Sweet, beautiful, socialist Amerika?
November 4, 2009 7:27 PM   Subscribe

A different twist on "what if the South won the Civil War?"

I'm curious as to what the USA -- you know, the Northeast, upper Midwest, and (I would imagine) the mountain west and California -- in other words, the non-Confederate states -- would be like if the South "won" the civil war.

I've Googled this, and keep coming across stupid crap from people who seem to equate "the South winning the war" with "the South taking over the entire continent culturally and economically." In reality, of course, all it would mean is that the CSA would emerge as an independent nation, while the USA would also continue, only it'd be smaller than the USA we know of today.

As a resident of the "technically Southern, but not really" state of Maryland, I find that notion delicious, actually. I start having wonderful dreams of where we in the US would be, politically, today, without all those Southern politicians -- pardon my French -- fucking it up for us all these years. There never would've been a George W. Bush. (Well, since he's from Connecticut, there would've been, but the whole Bush clan would've never bothered with relocating to Texas -- and if they did, they'd fuck up the CSA, and not the USA.) Desegregation probably would've happened a lot earlier, thanks to -- and yes, I swallow hard as I type this -- the Radical Republicans. As one thinks about this more and more, the mind reels at the possibilities. Hell, I daresay we'd be another Norway!

(Hey, that rhymes . . . sorta . . . )

My question is this: Has anyone actually put forth a solid analysis, preferably backed by historical demographic, census, voting and other data, of what the South-free USA would be like, mainly in political terms, today, if the South had gotten its wish of splitting off and forming its own nation? Google produces a lot of crappy, Yahoo Answers-esque links mainly filled with the wet dreams of rednecks who idiotically assume that the entire area between Canada and Mexico would become one gigantic Midland, Texas. How it escapes them that "the South winning" does NOT equate to "Richmond calling the shots for the entire 50-state region we call the USA today," but rather, only means "they'd be allowed to split off and be their own country, while the rest of us NOT in what we call 'the South' today would continue to be the USA" is an exercise I'll leave to the reader to figure out . . .

Anyhow, I think it'd be interesting to read an article where, say, the author is able to draw upon research, polling data, demographic info, etc. to put forth a vision of where the South-free USA might be today, politically, particularly in the context of some of the hot-button issues of this and the most immediately previous years -- e.g., gay rights, health care, church vs. state, Israel, Middle East policy, etc. I can't find a thoughtful analysis of this, and I'm curious.
posted by CommonSense to Society & Culture (1 answer total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: this is a little too ranty and a little too little of a question. maybe re-ask next week without the editorial asides? -- jessamyn

 
Adding a hostile border country, with potentially continuing disputes over such states as, say, Maryland, would not result in a historical trajectory that resembles "everything exactly the same but without the South."
posted by palliser at 7:36 PM on November 4, 2009 [1 favorite]


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