Holland writes: "According to Chuck Thompson, a veteran travel writer who toured the American South, a degree of mutual enmity between Northerners and Southerners continues to be a source of cultural tension and political gridlock."
Would America be better of if the North and South separate? (image: unknown)
Is It Finally Time to Let the South Secede?
10 August 12
The author of a new book challenges Northerners and Southerners to consider the possibility of a friendly divorce.
erhaps we shouldn't be surprised that cultural friction between the North and South persists to this day. After all, we fought an incredibly brutal, ugly Civil War. The battlelines that were drawn then continued to divide us through the Reconstruction period and well into the middle of the 20th century, as federal troops were once again deployed to enforce the civil rights acts.
According to Chuck Thompson, a veteran travel writer who toured the American South, a degree of mutual enmity between Northerners and Southerners continues to be a source of cultural tension and political gridlock. We remain divided even as we have grown to become the world's superpower. In his new book, Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto For Southern Secession, Thompson argues that it may be time for a divorce - to shake hands and go our separate ways.
Thompson appeared on last week's AlterNet Radio Hour to discuss his book. A lightly edited transcript of our discussion is below (you can listen to the whole show here).
Joshua Holland: Chuck, you seem to be channeling the frustration of a lot of Northern liberals. I may have even said myself that we should have let the Confederacy walk in 1860. But I haven't heard a lot of people calling to break up the Union today. You're known as a comedic travel writer. So my first question is to what degree are you being tongue-in-cheek here? To what degree are you being serious?
Chuck Thompson: I am being serious. I understand that the meta arguments here that call for secession can be received as somewhat absurd in some corners. I acknowledge that it is probably a remote possibility. Within the framework of that argument I think there is a lot of room to highlight a lot of these problems and a lot of these frustrations that you refer to. One of the goals of this book really was to more or less articulate - to put some facts, figures and research behind a lot of this frustration of Northern and Southern liberals, of which there are many. I encountered many Southern liberals while conducting my research.
There's this seething frustration people have. There's this kneejerk reaction to blame the South. The sort of Northern media strafing of the South for a lot of the nation's ills is a longstanding tradition. What I wanted to do was to get away from the traditional stereotypes of the dim-witted, mouth-breathing, Southern racist redneck and really look at what's going on today. Find out why people are still having these issues with the South, and put some hard research and some facts and figures behind this general unease with the influence that the South has on the rest of the country.
JH: So we know we have an overtly religious political culture down South, and a culture today that is pretty hostile toward organized labor. What is it in your travels or in your research that prompted you to call for Southern secession?
CT: I get tired of everybody bitching about the problem. It's like what Mark Twain said about the weather. Everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything about it. People have been having this problem with the South for my entire lifetime, and as my research pointed out to me, since even before there was a United States of America. Even in the Continental Congress, before the Declaration of Independence was signed, there were a lot of Southerners from South Carolina - particularly a family called the Rutledge family - sort of running the show back then and didn't want any part of the United States. So a lot of the problems that have arisen between North and South have been around for a long time.
So, as I've said, I've spent a lot of my life hearing from everybody from Seattle to Savannah. Almost every American, at one time or another, has said that it's too bad the country didn't just split when we had the chance. We didn't let the South go when we had the chance. We would have avoided a lot of problems. We - meaning this group in the north as we might identify ourselves - could take the country we want into a direction that we think is befitting of America without this push and pull that comes from the Southern states. At the same time the South could do the same thing.
What really led to this call for secession was understanding that a lot of people from the South are just as sick and tired of people like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid having an impact on their country as I am sick of people like Newt Gingrich and Jeff Sessions, Eric Cantor, Haley Barbour having an impact on my country.
So why shouldn't each of these societies that are really very different from each other in the way they approach the fundamental building blocks of society - education, religion, commerce, politics - both sides of the country really approach their problems in the way they want to put their societies together in very diametrically opposed ways. Why shouldn't people be allowed to live in a pseudo-theocracy if they want to? If the majority of the people in a very large part of the country wants to have the Ten Commandments emblazoned in front of their legislative houses, why shouldn't they be allowed to do so?
