Wake Up, America. We're Driving Toward Disaster.

Since it was founded in 1994, the League of the South has been warning anyone who'd listen that DC's other-worldly, over-centralized policies were taking us down the wrong road. Restoring local self-government wasn't just about greater efficiency, or citizen accessibility, or even the restoration of morality to government -- though all of those were genuine motivations to stop the slide toward empire. The ultimate justification, though, for the League's stance was that big, over-centralized government inevitably leads to tyranny, war, and ruin, and the signs that we're approaching a cliff at 80 miles an hour are increasingly clear.

In other words, the Southern Cause isn't about nostalgia, legalism, or the "Lost Cause," but ultimately about survival, both cultural and physical. Now the warning signs are so clear, none but the most delusional can ignore them -- increased, rather than decreased, instability in the Middle East, worsening the always nervous oil market, sending prices to new, terrifying highs; the credit crunch, with its deadly effect on the housing market, a direct result of the Neocons' foolish overseas borrowing to pay for the "liberation" of Iraq, also worsened by egalitarian home mortgage policies that trump rational business decisions; rising crime, including frightening increases in immigrant gang activities, the inevitable result of DC's de facto Open Borders policies; and an out-of-control citizen control mechanism that claims the power to dissolve the 4th amendment and other basic freedoms, even habeas corpus.

Now, it's not just "right-wing" pundits who recognize that things are falling apart, but liberals, too. James Kunstler has a great piece arguing that America's infinite consumption, infinite growth, and world-wide empire are not only unsustainable, but suicidal. His recommendations sound like a position paper from the League of the South Board of Directors:

So what are intelligent responses to our predicament? First, we'll have to dramatically reorganize the everyday activities of American life. We'll have to grow our food closer to home, in a manner that will require more human attention. In fact, agriculture needs to return to the center of economic life. We'll have to restore local economic networks -- the very networks that the big-box stores systematically destroyed -- made of fine-grained layers of wholesalers, middlemen and retailers.

We'll also have to occupy the landscape differently, in traditional towns, villages and small cities. Our giant metroplexes are not going to make it, and the successful places will be ones that encourage local farming.

(As a heads-up to readers, stand by for some exciting new activism strategies from the League leadership -- something we've been working on for some time.)

For now, let's just take a look at where the attitudes that led to these self-destructive policies came from. As Kunstler says, the notion that we can have, or should have, anything we want is both delusional and suicidal. The most concise expression of this philosophy is from the atheist writer Ayn Rand. As she wrote, appropriately, in The Virtue of Selfishness:

Nothing is given to man on earth except a potential and the material on which to actualize it. The potential is a superlative machine: his consciousness; but it is a machine without a spark plug, a machine of which his own will has to be the spark plug, the self-starter and the driver; he has to discover how to use it and he has to keep it in constant action. The material is the whole of the universe, with no limits set to the knowledge he can acquire and to the enjoyment of life he can achieve.

Contrast that view of man and nature with the traditional Southern view, best summarized by Richard Weaver in The Southern Tradition At Bay:

"But nature is not an opponent, as ancient systems of belief could have instructed us; it is the matrix of our being, and as such scientists we are parricides. Piety is a realization that beyond a certain point victories over nature are pyrrhic." (p. 16)

That's the change in direction we now need so desperately, from that of greed, selfishness, and unbelief, to that of honor, patriotism, and piety.

Details to follow ...