What the Southern Agrarians overlooked

The free enterprise system is one of the greatest social inventions, with private business operating in competition and largely free of state control. It led to the highest standard of living in human history and the development of amazing technology, but it could not stop itself from hypertrophying into the rapacious border-less capitalism we have today.

The Southern Agrarians in the 1920's and 1930's tried to prevent this from happening, warning of the social alienation and dehumanization of industrialism and urbanism and advocating localism and individualism, but they could not prevent rapacious border-less capitalism from taking over America.

Industrialism during World War Two gave the fatal boost to rapacious border-less capitalism. It has been argued by a few brave people, like Pat Buchanan, that World War II could have been avoided if the Treaty of Versailles had not been so harsh towards Germany. Buchanan believes that if Churchill had accepted Hitler's peace offer of 1940, the severity of the Holocaust would have been greatly reduced.

The Southern Agrarians missed the social alienation and dehumanization caused in the post-war period by the declaration that natural ethnocentrism is evil, which has been at least as alienating and dehumanizing as the growth of rapacious border-less capitalism. Human nature, as empirically explained by sociobiology, remains kin-centered, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, among other conservative things, with group-selection as the primary unit of successful selection, followed by individual selection. The Southern Agrarians missed the idea that an ethnopluralism of ethnostates or regions could be established legally in the United States with our constitutional separation of powers and states, protected by federalism.

The development of ethnostates and an ethnopluralism of ethnostates remains a taboo subject, but it nevertheless needs to be understood and spoken about if we are ever to recover from the social alienation and dehumanization of industrialism and urbanism. Permanent revenge and resentment from WWII is not the behavior of noble people.