Travels of State Sovereignty

From "The New Dixie Manifesto", by Dr Michael Hill and Dr Thomas Fleming, The Washington Post, Sunday, 29 October 1995

Here in the United States, a new group of Southerners is calling for nothing more revolutionary than home rule for the states established by the U.S. Constitution. …A concern for states' rights, local self-government and regional identity used to be taken for granted everywhere in America. But the United States is no longer, as it once was, a federal union of diverse states and regions. National uniformity is being imposed by the political class that runs Washington, the economic class that owns Wall Street and the cultural class in charge of Hollywood and the Ivy League.

The easiest way to secure home rule for Southern states is to restore the federal constitution. What had been a genuinely federal union has been turned into a multicultural, continental empire, ruled from Washington by federal agencies and under the thumb of the federal judiciary. And all this is done regardless of the party or ideology that controls the White House. If the liberal Democrats have saddled us with affirmative action, conservative Republicans are busily "federalizing" crimes that used to be within the purview of states and local communities.

We believe it is time for the people of the Southern states to take control of their own governments, their own institutions, their own culture, their own communities and their own lives. On the national political level, this will mean sending men and women to Congress who will insist upon a strict construction of the Constitution and a restoration of the 10th Amendment that explicitly reserves all unenumerated powers to the states and to the people.

On the state level, self-government should be restored to the towns and communities that make up the states. This means an end, not only to federal interference, but to state interference in local government and local schools. Under federal and state mandates, American schools have become the joke of the civilised world, and in the guise of helping black children, we have destroyed educational opportunities for children of all races. It is time to give the schools back to the parents.