When I was a youngster (back in the fifties) it was still possible to hear the slogan "The South will rise again!" expressed in earnest. At that point the defeat of the Confederacy was only ninety years in the past. This wistful phrase was seen as nothing to worry about, merely a part of the Lost Cause mythology of things as they never really were—the romance of Southern chivalry, the elegance of plantation society, the belles and the beaux gliding around ballroom floors, all ignoring that the whole glittering heap teetered atop the unimaginable hell of slavery.
Then, starting in the 1990’s, it seemed to come to pass. Southerners were suddenly holding all the reins of government. All you had to do was look around Washington—Trent Lott, Newt Gingrich, Bill Frist and Tom DeLay were calling the shots, and even those shots apportioned to the Democrats went to the Arkansan Bill Clinton. And when George W. Bush became president the North appeared finally to have lost the Civil War. The South had risen again, not as its own entity, but through penetrating and smothering, like a choking fog, the very government that had defeated it all those long years ago.
But, since then, how the mighty are fallen!
Starting in 2006, the country began to shake off the drowse it had been in since the election of Ronald Reagan. It was like waking up and finding Pod People all around you, and that you yourself were one of them. The populace suddenly discovered that it could say No! to mindless conservatism and live to tell the tale, so that by the time the economic meltdown occurred (i.e. what eventually happens when the foxes take over every last henhouse) all minds were alive to what had been happening. The people stormed the Bastille and threw the Bourbons out, who were forced to retreat into their traditional stronghold—The Deep South, the Bible Belt, the old Gulf Squadron that comprised the first wave of secession in the 1860s.
The GOP is now so lost and without message it has turned, in a desperate antic to revivify itself, not only to a black Chairman but an Indian American, Bobby Jindal, as its best and brightest hope for 2012. (Or he was until he seemed to folksy his way clear out of contention with his bizarre rejoinder to President Obama’s recent congressional address.) But the true diehard GOPers are not happy with this trend. They like their conservatism served up the old fashioned way, with a stiff dollop of intolerance. The result is that, hard as it may be to believe, the old secession furies have been stirred back to life. Deepest, darkest Whitesheetia wants nothing to do with the Union anymore, and if this fantasy ever really takes off, and ordinances of secession once more swarm across the South, I say this time let our fractious sisters go.
And good riddance.
In 1861, after the first seven Southern states seceded and their representatives departed Congress, suddenly all the legislation they had kept jammed up with their infinite complaints was passed. First was the admission of Kansas as a free state, a matter which sailed through in January 1861 after having been hogtied by Southern plots, objections and threats for nearly a decade. The only stronghold the GOP can currently claim is the very same swath of the country that was so dissatisfied with the rest a hundred and fifty years ago. The truth is the Union didn’t need those states then, and it doesn’t need them now. Why risk a single life fighting over a region with no industry to speak of, no indispensable agriculture or natural resources, and a population with the highest rates of poverty and the lowest in income and education; who want nothing to do with real-world biology or Yankee stimulus money, or to be treated for any fatal disease if it means the destruction of a single frozen embryo?
Of course I am being facetious here. But there is a real possibility of the South retreating so far into itself politically that it becomes as isolated as feudal Japan. Then all we would need is for them to start withdrawing their legislators from Washington, just like in the old days. Think how much easier that would make things—economic legislation that would be arrived at by consensus, not niggled together amid sniping and foot-dragging; wisdom brought to tackling the War on Terror, instead of partisan carping; real health care coverage reform.
If the South ever decides once again to take its toys and go home, I think the rest of us should do everything in our power to encourage them.