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Month: December 2022

#NCExit?

According to Ryan McMaken’ s new book, Breaking Away, since 1945 the number of independent countries in the world has almost tripled. #Secession is trending!

We, the people of the empire formerly known as the “United States of America” would be well-served to heed the lesson. After all, these confederated states were formed by secession from an overbearing Great Britain.

I submit that it is now high time that the revolutionary principles of our founders be applied to the federal oligarchy under whose yoke we are currently repressed.

#CalExit, for example, seems like both an excellent idea for those who desire to live there, and for those of us residing elsewhere as well.

I would further suggest that North Carolina would benefit from secession from the US, in ways both cultural and economic. Furthermore, NC currently consists of at least three independent regions (western, central, and eastern), each of which would benefit from disassociation from the others.

The idea of the eastern part of our state being disconnected from the urban central region excites me — the trade and governance aspects seem to almost demand it. And, as an historical “Appalachian-American”, I suspect the mountain folk might find a similar separation advantageous as well.

Such functional separations might lead to consolidations with areas more in common also, e.g., eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, or eastern NC and eastern SC perhaps.

There seems less and less reason to maintain our national status quo, and stronger and stronger arguments for a ‘national’ reorganization. At least, I think the topic deserves some serious discussion at several structural levels.

What is the South?

by Clyde Wilson, in “Abbeville”, the newsletter of the Abbeville Institute, Fall 2022

The term American is an abstraction without human content — it refers, at best, to a government, territory, standard of living, and a set of dubious and dubiously observed propositions. It refers to nothing akin to values or culture, nothing that represents the humanness of human beings. It could be reasonably argued that there is no such thing as an American people, although we have persuaded ourselves there was when shouldering the burdens of several wars. There was perhaps a time earlier in this century when an American nationality might have emerged naturally. But that time has passed with the onslaught of new immigrants.

Unlike the term American, when we say Southern, we know we imply a certain history, literature, music, and speech: particular folkways, attitudes, and manners: a certain set of political responses and pieties: and a traditional view of the proper dividing line between the private and the public. Things which are unique, easily observable, and continual over many generations.

The South, many believe, still has a substantial authentic culture, both high and folk, and it still has a purchase on Christianity. That is, the South is a civilizational reality in a sense which the United States is not, and it will last longer than the American Empire.