Activist Starts "Home Rule for Dixie" Web Site:

If it can play in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, it can play in Dixie, too, says long-time Southern activist Jim Langcuster.

Langcuster, inspired by a close study of home-rule movements in the British Isles, has established a new web site advocating a similar approach for Dixie.

Langcuster, who is a founding member of the League of the South, one of the three original founders of the Southern party, and the author of the Asheville Declaration, believes the current approach to Southern self-determination, which advocates secession and full-blown independence for Dixie, simply isn't practical at the present time. Instead, he believes contemporary Southerners should take their cue from home-rule movements in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

"What we've managed to do throughout the South within the past few years through organizations such as the Southern Party is appeal to a subculture -- people who have an affinity for the Old Confederacy and who feel strongly about defending Confederate symbols from assaults by groups such as the NAACP," says Langcuster. "However, we've failed to reach the hundreds of thousands of what I call 'non-traditionalist conservative Southerners' who live in the suburbs and for whom appeals to Confederate symbols and the legacy of the Old Confederacy simply don't make much of an impression."

"Among many of these people, appeals to secession either fall on deaf ears or cause outright alarm in some quarters," he says.

The solution, he believes, is crafting a strategy and a message to reach people within the political, social and cultural context in which they're accustomed.

"To build a movement, we must set parameters within which most rank-and-file Southerners feel comfortable," Langcuster says. "Part of this will involve revising and updating Southern nationalism in order to become more relevant to changing times."

As Langcuster sees it, part of this updating will involve reaching the growing numbers of disenfranchised conservatives who are "culturally seceding" from the predominant secular culture and building alternative cultural institutions, such as businesses and schools. As he sees it, these groups constitute a natural base for a fresh, new self-determinationist message.

"What many of these disenfranchised conservatives don't understand is that the predominant culture likely will not continue turning a blind eye to their emerging counter-culture," Langcuster says. "In fact, the left's increasingly hostile remarks about home schooling are a good indication that the enmity toward home schools and other alternative cultural institutions will intensify in coming years."

The ideal solution for safeguarding this alternative culture, Langcuster says, would be separate nationhood replete with secure borders and all of the other amenities associated with sovereignty. However, since such a course is impossible for the foreseeable future, the next available alternative should be focusing these counter-cultural efforts within the region where they are most likely to be insulated from these threats: the South.

"The fact remains that the South, more than any other region of the country, remains the most congenial to the formation of a widespread counter-cultural movement," Langcuster says. "It has a long history of resistance to central authority dating back to the tariff crisis of the 1830s, a somewhat embattled, but enduring, faith in the merits of limited, constitutional government, and a people, black and white alike, who, by and large, still remain faithful to traditional notions of public morality."

If cultural secession requires a safe haven in order to succeed and if the South appears to be the region best equipped to serve this role, Langcuster believes the obvious next step should be building a broad-based, grassroots movement advocating the fullest measure of autonomy for the region.

As he sees it, home rule, as a political strategy for securing this autonomy, would be somewhere between state sovereignty and secession.

"Given the increasing interest and even outright clamor for decentralization not only in the United States but worldwide, I can envision a day fast approaching when Southern nationalists and disenfranchised conservatives join hands in order to form a regional movement for the South," Langcuster says.

"If such a movement gathered sufficient popular force, it eventually could form the foundation for a broad-based grassroots coalition -- a kind of unofficial regional congress -- that could meet annually or even bi-annually in order to pass resolutions, issue policy statements and papers, and act as a moral force on behalf of the region."

For more information about home rule for Dixie, visit Langcuster's web site at http://www.homerule-for-dixie.com