Alt-South: Unique on this Continent

University professor, literary critic and prize-winning poet John Crowe Ransom wrote in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930) about the South’s unique position as a conservative European civilization in North America:

The Southerner must know, and in fact does very well know, that his antiqur conservatism does not exert a great influence against the American progressivist doctrine. The Southern idea today is down, and the progressive or American idea is up. But the historian and the philosopher, who take views that are thought to be respectively longer and deeper than most, may very well reverse this order and find that the Southern idea rather than the American has in its favor the authority of example and the approval of theory. And some prophet may even find it possible to expect that it will yet rise again.

I will propose a thesis which seems to have about as much cogency as generalizations usually have: The South is unique on this continent for having founded and defended a culture which was according to the European principles of culture; and the European principles had better look to the South if they are to be perpetuated in this country.

Of course, Ransom wrote this decades before the so-called Civil Rights movement and the 1965 immigration act which began the process of transforming the USA into a Third World country. It seems almost impossible for the Southern idea to ever again be “up” over the American Progressive idea in the present system. However, Ransom was on-point about Dixie’s uniqueness and its “antique” or pre-Modern European-style conservatism. There is much in this tradition for the Alt-South to draw from today.

ALSO SEE: Alt-South: What is Conservative Government and Alt-South: The Myth of American Democracy

NOTE: As Hunter Wallace has explained, “[t]he Alt-South isn’t a membership organization. It is… a space for everyone in Dixie who isn’t some kind of leftist or mainstream conservative (i.e., nationalists, populists, reactionaries) to come together to discuss our past, present and common future. Southern Nationalists [are] at the core of the Alt-South.”

About Palmetto Patriot 242 Articles
South Carolinian. Southern Nationalist. Anglican.

6 Comments

  1. I think the relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson symbolizes what the North and South are like and how they can relate to each other. Jefferson was a Southern gentleman, refined and aristocratic but improvident; Adams was a typically gruff, practical and hard-headed Northerner. Yet despite their differences and the the long stretch of silent hostility between them Jefferson and Adams remained good friends until the end.

    • Jefferson was a scumbag who supported the Illuminati, the murder of Christians by the Jacobin bunch in France, and opened our borders wide after President Adams had shut them and threw out all oversight on the Press. Freedom of the Press seemed like a good idea, but the same freedom that allowed Religious Tracts also allowed the Atheist ones and the other bizarre stuff.

      Thomas Jefferson proposed that miscgenation with the American Indians would end the Indian wars as well. He was no friend of White Euro Traditionalism

      • Yeah. I like to call TJ a Red. He was a weird fellow. He lived as a Southern planter, larped as a French revolutionary and wrote a bunch of BS about natural rights but also wrote stuff on race realism. Weird dude.

  2. Southern culture does seem to have more of an old-world orientation about it, with its emphasis on class, family names and tradition, whereas the North is all about American notions of business, industry and progress. Or is that an oversimplification?

  3. John Crowe Ransom wrote this as the Jews and Progressives had locked down the Democratic Party BUT the South had nowhere to turn for friends. The Republican Party, no longer the party of Abolitionism, approached the Negro issue with a hands-off approach. The Republicans hated lynching and public beatings, preferring to use the court system and the rule of law which in rural Alabama or Mississippi was an impossible thing to ask.

    The rural areas were often miles away from law enforcement and one sheriff and maybe 2-3 deputies for an entire county. If you had a serial rapist and you caught him handing him over for punishment meant a case would have to be established, discovery, etc and it could prove that white girl was nothing but a filthy mudshark, which would cast a shadow over her entire family and ruin their name. Handling things quickly stopped these embarrassing disclosures and made it known to other criminals that justice would be served promptly.

    The Democratic Party, horrible Progressives/Jewish Anti-Whites had promised the Southern Democrats that they would ignore Dixie for votes. Of course this was a high risk strategy as it meant Southern Dems had to go along with packing Jews and lowlifes onto the courts and it eventually caught up to them, but unfortunately the only good option, Secession was one no one would ever utter aloud, The S word was barely spoken of till the 1960s

    One of the worst Scalawags in History was Judge Hugo Black of Alabama who gave us the mess of Seperation of Church and State and voted for EVERY Civil Rights Measure that came before the court. Yet in Bama Hugo had briefly been in the Klan. I hope he is roasting in hell on a spit as I write this.

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