TRUE SOUTH
WHISTLIN' DIXIE?
BY KEN WARD

The campaign to turn New Hampshire into a Libertarian stronghold has gained a Southern counterpart: the Confederate States of America Project.

If that sounds like a return to antebellum days, sans slaves, you’re partly right. 

“The United States is beyond redemption. After 50-plus years of public-school indoctrination, people have just given up too many responsibilities,” says Robert Hayes, an organizer for the CSA Project.

Like the Libertarians’ Free State Project up North, the CSA venture is recruiting sympathetic Southrons to gather in Dixie to re-establish state’s rights and individual liberties.   

So, where’s the new nirvana (or the old plantation)?

South Carolina.

The Palmetto State is a natural Zion in several ways. It’s conservative — the governor’s mansion, the Legislature and all but two statewide offices are held by Republicans. It’s relatively small in size and population — a 2 1/2-hour drive from the capital in Columbia gets you to any border and its less than 2 million registered voters means a handful of committed activists can tilt its politics further right without having to expend millions of dollars.

Most importantly, South Carolina has a history behind it. Almost 150 years before the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, restive Carolinians threw out their proprietary governor. 

“This has always been a rebellious state,” notes Hayes, adding that even today, seven in 10 South Carolina residents are, like him, native-born and fewer than 3 percent are immigrants.

Being a fraternally fractious clan, however, not all Southern strategists are completely on board. Michael Hill, president of the Alabama-based League of the South, suggests that a broader approach spanning the old 11-state Confederacy will be more effective. He believes putting all political eggs in one basket is a tactical mistake.

“Instead of having to contend with many geographic centers of resistance, (Washington) only has to deal with one,” Hill says. “If we did our job in recruiting the Southern people to our cause ... we could find at least 250,000 people in each Southern state who agree with us on the major issues.”

Other neo-Confederates say South Carolina’s 30 percent black population (reliably Democratic votes) is another stumbling block. Indeed, some South Carolinians suggest (privately, of course) that the CSA Project should just buy train tickets to send this voting block north to Detroit and Chicago.

Still, the League of the South, which calls for secession “by all honorable means,” is entrenched in half of South Carolina’s 46 counties, giving the CSA Project its strongest organizational base in Dixie. Opening a series of Southern culture bookshops and stores, the movement is generating income and a growing socio-political presence.

Furthermore, CSA has formed a loose alliance with the Christian Exodus movement, which also has identified South Carolina as its new homeland. A broader coalition includes Libertarians, pro-lifers, gun owners and taxpayer associations.

Cory Burnell and Ron Holland, founders of the CSA Project, have been careful to distinguish it from these other groups. For example, the venture does not seek to establish any sort of theocracy (as Christian Exodus envisions), nor does it buy into the free-drug culture and libertine sensibilities of classic Libertarians.

Rather, the focus is on reasserting 10th-Amendment powers and the Jeffersonian (i.e., Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis) doctrine of governing by the consent of the governed. “We lost our government through the political process because conservatives sat on their hands,” observes Hayes, a Clemson University graduate and resident of Abbeville, home of Secession Hill. 

League of the South forces in South Carolina flexed their muscles last year by helping to derail Gov. David Beasley’s bid for U.S. Senate. Beasley was the odds-on favorite, but was denounced as a scalawag and relentlessly “flagged” by Confederates for his campaign to remove the Southern battle flag from the capitol grounds.

Next, the rebels are targeting Democratic Education Commissioner Inez Tannenbaum for defeat, while ramping up a slate of candidates of their own.

Whether these latter-day fire-eaters can gather enough political ammunition to prevail is a historic long shot. The Yankee empire that Abe Lincoln hammered together is crumbling around the borders, yet his artifice of “perpetual union” reigns supreme north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

But, as with the New Hampshire crowd, which calls for “liberty in our lifetime,” the CSA Project is aiming for some form of constitutional “independence” in 20 years.

“Don’t bet against us,” Hayes says. “We have a goal, a plan and the people to work to put it into effect.” Deo Vindice. LW