Secular Café: Splitting off the southeastern United States?

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Splitting off the southeastern United States? Jul 13th 2012, 17:44 Also known as "The South". The Washington Monthly - The Magazine - Tempting but Insane Should the South just be its own country? By Colin Woodard His review of: Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Succession by Chuck Thompson Quote: Chuck Thompson is by no means the first to argue that many of the nation's pathologies can be traced back to the South. Tax policies fostering economic inequality; the rolling back of consumer, worker, and environmental protections; efforts to underfund public education so as to provide tax cuts for the wealthy and subsidies for the world's most profitable energy companies; and end of times-driven foreign policy all have their core constituencies well south of the Potomac. Writers from Kevin Phillips to Michael Lind have been pointing this out for years. Nor is it novel to say that other parts of the country are falling under the South's influence—Stephen Cummings's The Dixification of America was published back in 1998, when few would have bet that Texas Governor George W. Bush could be elected president. What sets Thompson apart is his bold assertion that Uncle Sam should hack off his gangrenous right leg before the infection spreads any further. Most southerners, he suspects, "really just want the same thing I do: a country liberated from the tyranny of Mormons and seditionists, and the freedom to say about the other side, in all honesty and with complete accuracy, that we might be better off without 'em." The first question is: what counts as "The South"? The states south of the Mason-Dixon line? The former Confederate states? The slave states of 1860? The regional cultures that CW identifies as Southern? Those are the Deep South, Tidewater, and Greater Appalachia. That definition gets into the southern parts of the Northeast and northern Midwest; Pennsylvania is not called Pennsyltucky for nothing. For his part, CT has decided on the Confederate states, West Virginia, and Kentucky, with the exceptions of Texas and the northern-Virginia suburbs of DC. Quote: The question of subject settled, Thompson lets us ride shotgun on his two-year odyssey through the South, where we encounter bigots, religious fanatics, hypocrites, and good ol' boy politicians. ... The foregone conclusion: the South has a negative influence on the rest of the country—economy and all—as "it jilts workers, promotes poverty, sells out American interests to foreigners, wrecks the environment, [and] makes trans fat pushers like Paula Deen and Paul Prudhomme into national heroes." But how will the split be managed? CW thinks that CT makes it seem almost too easy, sort of like the breakup of Czechoslovakia. CW had spent the 1990's covering Eastern Europe and the Balkans, and he suspects that it would be as bad as the breakup of Yugoslavia: Civil War II. CW notes that CT had a hard time getting interviews with various people about his scheme; Michael Lind stated about it that "The last thing we need at this moment is one group of Americans suggesting others belong in another country." I'm reminded of DixieNet.Org :: Official Website of the League of the South!

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