Re: Lee Siegel's Daily Beast article "Memo to the South: Go Ahead, Secede Already!"

From: A Libertarian Woman [Email her]

"Cultural critic" Lee Siegel is drooling at the thought of the Southern states of the US being kicked out.

Reason Magazine does a decent job, as far as its ideological blinders will allow, of pointing out that it's complete rubbish. [Sock Puppeteer Wants North to Secede So Whole Country Can Be as Dumb as He Is, By Matt Welch, April 30, 2013]What I noted, however, was the racial element. This is Siegel's fantasy of what a Confederacy-less US would look like:

Just think what America would look like without its mostly Southern states. (We could retain "America": they could call themselves "Smith & Wesson" or "Coca-Cola" or something like that.) Universal health care. No guns. Strong unions. A humane minimum wage. A humane immigration policy. High revenues from a fair tax structure. A massive public-works program. Legal gay marriage. A ban on carbon emissions. Electric cars. Stronger workplace protections. Extended family leave from work in case of pregnancy or illness. Longer unemployment benefits. In short, a society on a par with most of the rest of the industrialized world—a place whose politics have finally caught up with its social and economic realities.

The Southern states have the bulk of America's colored populations.Siegel is essentially fantasizing about kicking out all those inconvenient blacks and Hispanics so he can have his white leftist socialist welfare state with a population that won't turn it into Detroit. I believe that's known as "pulling the ladder up". As one of VDARE.COM's left libertarian readers, I'm fine with some—not all—of the things he wants, but it's fascinating to see an admission that it can't and won't happen with your current population.

James Fulford writes: I'm sure that  Lee Siegel's hatred of white Southerners (and white Americans in general—see him on Romney here) is what's driving this. His hatred of white Southerners seems driven by the fact that they vote Republican, which blacks in the South don't.

Siegel is not the first person to make this suggestion—in a blog post called South-Hating Author's Plan Would Have Saved 600,000 Lives In The 1860s, I pointed out that travel writer Chuck Thompson,[Email him]wanted teh same thing. He's the author of “Better Off without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession”. Of course, Thompson, like Siegel,  seemed to have forgotten that there are black people in the South. Half of the Congressional Black Caucus is elected from the South. I wonder how they feel about this  plan.