The League of the South does not Speak for me on Immigration

My Southron credentials are unassailable. Admittedly, I am an expatriate in New York, but I am still a Southron to the bone. I have the requisite Confederate ancestors whom I would put up against anyone’s ancestors who were unlucky enough to be in the war. I grew up in the country in the buckle of the Bible Belt. I grew up Campbellite and Baptist. I am as proud of my heritage as anyone, and I dislike it when folks put down the South and Southerners. I hate Abe Lincoln and centralized government, and I reckon that the more government power is diffused into states and localities the better. If the Southern states broke off to start their own country, I’d be all for that.

For the life of me, I can’t see how being Southern and being anti-immigrant and anti-multicultural have anything to do with each other. Know-nothingism and ethnocentrism are not, in my view, aspects of Southern “culture” that I would like to embrace. Certainly, some Southerners are anti-immigrant and ethnocentric to a fault, and we have had to work mightily to live down a legacy of racism; however, Southerners are not in my experience more know-nothing or more ethnocentric or more racist on average than other regional Americans or other people.

Southerners vary widely in their levels of tolerance for others, and an aspect of Southern “culture”, at least among mountaineers, that I do embrace is our good old-fashioned American commitment to minding our own business. We didn’t have many busybody Puritans in our ancestry; rather, we had individualists who yearned to live free. It has not been third world immigrants who have eroded our live and let live ethos. On the contrary, it has been homegrown religious conservatives who seek to impose their morality on the rest us and homegrown nanny-state progressives who want to protect us from ourselves. The immigrants want to work, tend their gardens, raise their families and be free. They are mainly Christians, albeit Catholics, and they are fully able to adopt the Southern ethos and traditions. In fact, they are in essentials not unlike my own forebears who migrated into the mountains to build lives for their families.

The League of the South http://www.leagueofthesouth.net/blog/weblog.php , with which I agree on many things, seems way off base to me in seeking to legitimize know-nothingism and ethnocentrism as “cultural”, as if these are inherently Southern perspectives that need no other justification. I believe that people of good faith can disagree about immigration and ethnic relations and how to approach these issues, but one ought to justify one’s position on these issues on their own merits. Ultimately, these positions may be nothing more than a matter of taste resting on bedrock metaphysical assumptions or non-rational individual preferences, and if this is so it is best to face it and go on from there since there is no basis for debate over matters of taste. And if these tastes are traceable to one’s upbringing and were widely distributed in one’s social milieu, it does not necessarily follow that they may be cloaked in the mantle of “culture” and rendered immune from scrutiny or examination or criticism.

Also, what’s up with the teenage boy in the masthead?