beginning to sound a lot like,

The ultimate triumph of Northern Liberalism is inevitable. All your countries are belong to us. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

Well, pardon me if I say that honor requires us all to demur, and to resist the proffered dram of liquid oblivion. Conformism and other forms of supinity and surrender are never honorable, and one of the quirks of Southerners, even the educated ones that you think have all been coopted by Ivy League admissions offices, is that they still remember the idea of honor, and they still know what shame is. Thanks, but we'll pass.

Lentulus Gracchus

A few detail points.....

I don't know about interstate migration, but the Germans and Irish shunned the South.

This will be news to the Germans who flocked to Texas after the Texas Revolution (signs advising people of San Antonio ordinances were posted on the bridges across the river, in Spanish, English, and German) and who continued to speak German until World War 2 (Chester Nimitz was one of them); or to the German Jews who populated the Katy Prairie west of Houston after the Civil War and gave the city many of its peculiar road names (Silber, Westheimer, Voss, Bingle, etc.). But if more of them migrated to the Northern States than to the Southern, I don't know about the Germans, but it would be so among the Irish because word passed back to the Old Sod pretty quickly when New Orleans Irish began to die like flies in yellowjack and cholera outbreaks.

Who would put up with the disrespect for physical labor and working people that slavery inspired....

Oh, you mean, like strikebreaking and unionbreaking? And using freed blacks and immigrants as scab labor, fortified by swarms of heavily armed Pinkertons, to accomplish the same?

The people who run things in the world today are more and more similar......But governors are almost always solid, conformist types.

Jerry Brown. Jesse Ventura. Edwin Edwards. Dixie Lee Ray. Evan Mecham. The recent governor of Montana whose name I can't recall. Billy Jeff Clinton. Yeah, I know what you mean.

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.

This is the discussion we had above, in which I quoted from James Q. Wilson's essay in The New Urban Politics (Ed. Douglas M. Fox, Goodyear Publishing, 1972) about the difference between "constituency" and "audience". This would seem to be a major area for reform, rather like the British reform of the "rotten borough" system, in order to bring the officeholders back to accountability to the constituents rather than to the audience who are sometimes called, euphemistically, "stakeholders" -- but who have no right, under the laws of a republic, to call the shots as they do, using as their tools the inducements, inevitably, of money and more money.

Your Bush example seems to support my point better than yours.

I was making the point that the Bush family, and their supporters in Texas politics going back two generations, have performed for a Yankee "audience", in the terms that James Q. Wilson used in The New Urban Politics.

But every ten years or so Time Magazine brings me the "Face of the New South," Carter, Clinton, now Edwards.

Yeah, the Northern press is killing off the South and introducing a "New South" that looks like the North every generation or so. The Eastern media are the most enthusiastic players, but the scalawag press in the South, led by the execrable, Southerner-hating, white-baiting Atlanta Constitution (which has the mendacious gall to call itself, on its masthead, "The South's Standard Newspaper": yeah, they're a "standard", all right -- a Yankee battle-flag, carried by one of those black regiments that burned Georgia), also likes to play at burying the South and pronouncing a "new South" every few years. The fact that they keep having to do it again every few years shows they're failing -- and that they're lying SOB's. But Southerners don't pay that stuff much mind, they've heard it all before.

But if you really are to be an independent and prosperous state, what political base is there for the Tillmans, or Watsons, or Wallaces?

The same one that elected Jesse Helms and Phil Gramm to multiple terms -- although Gramm isn't a good example, since he worked for the East Coast banks and the Fortune 500 and was therefore a scalawag, nevertheless the people voted for him because he came down to Texas to campaign as a populist fighting for "Dicky Flatt" (a real person, by the way, whom Gramm appropriated after Flatt, a small businessman, wrote him a letter about his regulatory woes).

But there are Southern congressmen aplenty out there -- the ones the Northern papers complain about as unlettered boobs (if they were lettered and knew anything, they'd read us and obey!) -- who do what the people want, more or less, and don't kowtow to Washington. Ron Paul is a good example in the Houston area, and there are others. And if there's another opening for a "Pitchfork" Tillman, well, hell, I might just apply for the job myself. Haven't anything better to do at the moment. ;^P