My call here for secession isn't really a punitive thing towards the South, though I admit to a lot of these Northern frustrations. It's an effort to identify these differences; to acknowledge that they're very striking and very strong, and to say each one of these sides might be better of without the other.
JH: So we could have a divorce without an excessive amount of acrimony.
CT: I would hope so. Why not?
JH: How are you defining the South? Are we losing the research triangle in North Carolina? Are we losing Texas in this deal? And is there any chance we could give them some of the duller states. We're not using South Dakota, are we?
CT: There are some noncontiguous pockets of what would be left of the North that I think would be culturally more comfortable in the South. It's the first question I started off with in doing the research. It's a lot trickier than we might imagine. As for the research triangle in North Carolina? Yes, we're going to lose it. Texas is really interesting to me. The best line I heard about Texas during the research was from a student at the University of Georgia who said the Texas state flag is a perfect representation of Texas, in that it looks just like the American flag without all the other states.
Even though Texas was part of the original Confederacy, it's always been an all-around pain in the neck to categorize. They've never really been much of a team player, let's face it. In my breakdown of the South I did not include Texas as a Southern state. I completely acknowledge there's a lot of room for argument there, and that's probably the easiest point in my book to argue against. I could argue both sides of it myself. In the end I decided that Texas would stay with the North in large part for economic reason. Texas is really one of the economic anchors of this country.
JH: So it wasn't just for the barbeque?
CT: Barbeque, cheerleaders and Dr. Pepper.
JH: What about the people who live in those states? It's easy to say they vote for the crappy government they deserve, but consider that in Utah - the reddest state in the country - 30 percent of the population vote Democratic. I'm not saying that voting Democratic is a perfect proxy for one's ideology, but there's a good chunk of people down there who we would be consigning to basically English-speaking Mexico. In Alabama, it's 40 percent. Do you just say, 'here you go you have to live in a third-world country with crappy education systems, no healthcare, and a government of snake handlers?'
CT: [Laughing] You're tougher on the South than I am! Let me give you two answers to that. One is that in my imaginary secession legislative framework, I'm building in a period of 10-20 years where there's free and open citizenship for anybody who feels caught on the wrong side of the divide. A tofu-scarfing liberal in Mississippi would be free to come on back over to the North, as well as maybe some survivalist NRA fanatic in the hills of Washington state would be legally entitled to take up residency in the new Confederate homeland. So I've built something into the imaginary structure for that.
The larger point goes back to what I said about even if you consider the argument for secession absurd, it really does give us a lot of room to address other issues. One of those that you allude to in your question is one of Southerners who are not the mouth-breathing, white-supremacist, gun-toting rednecks. That is the stereotype, but the fact of the matter is that's a minority in the South.
JH: Fifty-seven percent of African Americans live in the American south.
CT: That's right. That's exactly right. One of the big mistakes that people who make these sort of polemics and screeds against the South is that they assume "Southerner" equals conservative white male. Now if you want to be really mean you include "racist" with Southern white male, that's the stereotype.
But let's even say that it's conservative, evangelical Southerners. The fact of the matter is that's not what the whole South is. There are a lot of African Americans in the South. There are increasingly a lot of Hispanics in the South. There are a lot of liberals in the South. There are atheists in the South. One of the things I really try to do with this book was not solely traffic in those easy stereotypes that I think a lot of people trap themselves with. That's not to say I didn't find a lot of those Southern, evangelical, white conservatives. I did and they're in the book, but I also made a huge effort not to define the South solely on the classic Northern stereotypes.
JH: Ultimately, while I share your befuddlement with Southern politics I have to say that I've traveled extensively in the South. I lived in Arkansas briefly. I love the South, and I've met good, progressive people everywhere I've gone.
CT: What did you love about it?
JH: I love the culture of the South. I love the people of the South. I really had some great experiences dealing with Southerners. Even those Southerners I couldn't necessarily discuss politics with.
I guess a related question is this: We have a really screwy political system with lots of deeply entrenched problems. Do you see anything that could be gained by the South's secession that couldn't be achieved by, say, getting money out of our political system? Or bringing back the fairness doctrine? Maybe reforming the filibuster in the Senate? Do you know what I'm saying? Those things aren't likely to happen in today's environment, but the South splitting away isn't too likely either.
