Fighting words:

It is just as well that Barack Obama is emulating Abraham Lincoln by traveling to his inauguration in Washington by train. As the regional politics of the automobile bailout controversy demonstrate, the Civil War continues. If the major U.S. automobile companies go under, it will be partly because timely federal aid for them was blocked by members of Congress like Tennessee Senator Bob Corker, whose states have created their own counter-Detroit in the form of Japanese, Korean, and German transplant factories. The South will have risen by bringing down the North. Jefferson Davis will have had his revenge.

Why, how dare Southern businesses actually try to compete in a free and open marketplace with Northern ones, whose mob-run unions have nearly destroyed an entire industry! And how dare Southern legislators stand up for capitalist principle and their constituents! Why, it’s an OUTRAGE!

Today the division is no longer between slave and free states, or agrarian and industrial states, but between two models of industrial society — the Northern model, based on adequate public service funding and taxation and unionization, and the Southern model, based on low-tax, low-service government and low-wage, non-unionized, easily exploited labor. If the industrial North and the industrial South compete for global capital investment, then the industrial South is likely to prevail, because Northern advantages in the form of a skilled workforce and superior public services are unlikely to overcome the South’s advantages of low wages and low taxes and state and local tax subsidies.

Translation: we northern liberals have taxed and spent ourselves into economic oblivion; our corrupt and greedy unions refuse to countenance the measures necessary to make the industries they’ve devastated competitive again; and now we want to ram our failure down the throats of more liberty-minded people and suck the life out of their thriving economies like the leeches we are. Because — waaaaa! — our Grand Socialist Experiment is a miserable failure, we can’t possibly sustain it without attaching ourselves, remora-like, to a stronger, better system until we’ve ruined it too…and IT’S JUST NOT FAAAIIIR!

The alternative to the Southernization of the U.S. is the Americanization of the South — a process that was not completed by Reconstruction and the New Deal and the Civil Rights era, which can be thought of as the Second Reconstruction. The non-Southern states, through their representatives in Congress and the executive branch, and with the help of enlightened Southerners, need to use the power of the federal government to put a stop to the Southern conservative race-to-the-bottom strategy once and for all.

Translation: we’ve fouled our own nest beyond all redemption, and we’re too obstinate in our stupidity to fix our problems ourselves. So our only alternative is not to undo the idiocy that led us to this sorry and disgraceful pass, but to bring our authoritarian methods down there and start taxing the shit out of robbing you Southerners, making you over in our pathetic image.

Well, try it, dickhead. Just you come on down and try it. Better bring help, though, and lots of it. There are plenty of us good old boys down here who are sick to death already of you arrogant fucks fleeing the mess you’ve made of your cities, and then having the beastly gall to sniff about how we ought to be doing things. And we’re armed to the fucking teeth, too. Remember it.

Call it the Third Reconstruction. The first step is to end the race to the bottom in wages and regulation, by national action. The national minimum wage should be gradually raised until it is a living wage, of $10 to $12 an hour, and it should be adjusted for inflation.

Yeah, right. Because that’s always worked out so well in the past. Fucking purblind idiot.

At the same time, federal regulations should set a higher floor with respect to worker safety regulations, environmental regulations, and others, preventing America’s own internal rogue states from gaining any advantages by flouting national standards. Most Southern politicians and business leaders will howl that this will bankrupt the South. That’s what they said about the abolition of slavery, child labor, and the convict lease system, too. The South was a better place to live after those reforms, and it will be a better place to live when there is a living wage throughout the South.

Kiss my ass, twerp. If we wanted to live in any of your blighted urban shitholes, we’d be moving there ourselves. Oddly enough, the migration seems to have been headed in the other direction, for a long, long time now. And it ain’t because Detroit, New York City, Pittsburgh, or Cleveland are “better places to live.”

Second, the race to the bottom in taxes and public services must be stopped by means of federal revenue-sharing. In most industrial democracies, the central government contributes much of the money for local services. In the 21st century U.S., too, a much greater percentage of state and local public service funding should come from the federal government, in the form of general revenue sharing (a popular and effective program abolished by Reagan) as well as special purpose grants and loans for some needs like infrastructure.

This means that more tax money, not less, will flow from blue states to red states. But it is the price the blue states must pay for the survival of their own way of life in their own regions.

