The newest issue of Yale's ISI-funded right-wing mag, Light and Truth, offers Editor Emeritus Alden Bass' celebration (not available on-line, alas) of neo-confederate secessionists:

The founding fathers did it. And now another group is trying it, for similar reasons...Almost exclusively composed of Christian neo-confederates (and trust me, there is no shortage of those people in the South) the group plans to assemble 12,000 souls willing to transplant their families to South Carolina, where they intend to infiltrate the state government and secede from the Union. Yes, secede...When Southerners speak of the South, a dreamy look clouds their face as all the bittersweet associations of home come rushing back...the South is so frequently considered to be one category (like the Soviet Bloc or Latin America) that no one really questions the difference between Alabama and Mississippi. There is also the shared experience of the War of Northern Aggression, which none of us remembers, yet which none of us can forget...You may think this is my unique experience as a middle-class white preacher's boy, but I don't think so. Because I've heard it in too many old bluegrass songs, I've read it in too much literature, and I've seen it in too many elderly faces. Communicating face to face is the essence of Southern conservatism. It's about connecting, and not consumerism. This is why the South love's state's rights. The shared experiences of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights movement have bonded Southerners together in a way no other region cann boast. It's no wonder that we stick together the way we do... These disheartened fundamentalists of Tyler, Texas have realized that the sense of community once shared by the Nation and untiil recently by the South is fading fast, and they have opted to act radically. They will establish a community, a community small enough that it can be managed efficiently, personably, and responsibly. They will restore those values that we in the South were raised with, or at least thought that we were raised with. Will they succeed? I don't know, but I'll certainly be rooting for them.

I'm going to venture a guess that Bass' identity as a white conservative might, bluegrass aside, indeed have something to do with his excitement at the prospect of neo-confederate secession, and that other Southerners - white conservatives or not - might be somewhat more skeptical about what features other than size these "Christian Exodus" types are looking for in their new community. They might also question the idea that Southerners are all united by "shared experiences" of the Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement. Seems to me that being sprayed with fire hoses for non-violent protest of American Apartheid and being one of the ones holding the fire hoses are very different experiences to have of those events, and that the zeal of some to pull out of the union and found a nation they find more in keeping with their "values" only evidences how deep that division runs.