But of course they hadn’t thought of those things, at least
the fictional cavaliers gathered at John Wilkes’ barbecue that
spring day in 1861, and if the leaders of the new Confederacy had
thought about them more, too many other Southerners failed to give
such mundane matters the consideration they merited. What they
did think about was the glories of the coming conflict and the
rights they were going to vindicate by force of arms, and within a
few years and a few more battles than Stuart Tarleton had
anticipated, he and his twin brother were dead, along with most of
the others who had listened to them, the Confederacy itself, and
the society on which it rested. As for Rhett Butler, he not only
survived but flourished, confident in his philosophy that there
are two times when a man can easily make a fortune for himself –
once when a civilization rises, and once when a civilization
falls.

Today, 130 years after the disasters to which the chatter of
valiant fools like Stuart Tarleton led, secessionism purports to
rise from the ashes, this time embodied mainly in the League of
the South, of which most of the editors of this magazine except me
appear to members. Its leaders foreswear the use of violence, so
we need not anticipate that the results will be similar — at
least not until a good many more Southerners sign up than seem to
have done so in the four years of the League’s existence and until
the federal government pays more attention to them than it has
done to date. Nevertheless, if the physical extermination of
600,000 white men over the burning issue of whether four million
black men are to be slaves or serfs is not on the agenda this
time, secessionism promises to be no less a disaster for those of
the American right than it was for the pretty belles and beaux of
Mitchell’s novel. It is unfortunate that many of those gentlemen
most dedicated to secession seem not to have thought of the
weaknesses of their position any more than the guests at the
Wilkes barbecue had.

Two main forces appear to drive the resurrection of Southern
secessionism. In the first place, the American right as a serious
political movement has collapsed, leaving its most dedicated
adherents with no obvious vehicle for pursuing its goals of
dismantling the federal leviathan and ending the cultural and
demographic inundation of the South and the rest of the nation.
In the second place, a concerted onslaught against Southern and
Confederate symbols and traditions, most clearly represented in
the attacks on public display of the Confederate Battle Flag,
rightly excites the wrath of Southerners who remain loyal to the
memory of the Confederacy and the culture that the flag and the
war have come to represent. Correctly lacking any confidence in
the Republican Party or the neo-conservative-dominated
“conservative movement,” Southerners of the right have decided to
chuck it all and set off on their own, with the goal of invoking
the traditions and identity of their own land and culture as the
basis for resisting federal tyranny and their own racial and
cultural destruction.

Yet neither of these two forces provides an adequate
justification for secession, and neither suggests any realistic
prospect of success. There are, to put it simply, two strong
reasons why secession, for the South or any other part of the
nation, is not a good idea. In the first place, it is not
practical; in the second place, even if it were practical, it
would not be desirable.

Leaders of Southern secessionism often point to sister
movements abroad — to secessionist movements in Northern Italy,
Quebec, Scotland, the Balkans, and other places — as well as to
perennial discussions and controversies about a kind of secession
in various states, cities, and regions in this country. Both the
foreign movements and those in the United States are irrelevant to
what Southerners actually propose, however. Abroad, where
secessionism has gathered significant support, it has done so
because those pushing it can claim to be the heirs of real and
ancient nations or at least of subnational regions that exhibit
far more distinctiveness than the American South, today or at any
time in its history, can claim. Scotland, Quebec, the Balkan
peoples, and even Northern Italy all can boast of distinctive
linguistic, religious, ethnic, and historical heritages, far more
distinctive than those of the South, and some can point to some
period in their past when they actually constituted autonomous
states. Indeed, compared to some of these nations or regions, the
American South under close scrutiny begins to vanish as a cultural
unity. There is at least as much difference between Tidewater
Virginia and East Tennessee or between northern and southern
Louisiana as there is between Scotland and England or Northern and
Southern Italy today.

Within the United States, the periodic demands for breaking
Staten Island off from New York City or East Kansas from West
Kansas or Southern California from Northern California are not
secessionist movements in the same sense as what the Southerners
advocate. None of these other movements contemplates leaving the
national political unity of the United States, and how they re-
arrange or fail to re-arrange their own borders and jurisdictions
is largely a matter of their own concern. It makes sense that
over time some borders and jurisdictions will become outmoded, and
to redraw the map every now and then to suit contemporary
interests and needs is unobjectionable. But it is not secession
in the sense that Southerners and most dictionaries use the term,
and to cite such movements (none of which has so far been
successful) as examples of the rising dissatisfaction with the
unified nation-state is fallacious.

