Was slave culture a turn-off for free working people? I'd have to look at the original sources. My own feeling is that if you were part of the "southern family" you took society, its rules and your place in it for granted. If you were an outsider from Germany or Ireland or the North the world the slaveholders made might be something you'd want to avoid. There can be no absolutely binding generalization. You will always be able to find Germans or Jews or Irish or Northerners who fought for the Confederacy and felt at home there. But there should be some way to acknowledge those who avoided the South because of slavery and to put them into our picture of the times.
Does "Northern Liberalism" always win? I'd say that capitalism and technology have been the winners for centuries. They bring some libertarianism and liberalism with them, but I don't think one can say that it's the liberals or Democrats who win in the end. If you look at all the ideologies swirling around in the first half of the 20th century, it's clear that capitalism has been the winner. It's had to make compromises and adapt to local situations and settle for less than absolute victory, but more collectivist or traditionalist or egalitarian or centralizing ideologies have clearly lost out. The next question is what kind of capitalism won out. The answer is a libertarian-egalitarian capitalism, informal with sneakers and sportsware rather than top hats or frock coats or even suits and ties much nowadays. It's a consumerist capitalism with an appeal that isn't so much based on bayonets or principles as on appealing to human desires, satisfying them, and encouraging them anew.
So can you combine this with a more conservative political order? Maybe. Maybe locally. Cutting back on public education and private broadcasting might help. But there will always be the draw of mass culture and consumerism on young people -- and on many older people. Do you deny this? Perhaps a catastrophe will destroy the system and reduce us to poverty. Undoubtedly some people will withdraw and try to live different sorts of life. But barring catastrophe, will people really abandon the "fun society" in order to "live ancient lives" of virtue, piety and dignity?
It's not like I'm happy about the result. But you'd have to show me some place where what you have in mind worked for more than a generation to convince me that it was really possible. Otherwise it's more wishful thinking than anything else.
So many Southern nationalist types go on and on about the virtues of the South as compared to the North -- loyalty, honor, fidelity, tradition, etc. The North wasn't devoid of this virtues, and had others as well. But "in comparison with" is the important thing here. Southernists milk the comparison with the North to hide how much we have in common.
I can't prove this. But look around to other countries, peoples or regions that have won their independence. There's a great hunger for "authentic national culture" in the beginning. Then, when people realize that they are a nation among nations governing themselves, "authentic national culture" becomes less important, and may even be thought oppressive. Nationalism is driven by the ambitious, who expect that once they attain power people will naturally fit into a given political and cultural order. The problem is that once independence is attained ambition and the ambitious don't stop. Some of the ambitious will follow the founders and try to succeed them. Others will join the opposition and try to remake society. Most of the ambitious will get to work in the economy. They end up by remaking the economy and society. They won't care so much about political philosophy or cultural values. You may very well get good, decent, hard working people who care for their families. You won't get people who are very preoccupied with politics or even with national identity.
The presumption people have is "let's stop looking outward and turn inward to build our own culture." But it's a mistake. In the modern world, looking outward at the enemy, the adversary, the opponent, or the foe strengthens the sense of nationhood, cultural uniqueness, and tradition. "Turning inward" means earning a living, learning how to use technology, taking care of a family, enjoying one's spare time, not reciting the tales of great battles and heroes -- or not so much outside hobbyist circles.
There are exceptions. What's happening in Arab countries and in India now, for example. They certainly are concerned with traditions, nationhood, and salvation. But that's because they have enemies to focus their attentions on.
I shouldn't be so certain of my predictions, but it does seem to me that what sustains so much of this Southern nationalism is opposition to the North and wounded pride. But if the South does become independent there would be no sense in making the constant comparison to Yankeeland. You would have to make your own way without always having that opposition to fall back on. You might well have an identity crisis -- as might we. Those who built their self-image on the North-South opposition may find that self slipping away with political questions that are no longer current. Or you might heal that wounded pride by focusing on the future, rather than the past. That means letting go. Most likely you'll find nationalist sentiments fading after you gain independence. If you don't there might be trouble here, as in India or the Middle East.
With thunder rumbling outside, as some small, New England-sized thunderstorms wander across the vastness of the Texas countryside, the atmosphere would seem to be just right to contemplate your vision of a potential separation.
First, any separation would be founded squarely on solid cultural factors that Blue and Red America divide quite sharply on, not merely on reactionary Southern resistance to "Northernness" -- which is shorthand for selfish brio and casual abusiveness justified by its idolators and beneficiaries as "impartiality" and "businesslike impersonality" -- one size screws all.
The values dichotomy is real and deep. First, any departure by the South would condemn the rest of the country to an endless procession of liberal presidents and Congresses, which would have dramatic consequences for the recovering economies of the former Rust Belt states, which are trying to come back as a combination of service and high-technology economies. It isn't just a matter of speechways and folkways. It's a difference in how people are perceived. Beyond stating that obvious difference, I'll leave its elaboration to various people, who, smarter than I, have attempted to mine the Red-Blue Divide for intelligible information and insight.
Sectional and regional differences, remembered loyalties and differences in voting patterns, would, I think, leave the Midwest and Mountain West with the Union. They vote Red (notice how the writer of the original article cleverly avoided assigning Gore the "Red" position, which would have been a little too telling), i.e., often with Republicans....but they would be left behind by the South to become perpetual junior partners of the industrial North, and its helpless thralls. The future of the West and Southwest under such a separation would be imponderable, but I would say as an aside -- I think I've referred to it above -- that any separation of the South from the Union would likely occur as a result of a successful partition of the Southwest by Mexico sponsoring Mexican-American "Aztlanists" to the United Nations and various anti-American world powers, setting the stage for a second collision of the Old Southwest (viz. the western states of the Confederacy) with the new.
Your argument that the differences between North and South are thin and vanishing is itself thin and wishful. You need only read the Christopher Caldwell article in the June, 1998, Atlantic Monthly about "The Southern Captivity of the GOP", which I think I've referred to before, to see the regional differences usefully sharpened for purposes of arguing that the Bushites must be allowed to abandon the GOP's Nixonian Southern (and conservative) base in order to pursue "tent-widening" strategies that avoid the shrinking horror with which voters in Blue America would otherwise inevitably come to regard the GOP. Which is a hell of a long, and usefully circuitous and diverting, way of saying that the Republican Party needs to retrogress to a New York-dominated "me-too" strategy like that employed by the Rockefeller Republicans of 50 years ago, and for the same reasons. But there I leave Caldwell, satisfied that his horror of Southernness presents fairly a regional division that means a lot more than you think it does.