Tempting but insane: should the South just be its own country?

• Author: Woodard, Colin
• Position: Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession - Book review

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Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession

by Chuck Thompson

Simon and Schuster, 336 pp.

Chuck Thompson is by no means the first to argue that many of the nation's pathologies can be traced back to the South. Tax policies fostering economic inequality; the roiling back of consumer, worker, and environmental protections; efforts to underfund public education so as to provide tax cuts for the wealthy and subsidies for the world's most profitable energy companies; and end of times-driven foreign policy all have their core constituencies well south of the Potomac. Writers from Kevin Phillips to Michael Lind have been pointing this out for years. Nor is it novel to say that other parts of the country are falling under the South's influence--Stephen Cummings's The Dixification of America was published back in 1998, when few would have bet that Texas Governor George W. Bush could be elected president.

What sets Thompson apart is his bold assertion that Uncle Sam should hack off his gangrenous right leg before the infection spreads any further. Most southerners, he suspects, "really just want the same thing I do: a country liberated from the tyranny of Mormons and seditionists, and the freedom to say about the other side, in all honesty and with complete accuracy, that we might be better off without 'em."

Letting the South secede, he argues, would be best for everyone. "Freed from its standing as a hind tit, guilt-by-association international embarrassment to the rest of the country, the politically repressive religious monarchy of the born-again Confederacy would be transformed overnight into a travel destination swarming with trendsetting elites," Thompson, author of comedic travelogues To Hellholes and Back and Smile When You're Lying, writes at the outset. "Lonely Planet types from around the world would immediately embrace the South as ... an indigenous society teeming with underappreciated folk wisdom, ancient values, and fascinating dialects deserving of fierce protection and a slew of new expat-financed eco-lodges." It would be another Mexico, in other words, "only with an even weaker currency and more corrupt government."

Better Off Without 'Em maintains this fevered and irreverent tone--as if Phillips's American Theocracy were being narrated by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi--throughout its grand tour of the American South, a circuit that took Thompson two years to complete. Viciously funny and...