CT: That's right, but a lot of these problems have been deeply entrenched in American society long before this dysfunction befell our political system. Politics is really only one way in which the South is quite a bit different it approaches its society. I think religion is the really big factor here and I think that's what's really not going to change in the South. Yes, there are evangelicals and religious lunatics in all 50 states in the country. Only in the South, though, do they represent a voting quorum. Only in the South can you appeal to voters in very overtly religious terms and expect success on a consistent basis. Again, that's not to deny that this exists in the rest of the country. It does, but in the South is where its power base is.
I think that is the piece of the puzzle here that informs the politics of the South, in the same way that evangelical Christianity is the least tolerant of any sort of diversity or diversity of opinion. It's Bible literalism. Everything is true and you adhere to everything; it's black and white. When that is the foundation of the majority of the people in your society, when that becomes your whole social framework, then that's the politics that grows out of that society. So we get that same sort of blinkered view of humanity of politicians in the South who come up to the North - we get this absolute, no compromise stance between these hardcore conservatives and other politicians.
When there were Republicans and Democrats fighting it out in the '80s during the Reagan years, there was the famed Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan give-and-take. This is how politics works; it's the art of compromise. The ruling power says to the opposition we won the election so we're going to get these big things. Don't give us too much trouble and we'll work with you. We realize you have a constituency. Let us get our big things through without a lot of hassle and we'll make sure you're taken care of on some level. That's sort of how it has worked for the most part. In the South, it's different, because there is no such thing as compromise. If it's God's law that is driving you, if God says gay marriage is an abomination, if God says abortion is an abomination, then you simply can't compromise. That's not in your DNA if you really believe that. That's where I think a lot of the dysfunction of our political process comes into play.
And I don't think that's going to change, regardless of whether you pull the money out of it or not. This ties into how the South deals with education. Southern states don't typically fund their public schools the way other states do - they're typically at a much lower level. There's less commitment to the ideal of public education in the Southern states than there is in the rest of the country. That's why we see over and over when the statistics come out, the South has the lowest SAT scores, lowest graduation rates, the most illiteracy. Whatever measures you want to put on academic performance it's those core Southern states that are always leading the bottom of the back. In the bottom 10, eight or nine of them are always going to be Southern states.
I wanted to look into this. Why is that? Is it just that Southerners are stupider than the rest of us? Clearly that's not the case. It's the same gene pool. The more you look at it the more you realize there's just a lower commitment to public education in the South than there is in the rest of the country. That's been going on for hundreds of years. It's not changing.
I was in Arkansas. I spent a week in Little Rock while they were searching for a new superintendent of schools last year. The dysfunction that I saw just in attending these public meetings where they were talking about what they needed was astonishing.
JH: We see a lot of liberal animosity towards the South. Were you at all concerned in writing this book about whether you would reinforce the stereotype of the coastal, elite liberals looking down their noses at the middle and the South? Was this a concern?
CT: Sure, people are going to jump to that conclusion. As you know -- and as I found out in writing web articles and books -- most of the really heated criticism you get from people are always from people who don't even bother to read your article or your book in the first place. That's going to happen. There's nothing I can do about it. I really did make an effort not to be strident - though I'm certainly judgmental - and to find good things in the South, which there are. You deal with Southerners on an individual basis and they're great. They're friendly, hospitable, gregarious, and they like to party. They like to drink, to give you their food, they like to play music. It's a lot of fun.
I didn't try to be this super-strident jerk who was just sitting there bashing. I really am trying to put some numbers and some facts to this argument. These are two very different societies that have been economic and social frenemies from the day they were founded. The dysfunction has got to stop at some point.
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Besides if the South seceded, what would happen to all the good barbecue, blues, hip-hop, sweet tea, hospitality, chivalrous men and beautiful women?
I reckon chopped and screwed music would be left alone, since Texas is kind of its own thing. The author is right about that- Texas isn't the South, or the West. Texas is Texas.