Nor do contemporary Southern secessionists make any
compelling case for the separation of their own region from the
larger national unity. Historically, the Southern people have had
an arguable case for separation, and in 1860, with the prospect of
their slave-powered economy being gradually gutted by Northern
dominance, their case was more arguable than ever, though even
then there was less than a universal consensus in the South for
separation. Today, that case simply does not apply. Today, the
modern South has probably profited from federal largesse more than
most other regions, and the argument for States’ Rights, which
Southerners invoked from Jefferson to George Wallace, is silenced
by the demands of Southern politicians for more farm subsidies,
more defense contracts, more military bases, more federal
highways, and — if we include blacks as Southerners, which the
League readily does — more “civil rights,” more affirmative
action, more federal marshals to enforce them, and more welfare.
To find out how practical secessionism is in the South today,
visit any large Southern city — Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville,
Richmond, Dallas, Fort Worth, let alone New Orleans and Miami –
and ask yourself if the residents (even those who are still
recognizably American) are ready for another Pickett’s Charge.
It’s all conservative Southerners can do to keep the Battle Flag
flying and Confederate monuments from being obliterated, and the
most vociferous enemies of the flag and the monuments are not the
“Yankees” of yore or even the federal government but Southerners
themselves, either the manipulated blacks of the NAACP or white
Southerners of Confederate antecedents like South Carolina’s
Republican Governor David Beasley. The South today and the
Southerners who inhabit it are simply too well connected to
Washington and the rest of the nation to contemplate any serious
movement for the national independence of their region.

But even if secession were possible, it would be a bad idea.
Today, the main political line of division in the United States
is not between the regions of North and South (in so far as such
regions can still be said to exist) but between elite and non-
elite. As I have tried to make plain in columns in this magazine
and many other places for the last fifteen years, the elite, based
in Washington, New York, and a few large metropolises, allies with
the underclass against Middle Americans, who pay the taxes, do the
work, fight the wars, suffer the crime, and endure their own
political and cultural dispossession at the hands of the elite and
its underclass vanguard. Today, the greatest immediate danger to
Middle America and the European-American civilization to which it
is heir lies in the importation of a new underclass from the Third
World through mass immigration. The danger is in part economic,
in part political, and in part cultural, but it is also in part
racial, pure and simple. The leaders of the alien underclass, as
well as those of the older black underclass, invoke race in
explicit terms, and they leave no doubt that their main enemy is
the white man and his institutions and patterns of belief.
The only prospect of resisting the domination of the Ruling
Class and its anti-white and anti-Western allies in the underclass
is through Middle American solidarity, a solidarity that must
transcend the differentiations of region, class, religion, party,
and ideology. White Southerners are a vital part of the Middle
American core, as are their northern counterparts, and neither is
the enemy of the other. Both regional sections of Middle America
face the same threats, experience much the same problems, and
ought to be joined in the same political-cultural movement to meet
the threat together.

If, however, Southerners were to secede, they would be
engulfed by the same forces that threaten the nation as a whole.
By the year 2020, the Census Bureau reports, the only parts of the
South that will have more than a 75 percent white population will
be a thin strip of western Virginia, most of Tennessee, and
northern Arkansas; the rest of the region, especially Texas and
the Deep South, will be dominated by populations more than 50
percent non-white, in some places far more. Dr. Brent Nelson has
calculated that even today, even if 80 percent of the white
population of South Carolina were to support secession in a
referendum, that would amount to only 55 percent of the state’s
total population.

I mention this racial dimension of the secession controversy not
because of the obvious conflicts that will arise in its wake but to
suggest that the majority populations of the South in the near future
will either be blacks, who have only hostile memories of what secession
and the historic South meant to them and their ancestors, or Hispanics,
who will sympathize with secession only if it means union with Mexico. It
is unlikely that either the black or the Hispanic populations will
evince much sympathy for Jefferson Davis and his legacy.
But the racial composition of the future South is significant
also because the racial consciousness and solidarity non-whites
will exhibit is already plain, in the frenetic, hate-driven
language of their leaders and organizational vehicles, in their
political behavior, and in the whole fabric of their subculture.
It is a consciousness that readily identifies whites as an enemy
and their institutions and values as alien and oppressive.
The only prospect of white Middle American resistance to this
racial and political engulfment is our own solidarity; instead of
snorting at white Northerners as “Yankees” who lack good table
manners and the rudiments of culture, white Southerners should be
standing firm with them in opposition to more immigration and more
domination by the federal leviathan that serves as the political
instrument of the overclass-underclass alliance.