Something more serious holds back Southern nationalism: Its support is limited almost entirely to people who profess a certain kind of politics, whereas national movements must be beyond politics. An independent South would need the support of people who may not be conservative, who may not be suspicious of big government, who may not be Christian, who may not oppose marriage for homosexuals, but who are still devoted to the South. The roots of a Southern nation would have to spread widely and not just sink deep.
Looking back 150 years, I am struck by how remote an irritant the federal government then was. About the only brush with Washington most Americans ever had was buying stamps at the post office. The feds never dreamed of telling you whom you had to hire, what you could put in your food, or how many days off you had to give the help. No American had to account to Washington for every penny he earned, and then hand over a big part of it. Not even Louis XIV or Ivan the Terrible exercised that kind of tyranny. The people of Illinois and Wisconsin would have voted articles of secession before South Carolina did if they had lived in the grip of today’s central government.
And yet, the irony is that today’s pestilential bureaucracy has nothing like the resolve with which Lincoln’s government fought the war. A country that chants mantras about diversity and tolerance has no idea what it even is. It has no identity to impose on people who know who they are, know what they want, and are prepared to fight for it.
The real tragedy is that Southern nationalism crested 150 years too soon. I am convinced that if, today, the people of the South—or of any state—were as determined to secede as my ancestors were in 1860 and 1861, the federal government would not now slaughter them to keep their corpses in the Union.
Independence is there for any group of Americans that is united in its determination to take it.