Plus, if America were split into two, we wouldn't be able to support a global military Empire any more, would we? It would drastically cut down on our war/empire spending, and free up our budgets to do better things...clean up our environment, modernize infrastructure, R&D on clean energy technologies and science/medicin e, etc. Let the red states go back to neo-slavery for its labor, denying any health care access for its poor citizens, and living in a decaying wasteland because they don't want to pay the taxes it takes to have a modern nation. We'll see how long they like what they THINK they want.
Of course as a Califonian I would have to move from this bankrupt state that drives business away and spends money on trains from no where to no where and can pay public union members unbelievable pensions since it is soooo blue.
then maybe we could be better neighbors than we are fellow citizens.
OH to all you progressives, if we did this then you could have a SCOTUS that would overturn Citizens United and you could have public financing of elections just like you want.
think about it.
A few words:
Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Ted Bundy, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Mayor Bloomberg, Al Capone, Mayor Daley, Charles Manson, the Mafia, Jeffrey Dahmer, Boss Tweed, John Wane Gacy, Ed Gein.
You get the drift on what other parts of the country has produced outside The Deep South.
On the other hand:
Rock and Roll, The Blues, Tennessee Williams, Elvis and many others, William Faulkner, Mark Twain, James Dickey, Ty Cobb, the original amazing New Orleans, Bear Bryant, Joe Namath who couldn't play worth a shit until he played for Bear Bryant, Dr. John, the Neville Brothers, Robert Trent Jones, Peyton and Eli Manning, the best bluegrass music on the planet, Bo Diddly, BB King, Muddy Waters.
I think you get the drift on that, also.
Say hello to your ex governor Arnold and your present governor MoonBeam. And about college football, the SEC is gonna kick your ass again this year just like they always do.
Ronald Reagan
This yakking back and forth and stupid regionalism is just another way to keep folks thinking in terms of politics and social issues as a football game. Our side against yours.
I couldn't help but make the posts above to illustrate how stupid the battle is.
But the south really does run the whole nation. The constitution was written by southerners and designed to preserve southern rule. the 3/5 rule allowed the south to always keep a majority in the legislature and electoral college. All presidents from Washington to Lincoln were southerners except for two. In the 6 decades after the civil war, the south was out of power and the nation became progressive.
By the end of the depression of the 30s, the south was back. It was the same old coalition of New York banking money and southern ruthlessness and corruption in politics. Southern politicans have dragged the whole US into a kind of political hell.
Let them go and build a huge wall between the north and the south. I'm a Californian, so I'd also like to build a wall keeping Arizona away, too.
Some groups like the Federalist Society (of which 4 supreme court justices are members) are neo-confederate s. The biggest law school in the US --Pat Robertson's school -- trains neo-confederate s to work in government agencies.
The neo-confederate s are slowly infiltrating the entire USG. The do have operational control but they are not recognized yet.
Reagan was a neo-confederate . He gave his first presidential campaign speech in Philadelphia, MIssissippi, the headquarders of the KKK and the neo-confederate movement.
Maybe the way to put this is that the rest of the nation should divorce itself from the South. The south has only its corrupt and ruthless politics to offer. The rest of the nation does the work and produces the income. The South is a parasite on the nation. Time to throw it off.
The need for a United States just doesn't exist anymore. The Old Republic created a bulwark against Europe. Europe can't even get out of its own dust anymore. The Middle East might be a bigger problem for the South based on their refineries etc.
Also, Texas just has to go with the South whether they like it or not. I have worked in Texas and made great friends and have good memories of my time there. That said, they are more Southern culturally.
A session and a different currency would solve a whole bunch of too big to fail banking problems. Banking across state lines is one thing. Banking across national borders is quite another kettle of fish.
I suppose they would lay claim to "American". It does have a better ring to it than "Confederate". If it looks like a deal breaker let then have the name. It is a just a twist on some Italian's name anyway.
One condition has got to be agreed upon. The North and South can never be united again.
The split will never happen.
Germany was responsible for starting the most horrific world war ever known. They lost. Where are they now? They're running the show in Europe. That's pretty good for 'losing' the war. Japan joined Germany in declaring war against the rest of the world. They lost! What was their penalty for losing...they can't have an offensive army. Goody, goody, they don't have to spend money supporting the Military/Indust rial Complex. So what do they do...they build the biggest economic powerhouse that lasted half a century, and they were the losers!
