Southern Partisan magazine, Abbeville Institute, Revival or Decline of the Southern Partisan and the neo-Confederate movement

The Abbeville Institute is running a lot of essays from the Southern Partisan magazine.

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/

First I want to discuss and dispose of this website which seems to be some zombie thing in case anyone thinks it represents a real continuation of the Southern Partisan magazine. This website exists with the old Southern Partisan cover title.

https://www.southernpartisan.com/

However, it seems to be a content farm or some type of website in which an algorithm scans published articles and presents them on the website.

All the authors are, "by Editor," or at least the ones I have reviewed.  I don't see any of the old Southern Partisan material from the magazine available.

So it is with some interest that I have seen a lot of Southern Partisan material being republished online at the Abbeville Institute. Is it a sign of the Southern Partisan neo-Confederate ideology continuing on into the present and possibly into the future?

I thought initially it might be that. However, I am also thinking that it might be that the Abbeville Institute needs filler. I noticed last week on the blog it is all or almost all old Southern Partisan articles.

It could be that since 2015 there are less and less individuals willing to write for the Abbeville Institute. They no longer list a faculty, and I can't find online any indication anymore that Brion McClanahan is the editor. I notice that some contributors have nothing to lose in their reputations.

Or it could be that this nationalist movement is dying out. The purposes which drove neo-Confederate nationalism and much of Southern studies, the maintenance a hierarchy of class, gender, race are still there, but neo-Confederate nationalism is no longer seen as the means to maintain these hierarchies. It could be that among neo-reactionaries, white nationalists, other reactionary sorts neo-Confederate nationalism is seen as irrelevant or at best a charming antique from the past.

These reactionary forces might still respect the Confederacy and revere figures of the Confederacy, but they don't see neo-Confederacy as a means or program to direct the future.

One of the forces which drove neo-Confederate nationalism was the need to maintain a separatist anti-democratic and explicitly racist section in the former slave states against national democratizing trends and national movement towards civil rights. It was to facilitate an internal secession.

The Southern Partisan started in 1979 and got serious funding in 1980 and was really launched that year, when it seemed that with the election of Ronald Reagan there was a real chance of overturning or rendering impotent civil rights legislation. The neo-Confederates felt very betrayed when Reagan didn't restore the pre-civil rights era status quo, though Reagan did much to undermine civil rights.

Though there still is a struggle over civil rights in 2018, the old segregationist regimes of the 1950s are gone forever. M.E. Bradford's hopes remain dashed.

Also, the struggle is for the nation at large. States' rights is gone. All the political forces are playing for the nation. Separatism is conceived as being realized through external secession in the form of a nation state and not internal secession with the vehicle of states' rights.

The whole Lost Cause argument of the Civil War being about states' rights doesn't seem to be that important. Secessionists might believe that the Civil War was over states' rights, but they are planning secession. They may be justifying secession a little because they see a lack of states' rights.  But I think the whole discussion might be seen as superfluous to secessionists who are conceptualizing their arguments within nationalist concepts, and nationalists aren't interested in being within a larger polity with or without "states' rights."

Neo-Confederacy is not dead though. It will continue as a reactionary thread in American thinking. It is still a concern. It has influence, such the "Politically Incorrect Guides" of the Regnery Press.

Because a specific nationalist movement is becoming less important, doesn't mean that the Lost Cause is fading out. School textbooks pander to the Lost Cause. The Lost Cause and its monuments seem to have become an agenda item of reactionary or racist websites like Breitbart. But Breitbart doesn't care about M.E. Bradford or neo-Confederate writing or ideology. Instead their defense of Confederate monuments is more about white nationalism in general and white resentment.

At this time neo-Confederacy is largely expressed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The United Daughters (UDC) of the Confederacy seems to have dropped entirely advocacy of neo-Confederate ideas. Privately they might still support neo-Confederate ideas though, it just isn't public. The UDC has set up their website such that archive.org doesn't archive it.

This doesn't mean neo-Confederacy is dead or will be dead. I don't think it will be what it was in the 1980s and 1990s. It will likely be picked up as a narrative in a larger reactionary narrative of national or world history. It might be a field of study for reactionaries reading reactionary books.

I think there still remains work to be done about neo-Confederacy. There is the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy and their enablers. There is still the issue of the complicity of the field of Southern studies with neo-Confederacy which the field refuses to acknowledge much less address.

Of course like a herpes infection, neo-Confederacy might flare up again under stressful circumstances.

However, even then I think that it will be that elements of neo-Confederate thinking will be used by national reactionary movements to advance a national reactionary narrative rather than push regional agendas.

The publication of the American Ideas Institute is American Conservative though they have had neo-Confederate contributors.