What made the Southern agrarianism of the 1930s so appealing to many was the contrast between the agrarian South and the industrial North at a time when industrial capitalism was in trouble. A rural, agricultural society is always socially or culturally conservative, even when it elects or is led by radicals, liberals or socialists. The ties of family and religion are too strong to be denied.
The idea of the heartless North and the warm South with its strong emotional ties may have appeal as a general rule, but it also has a lot of problems. How much more personalized and non-instrumental were relations in North Carolina textile factory towns than in New England mill towns? Was Birmingham really less economically driven than Pittsburgh? If the argument is that Birmingham was always an anomaly in the South, one has to deal with sharecropping, convict labor and other conditions of the day. The post-bellum may have been more open to the ties of community and extended families than the North at the same time. But it was not less exploitative. Rural Vermont or Iowa may have been more Yankee, but were they really more profit-driven or materialistic than rural Mississippi or Arkansas?
And what does this have to do with the "post-industrial" America of today? Does that old industrial-agricultural parallel still exist? Pittsburgh is no longer what it once was. "Detroit" is as likely to be in Tennessee today as in Michigan. Were such "Blue Zone" centers as San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, ever given over to "dark, satanic mills?" The characteristic of the deep blue zone is an indifference to smokestack industries and industrial regimentation. Today, Vermont and Maine, Iowa and Wisconsin may be more reliably Democrat in presidential campaigns than West Virginia, Pennsylvania, or even Michigan.
If a rural society cannot help but be culturally conservative, even under a radical rulership, a post-industrial society, driven by information, sensation and design, tends towards cultural radicalism, even under conservative political overlordship. The sophisticated urban types are likely to be much the same wherever you go, in Houston or Atlanta as much as New York or Los Angeles.
Of course they would only be a small part of any Southern nation, but their numbers would increase. Rural areas look to industry and commerce to provide work for those who can't support themselves on agriculture. As basic industries become less profitable in the developed world the temptation is to turn to high-tech, style-driven enterprises. That temptation is to embrace innovation, rather than stability or rootedness.
The trauma of many countries has been whether to accept this trend or try to avoid it by adopting or preserving socialist or centralized or social managerial economies. Such collectivist alternatives have generally failed and been rejected. One can't imagine they'd be very popular with those who think secession is about liberty. So the acceptance and enthusiasm for the innovation- and sensation-driven post-industrial economy continues and grows and with it, a movement away from traditional social and cultural norms.
Oppositions between South and North, Cavalier and Yankee will always endure. But what's made of them isn't constant, no more than oppositions between Quebec and English Canada or England and Ireland or Fleming and Walloon. In defense of their interests Quebec went from being collectivist under Trudeau to free market under Mulroney to whatever they are now. Flemish speaking Belgians went from being the poor exploited victims of rich French-speaking Walloons to being the richer, post-industrial adversaries of the Walloons who were still chained to coal, iron, textiles and steel. Protestant Ulster looked down on backward, priest-ridden Ireland. Today, swinging Dublin and even provincial Irish cities pity tired Belfast with its eternal war, decaying shipyards and unemployed.
Traditionalist, obscurantist Eire embraced modernity two or three generations after independence. They still are Irish, but "Irish" doesn't mean the same thing. Stodgy, snobbish, stagnant Ontario went all out for modernism, progressivism and multiculturalism. Clericalist, traditionalist Quebec also rushed into consumerism and individualism. Toronto or Ottawa still isn't New York or Detroit. Montreal and Quebec still aren't Toronto or Vancouver, but the differences and the cities and the cultures they represent aren't what they used to be.
My point is 1) you can't assume that the South will remain true to its rural roots -- it could embrace affluence and modernism or post-modernism with a vengeance -- and 2) one can't expect "Southernism" to be something fixed eternally and immutably. It only looks that way because of the North-South political opposition within a united country.
One can imagine southern "caring" and "familialism" and "traditionalism" being given a collectivist tinge once the Yankee is banished. Look at the change in the US over the last seventy years. The Democratic South and West which supported Roosevelt and the New Deal and their public works projects became the most Republican regions of the country. The Yankee individualist and high capitalist Northeast is now the most Democratic region. What is to prevent another reversal of polarities from happening?
The "it's ours" argument that applied to slavery and segregation may be applied to a more comprehensive welfare system than the cold North provides. If the country does break up, the Northern fragments will likely beat the South to single-payer health care, but you can never tell.
I think you are right about a secession of "Aztlan" acting as a trigger to future secessions. It's hard to see what else could play this role. If one region goes, others may follow. It should be noted that the same might happen in Mexico. The proposed "Republica del Norte" has little use for the Aztec South. So it's a question of what Chicano nationalism is really about.
But if the United States break up, it's a major blow to the "American" model on such things as abortion, capital punishment, gun control, homosexual marriage, national health care and other issues. The pressure to adopt European standards becomes much greater when there's no longer a superpower standing up to it. But it does stand to reason that after we topple the Saudis the next step is to undo our own country.
If a rural society cannot help but be culturally conservative, even under a radical rulership, a post-industrial society, driven by information, sensation and design, tends towards cultural radicalism, even under conservative political overlordship.......Rural areas look to industry and commerce to provide work for those who can't support themselves on agriculture. As basic industries become less profitable in the developed world the temptation is to turn to high-tech, style-driven enterprises. That temptation is to embrace innovation, rather than stability or rootedness.
I think you overlook the facilitation of decentralization by improvements in communication. Nowadays it is possible to tele-commute, and the major impediment to its widespread adoption, IMHO, is the fact that American business is still dominated by "Red"/"dominative" personalities who like to bully their serfs in person, and who are threatened by the gains in personal space, freedom, and initiative for the employee that a telecommutation solution implies. Of course, people like Pete Peterson and various productivity gurus recognize that that is what the doctor ordered for quantum gains in real productivity (not the kinds of marginal gains produced by flogging the squirrels harder, by feeding them less, and by extending office hours by various managerial stratagems -- "casual overtime" is my favorite: the words are actually being used in a formal context now, defeating the users' purpose of evading Wage and Hour laws). But they still haven't sold the typical American executive on that proposition yet.
Decentralization plays to the strengths of the new-pattern cities like Houston and Los Angeles, and to exurbanization over the suburban pattern. Who needs ribbons of concrete if ribbons of fiber-optic cable will do? It will take a while, I think, but teleconferencing will do for the typical business Napoleon and his officing arrangements what xerocopied samizdat did for totalitarian ideology.
There is no link that I can see, moreover, between the adoption of high technology and the radicalization of organic (as opposed to manufactured) social arrangements. The great subverter of the Southern extended family is medical science, which extends life and overcomes the pests that bore people off in the 19th century and earlier after perhaps seven years of married life, leaving children to be reared by steps and half-siblings, aunts, cousins, and black domestics. But if the Southern family can become smaller, that does not mean that Southern society will automatically replicate the Puritan attitudes that drove young men out of the nest in their teens, to start pulling their own weight in the world as heads of family. In short, introducing high technology won't change social attitudes: just look at Stormfront. If anything, it will open out the South's options and deliver it from its captivity by Northern capital and management, and liberate it from this seeping, corrupting, coarsening Yankeeism.
The sophisticated urban types are likely to be much the same wherever you go, in Houston or Atlanta as much as New York or Los Angeles. Of course they would only be a small part of any Southern nation, but their numbers would increase.
One of the things about the South has been its propensity to export nuisances. People like these would probably migrate willingly, or be encouraged to migrate, in search of other places and people to inflict themselves upon.