Now we come to 'the South' and their conscious decision to declare WAR on the nation they were a part of from the beginning. It was a Civil War (an oxymoron if I ever heard one), but they choose to start it. We finished it, and we one. They lost, but they never accepted that loss. In their mind they won. It most be the climate that has fried the southern DNA. Did they not know, or realize what they were getting into? To the victor goes the spoils, right? Maybe we should do as the native Americans did when it came to tribes that warred against each other. The winners took the losers as their slaves, and
altered their lives forever.
I'm tired of LOSERS getting the better deal.
Maybe there would be less war if a loss meant a LOSS!
Only in the Soviet Union was this truth recognized. Hence the Soviet name for World War II, "the Great Patriotic War against Fascism." Hence too the allied turnabout at the end of World War II, declaring the U.S.S.R. the new enemy even as the last shots still echoed.
Indeed the Republican Hard Right -- the One Percent and their disciples, the 1945 equivalent of today's Teabagger fanatics -- wanted to rearm the Wehrmacht, re-equip the Luftwaffe and re-invade the Soviet Union, using the A-Bomb as their victory weapon.
Fortunately the New Deal Democrats, then still partially in control of the government, recognized the U.S.S.R. could not be defeated even with nuclear weapons -- that, as the Nazis had learned, its people would defend Rodina -- Mother Russia -- literally to the last man, woman and child, just as their ancestors did against the Mongols and against Bonaparte, just as their Scythian forebears did against the Persians.
That book, and others by the historian, Glenn Feldman, will shed much light on this whole issue.
I say, let the south go!
There's my 2 cents.
Why? Because given the Ku Klux mentality of most Southern politicians, an independent South would have undoubtedly joined the Berlin/Rome/Tok yo axis, enlarging it to the Berlin/Rome/Ric hmond/Tokyo axis. With Hitler's Wehrmacht given a North American base from which to support Japanese invasion via the Aleutian Islands, the United States of America – attacked from two directions and bombed to rubble by the Luftwaffe – would have lasted maybe two months at the most.
The Germans and the Japanese would of course have claimed the conquered USA for themselves, unleashing the Gestapo and the Kempetai to inflict the same sorts of horrors inflicted on Warsaw and Nanking.
Meanwhile, given the intensity of Southern white racism – its murderous venom truly unimaginable to Northern liberals – the KKK (the Southern equivalent of the Nazi Party) would have imposed a "final solution to the Negro problem" no different from the Nazi final solution to "the Jewish problem."
Yes, I have lived in the South; I spent half my boyhood there. I know of what I speak. As the New York City born son of a Bostonian -- the Yankee son of a Yankee carpetbagger -- I learned very early the truly bottomless malevolence of Southern hatefulness.
But fascist sentiment remained terrifyingly strong. The German-American Bund – the primary U.S. instrument of Hitler's foreign policy – grew to enormous power throughout the nation but was kept in check by the much larger numbers of Communists. In the South, however, the Bund was soon wed to the Ku Klux Klan, which gave the fascist majority absolute power. Thus in the Confederacy the tyrannical goals of the Bankers' Plot would have been achieved at the ballot box, and anyone not a bible-thumping, cross-burning, union-busting, zieg-heiling theocrat would have soon been exterminated.
Today Western Europe would be part of the Thousand Year Reich; Canada and the former U.S. divided between the Reich and the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Our only hope would be the Soviet Union – just as the Persians could not defeat the Scythians, neither could the Mongols, Bonaparte, nor even Hitler defeat the Russians – and we in our prison camps and slave quarters would dream endlessly of eventual liberation by the Red Army.
As for Texas, it's wonderful, it has the mountains, prairies, deserts and seashore; something for everyone. Now, if they'd just get those Texans out of there. Texas can stay, Texans themselves would have to move to Mississippi.
The man never did truly define the South state by state and never even mentioned how diverse the entire country is, relative to those stereotypes he presented. So nice that he assumes folks can just trip on over to "the other side" simply because they are "tofu eating liberals" stuck in the South. Maybe those liberals like it where they are.
