In this chapter we explore the emergence of neo-Confederacy amongst a group who identify themselves as paleoconservatives.¹ Much of this intellectual effort, developed in a series of writings in the 1980s and 1990s, was located within the Agrarian tradition of Southern thought, a tradition that paleoconservatives envisioned themselves as inheriting and continuing. We focus on a few key figures who articulated a neo-Confederacy that we propose has since spread beyond these self-appointed articulators of paleoconservatism. These individuals became influential precisely because they wrote books, founded think tanks and institutes, published magazines, spoke at conferences, and disseminated their ideological positions and...

Religion is central to current invocations of neo-Confederacy. The New Dixie Manifesto, outlined in the introduction, represents the public articulation of neo-Confederacy’s central tenets as put forward by two of its major proponents, James Michael Hill and Thomas Fleming:

On a spiritual level, we take our stand squarely within the tradition of Christianity. This historic faith, though everywhere attacked by the hollow men of modernity, has always been central to the pursuit of personal honor, political liberty and human charity. Asking for only the religious freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, we oppose the government’s campaign against our Christian...

In neo-Confederate ideology, interpretations of gender and sexuality utilize nineteenth-century invocations. When neo-Confederates declare behavior to be “manly” or “womanly,” they draw on a legacy of gender relations dating from the antebellum Old South. These are best expressed by what advocates of neo-Confederacy call “Southern patriarchy” or the “culture of honor.”¹ Neo-Confederates long to reestablish patriarchy, to bring back a time when men ruled their families, women were subordinate, supposedly lesser races knew their place, and sexual deviants were shunned. Neo-Confederate organizations such as the League of the South (LS) lament the loss of this earlier time—and work to...

The concept of ethnicity has been central to social theory for the past thirty or forty years, a period during which global events have changed the ways in which people identify themselves.¹ Processes of decolonization, international migration, economic globalization, and the break-up of the Soviet Bloc have destabilized long-established relationships of political and cultural authority, and, Thomas Hylland Eriksen proposes, these developments continue to provoke both violent and nonviolent “ethnic struggles for recognition, power and autonomy.”² One central aspect of these reevaluations of ethnicity is the understanding that personal identities are multiple, being constructed and deconstructed in different contexts, enabling...

The previous chapters have demonstrated that neo-Confederacy comprises a comprehensive worldview and consistent ideological belief system. Having examined neo-Confederate understandings of religion, gender, and Southern ethnicity, our contributors have established that proponents of neo-Confederacy envision a white, Anglo-Celtic ethnicity, a belief in patriarchy, so-called “orthodox” Christianity, and social arrangements that are hierarchical and perceived through the lens of social Darwinism. In this chapter we turn to explore how understandings of race are central to neo-Confederacy.

In his analysis of racist discourses, Teun van Dijk argues that in the United States, “specific buzz words, such asbusing and quota,are used...

During the past decade the American South has witnessed dozens of controversies over the appropriate display of symbols, the celebration of historical events, and the memorialization of individuals associated with the shortlived Confederate States of America (1861–1865). These controversies have surrounded school dress codes that ban clothing with Confederate symbols in Alabama,¹ the naming of public schools after Confederate military figures in Virginia,² the display of the Confederate battle flag on specialty license plates in Tennessee³ and on a city logo in Florida,⁴ litigation over a barbecue sauce boycott stemming from the producer’s support for Confederate symbols in South...

Neo-Confederacy has long counted numerous academic professionals amongst its proponents, including current and former university and college faculty members as well as church ministers and other educators. As a result, strategies that encompass education form a central plank of the neo-Confederate program. Many neo-Confederates argue the educational system in the United States is prejudicial and discriminates against what they identify as Southern culture and heritage. The League of the South (LS), for example, has developed curricula for all ages that challenge established U.S. views of religion, history, and the Civil War, and promotes these curricula to home-schooling families. Other neo-Confederates...

For neo-Confederates like Clyde Wilson and Thomas Fleming, the idea of true Southern culture and identity is most clearly expressed through the region’s narrative traditions: song lyrics, historical accounts, or, as examined here, fictional literary works. Organizations like the League of the South (LS) and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) have established literary boards, produced seminars on Southern artists and writers, sponsored music festivals, and printed lists of “essential reading for educated Southerners” in magazines, includingSouthern Partisan.³ Leaders of the LS, many of whom have PhDs in history and literature, have stressed cultural issues by producing sixty-five in...

In the essay “Jimmie Davis and his Music,” Grady McWhiney, one of the central theorists of neo-Confederacy and founders of the League of the South (LS), and his co-author Gary B. Mills detail the life and times of the Southern folk artist and author of the well-known American ballad “You are my Sunshine.”¹ Davis, who served two terms as governor of Louisiana, during which he fought strenuously to resist desegregation, is, for McWhiney and Mills, “America’s most versatile and enduring singer and song writer [and] . . . lucky enough to have been born one of the Southern plain folk,”...

During the 108th annual reunion of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), held in July 2004 in Dalton, Georgia, Walter C. (“Walt”) Hilderman III was ejected from the event by SCV lawyers Burl McCoy, then serving as the group’s Judge Advocate General, and Sam Currin, a prominent former U.S. attorney and superior court judge from North Carolina who had chaired that state’s Republican Party from 1996 to 1999.¹ Hilderman, a South Carolinian with a fondness for reenacting Civil War battles and tidying up Confederate cemeteries, had publicly asked the SCV to remove white supremacists and secessionists from its ranks. After...