No, I think not -- they're having too much fun spoiling things for everyone else with their prating and eco-hectoring. I would like to find and read Kaplan's articles in the Atlantic Monthly, though. Because of the gross disorder on my rolltop desk where I keep my laptop, I can't right now put my hand on the file folder I keep my "books wanted" list, to check whether I've added Kaplan's title to it, but could you tell me the title to his book, if you have it? I'm sure I could look it up in a library author file if needed.
Will city states or smaller regional states be freer than nation states?
Not necessarily. I think it was Robert Heinlein, in his fiction, who first suggested that California has a bent for totalitarianism. It's obvious to me: democracy and republic require character in the citizenry. Less character in the people means more dirigisme in the regime.
Confederatopia -- if it does free itself from the country club elites -- might provide great freedom from government social programs, but be quite unpleasant for dissenters to live in.
Texas has a lively tradition of populist dissent, so I've no concerns on that score, and Louisiana has always given great scope to the individualist "character" ..... you must be thinking about Snopesian Mississippi and Arkansas. Which latter, by the way, hasn't received any Mexican immigration worth talking about. That state remains very Jacksonian and Old Democrat in its politics. Corrupt, too, like the Spoils System, the Albany Regency, Tammany Hall, and the other legacies of the National Democracy in the Age of Jackson and Van Buren.
Perhaps it's time for an established historian to start distilling out the essences of Jacksonianism, and filtering out the "contributions" of Martin Van Buren and the Albany Regency, which was anything but democratic and populist.
One thing I do notice is that we are in the middle of a great libertarian tide. People naturally assume that changes will promote further libertarianism. But that's not a certainty.
I think that the "libertarianism" you notice is artificial, and wholly incidental to the real process at work, which is the New Elite's vigorous solution and destruction of the sources and structures of competing authority in morality and political influence, principally Judeo-Christian morality and its exponents, and the various memetic resources of the political opposition.
City-states in the 30s or 40s, 60s or 70s would have been far more socialistic. What regional states would do about turbocapitalism or Walmart capitalism is not easy to forsee.
Excellent point. And for purposes of the forces now at play, even the United States is a "regional state", and meat on the table. The migrations you refer to are the superclass calling its underclass resources to join it in the metropolises, there to offset, undermine, submerge, and destroy the middle class in the processes of reproletarization that the superclass has set in motion, commoditizing added-value skillsets seriatim and en bloc and attacking the earning power of all sectors except management. Only entrepreneurs who succeed, are outside this system of proletarization. Even academics are caught in the maw; they just don't realize it yet, as they are being kept happy for the nonce.
What a joke: just as institutionalized Marxism dies, the real "class struggle" begins, as internationalists work to abolish countries, and reintroduce the world of the 18th century, when the main divisions were those of class and money. And I've just put my finger on the best reason for continued Union: some country has to be big enough to fight the global imperialists, and a disunited United States won't be that country.
FWIW, If America is being Mexicanized, the South won't escape the phenomenon.
Yes, it will. It'll arm, ruck up, and blow the Mexican Aztlanistas into the Pacific. Literally. The South wanted to be transcontinental, too, remember; and the Mexicans have worn out their welcome with their reconquista B.S., so Southerners would deal with them pretty frostily, I think. Texas will be the flashpoint in any fight like that -- or developments in New Mexico, where whites are few and the Chicanos might be emboldened to help them "see the advantages" of leaving the state. That would do it.
But this is all speculation now, which is never as interesting, in the end, as the event. But we will have a fight over the demographic upset before too many more years have passed; and whichever side the United States is on, we may rely on it, that the United Nations will be on the other. That is when even larger issues will be joined -- and the sooner the better, before the Bilderbergers (for lack of a better label) are ready for those issues to be joined.
I don't share your conviction that an independent South would keep out or throw out Mexican immigrants. It looks like they're bound to end up where ever there is ill-paid menial labor or dangerous, poorly paid, non-union work, or a demand for servants. Or the work will be performed by other immigrants from Latin America or Asia. Tightening borders could stop or slow down the process, but it would be a mistake to assume that the kind of people who would rule the US's successor states would be the kind of people who would do that, if those successor states were to be of any size. The people who end up running things above the county level are the same sort of people wherever you live. And that would be true of an independent South. It won't be those who are propagandizing for it who will end up running things. And if the libertarian component is large in any of those new countries, they certainly wouldn't cotton to what it takes to keep borders under control.
In general, there's a tendency among some to view the South as more devoted to loyalty and solidarity, and the North as hostage to market forces and money making drives. The latter may be quite true, but the former is doubtful. Slavery itself grew as a response to market forces and the planters' desire for a cheap and secured source of labor. Some emotional ties may have grown up by living together with household servants, but one can't leave the economic calculations which were more important in managing the field hands out of the picture. Nor can one ignore the macroeconomic considerations that led to Southern expansionism.
After emancipation in Trinidad and Guyana, when the costs of labor increased and the willingness of Blacks to toil on plantations decreased, indentured servants were imported from Java, China, and especially India. This could have happened, and I believe on a very small scale did happen, in the American South after emancipation. Agriculture doesn't need the kind of large settled populations it once did, but one can expect, unless people radically change, that much of its labor requirements will be met by cheap, exploited immigrant labor.
Today, as in previous centuries and for good or ill, we are more one country than many have thought. First slavery, then defeat, poverty, and an enduring racial problem convinced many of a Southern uniqueness. To be sure, there are persisting regional differences, but our regions have more in common with each other than separatists will admit. For a century, poverty and racial conflict kept large-scale immigration out of the South, and indeed slavery discouraged free immigration to the South even before the war. But now those problems won't hold back immigration to the South any more than to other sections. Nor will political and economic elites in an independent South -- we are learning that they have far more power and are far more alike from country to country and party to party than people would have thought.
But then again, if immigration and other forces help to produce a more homogenous world we may find nothing to unite us together as a nation. A truly global free market will make national loyalties and nation states seem redundant or superfluous to some. I would call that a mistake -- even a tragedy -- but I'll get a big kick out of watching Rockwell paleo-libertarians and metaphysical Southern nationalists fighting each other over the size and role of the state in culture and society.