Never think the South has not been manipulated politically and socially just as the rest of the country, and never think there is not talent and expertise in the region, just as there is elsewhere.
This reminds me of what was done to the Middle East and elsewhere relative to establishing borders to favor other countries, throwing Middle Easterners into chaos. Chuck Thompson is nothing more than a member of the group who are experts at stirring citizens and creating more division.
Each state and region contributes a negative in one way or another.
As a southerner born and bred, I'll just say we are not all the ignorant rednecks the author seems to think we are. I've lived all over the country at various times in my life and found all kinds of attitudes in every setting (SC, GA, NC, OK, NY, MA, TX...).
I love the southern hospitality I was brought up with, and friends I've made in other places noticed and appreciated it when I entertained or had them as house guests. I also love the social and cultural atmosphere in Massachusetts, where I lived for 7 years.
The one thing I do agree with out of all this is that TX is not typically southern. I've lived here a year and I still do not know my neighbors. In the south I grew up in, neighbors welcome newcomers with casseroles and cookies to help the newcomer feel at home. In this neighborhood, not a single person has bothered to introduce themselves, much less knocked at my door. Different strokes, folks...I'm not judging, just reporting; the part of TX I am experiencing is definitely not southern.
That's it -- no great insights here, just sadness at more stereotyping and separating. We do not need that.
They can also be remarkable insensitive. When I lived in Raleigh, NC, I was often told by people, "This used to be a nice place until IBM came here and brought in all them outsiders." They would say this knowing I was there on a long-term assignment for IBM.
Another thing that symbolized their prejudice against "outsiders" was they would look at you with a suspicious squint in their eyes and say, "You ain't from around here, are you?"
I say, give them the babble belt and let them go.
The South definitely has an ongoing style and traditions that are different from the North and say, California, that continue to define regions, but that does not eliminate any from being a part of the U.S.
Citizens have no idea how much they have been manipulated and divided.
I have lived and traveled in many states, also.
And that gives one a much wider perspective, doesn't it? I've really enjoyed my experiences of living in different states/parts of the country.
Thanks for responding...I was beginning to think there was nobody else here on this one who could manage to see beyond regional divisions to the fact that people are people everywhere.
Yes, I learned a lot while traveling and moving from state to state. Many of the posts in this thread do illustrate that there is bigotry and propaganda all across the country. That is not to say I have missed the serious problems in the South, having been born there and having some bigots for relatives, but when living in California there were those who were capable of the same. There were some incredibly uppity snobs in their blind adherence to California and California alone, as the center of the universe, just as folks in New York City and elsewhere are blind.
Nevertheless, it was also easy to see how great many states really are, in spite of the same insanely religious types, and bigots found in all states, just as in the South. Glad you are measured in your assessment, also.
How about you research religious folks in other states and their influence and attempts at instating intolerant laws and rescinding decent programs.
Maybe the whites will be enslaved, they are rapidly becoming the minority.
It's time to read Colin Woodard's excellent book on the subject: "American Nations; A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America."
Southerners will never leave because financially they'd be worse than Greece and the Euro - etc.
VOTE STRAIGHT DEM: R&R would be like "W" & Cheney on steroids with Ryan in the driver's seat as was Cheney.....
What about an arrangement somewhere between having separate countries, and not? Start with 2 Congresses, 2 presidents, 2 Supreme Courts, and 2 constitutions (initially identical, each subject to amendment). Keep open borders and mostly uniform commercial laws, so daily life and business will be largely the same as now.
Each government will have its own taxes and budgets. And like the two constitutions, there would be two sets of international treaties, both starting the same as we have already, and both open to change.
Texans could decide whether they wanted to join one, join the other, or be independent.
Then the North could allow gay marriage, and maybe end its drug war and mass-prison system, while the South could have school prayers, poll taxes, and chain gangs. (But not formal slavery -- probably uneconomic anyway today, since industry can abandon wage workers in a downturn, without taking a big capital hit like slave owners would).
Americans could join whichever government they chose, but travel, live, and do business where they want to.
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