In the first place, it’s a flat lie, and down here we’re smart enough to know better than to trust the forked tongues of statists when they come sliming around out of their sewers to sell us some of that good old big-government snake oil. And even if it did work out that way — and it never, ever does — you can keep your goddamned money. We’re getting by just fine without it, thanks; we’re not interested in being bought by the likes of you. And that’s what it would amount to: no money from liberal cocksuckers like you ever comes without plenty of strings attached. You’re always so smug and self-righteous about having eliminated slavery — a fine thing, no question, and I would never say otherwise. So how is it that you’re so eager to implement it again in a slightly different form, with free Southerners as the slaves and your imperial federal government as the master?

Third, federal-state collaboration in national economic development must replace individual state economic development systems designed to promote one state at the expense of another. Most states today have complex and sophisticated economic development systems, including agencies like infrastructure banks and municipal bonds to pay for infrastructure and sometimes industry. The problem is not their existence, but rather the absence of an overarching federal system…

Yeah, it always is for you communist pinheads. More centralization, more government control, more rules, more taxes, more everything…except freedom. Why don’t you spend a year in Cuba and see how that’s working out for them? Better yet, why don’t you just move there permanently? They’d probably love to have a bright boy like you telling them how they ought to be running things.

These and similar measures adding up to a Third Reconstruction would not turn Mississippi into Vermont.

I will guarangoddamntee you there ain’t one living soul in Mississippi outside of a university faculty lounge who would want to turn their fine state into Vermont. In fact, I’d be willing to bet most Mississippians would gladly fight any cheap dictator like yourself who made a serious attempt at it — to their last drop of red all-American blood.

The Southern conservatives of the GOP are not irrational when they denounce the very idea of a national economic strategy as “socialism” or “industrial policy” while each of their states pursues its own “socialist industrial policy” within its state borders. They are being strategic. They understand their interests, as they define them. A U.S. economic development strategy would make it more difficult for individual state governments and their crony capitalist allies to engage in the beggar-thy-neighbor policies that the Southern elites have specialized in for nearly a century.

Hell, why don’t you just come right out and say it, asshole: just go ahead and openly advocate banning conservatism, throwing out the Constitution you so clearly despise, and tossing everyone who disagrees with you in the hoosegow. At least have the guts to be honest, you wormy, wretched fuck. Like I said before: go on and try it. See what you and your jackbooted thugs get for your trouble.

And a national economic development system would thwart the ultimate goal of the extreme right in America — the leveling down of the entire U.S. to the South’s inhumane and primitive standards.

“Inhumane?” “Primitive?” Hey, I have an alternative to your lousy fascist proposal. I say Southern states immediately ban all Northern liberals from ever moving here, with a provision that allows proud, ordinary Southern folks like me to shoot your worthless, self-righteous asses on sight. Keep your douchebaggery up there where it belongs. Live with the mess your proven-failure folly has created. If we in the South want any further shit from you, we’ll come up there and squeeze your fucking pointy head.

God DAMN, but assholes like this guy piss me right the fuck off. Thankfully, I’ve lived in the north myself, and I know full well that most of my friends up there are embarrassed to the point of actual horror whenever retarded drivel like this bursts forth from the septic tank.

(Via Jonah)

Update! Heh. Mighta known Sith would beat me to it.

Updated update! I was just killing pissed and straight-up unloaded on the despicable swine Lind; if you prefer a more surgical approach, Velociman’s your guy:

The man is simply mad. Here’s the Ray Bolger he sets up: the South is exploiting labor by providing jobs in a low-service environment, as opposed to the North, which provides some ephemeral “adequate public service funding”. The Southern model is obviously immoral and grievious, and must be corrected by forcible Federal intervention. This is of course of a sort with all liberal fantasies of the proper use of power: the armed forces are never to be used against a belligerent enemy; Federal bayonets are only suitable for use in coercing fellow citizens to toe the fucking line. Most especially stupid redneck sisterfuckers.

…Because, of course, contextualizing this Renfieldesque delirium as another Reconstruction is certain to charm the Southerners, who fondly recall Reconstruction as the time the bayoneters forcibly removed their families from their lands and possessions, eviscerated their franchise, and plunged them into four generations of poverty. Think of it as a never-ending series of disastrous Soviet five-year plans, replete with famines and murder, and a handful of bureaucratic cocksuckers with political expediency and power by fiat upon their minds and you get the gist of it.

So, yes, sign me the fuck up for more of that.

Actually, V-man seems a bit riled himself. It’s a thing of beauty, too. He gets in an excellent quote from good old Jeff Davis, as well:

I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

Worth mulling over in the larger, current context, but the very jerkwads who most need to consider how it might or might not apply…won’t. Ever.