Southern Party
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The Southern Party (SP) is a right-of-center, minor American political party organized in 1999 by members of the League of the South (LoS), an organization advocating greater regional sovereignty for the Southern states of the American federal union.
A proposal to explore the feasibility of launching a minor political party representing the regional interests of the Southern states and several border states was first advanced in December of 1998 by Jim Langcuster, George Kalas and Michael Hill at a League of the South conference held in Monroe, Louisiana. The League authorized the formation of a Southern Party Exploratory Committee, (SPEC), which was soon formally organized at a meeting in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in January of 1999. During this meeting George Kalas was elected to chair the committee. The SPEC operated until May of 1999 when internal ideological, personal and strategy disagreements led to the fracture of the SPEC into two competing bodies. One faction, continuing to operate under the SPEC moniker, remained loosely affiliated with the League. The other faction, led by George Kalas, Jerry Baxley, Jim Langcuster and Thomas Reed, among others, formed the Southern National Committee (SNC) whose purpose was to launch the SP as soon as possible. Because of the hostility exhibited by the League of the South's board of directors towards SNC, the officers of the SNC faction voted to formally divorce itself from the League in May of 1999.
The two factions subsequently engaged in a fierce competition to gain the allegiance of Southern political activists throughout the Summer of 1999. Although the SPEC faction continued to enjoy the official support of the League of the South, it gained little traction and failed to effectively organize a political infrastructure for the SP. The SNC faction ultimately emerged as the more widely accepted organizing body with its ascendancy largely assured as a result of its successful launch of the Southern Party at an event it sponsored in Flat Rock, North Carolina (near Asheville), on August 7, 1999.
The official launch was attended by approximately 200 party supporters and a surprisingly large entourage of reporters. The highlight of the event was the presentation of flags of the Southern States and the reading and signing of "The Asheville Declaration" which articulated the SP's founding philosophy. The party launch received intense and largely positive local, regional, national and international media coverage which led to a flood of inquiries from interested political activists across the South and from around the world. In later years, as interest in Southern nationalist movement waned for want of progress, the SP party launch came to be viewed by many Southern nationalists as the high-water mark of their movement. Even some of the party's harshest critics acknowledged at the time that the SNC had achieved a phenomenal breakthrough by garnering so much positive media attention which led to a greater public awareness of the existence the nascent Southern nationalist movement.
Although the party advocated peaceful secession of the Southern States from the American union and the restoration of an independent Southern nation, the organizers of the SP did not believe that secession was actually an achievable short-term goal. Organizers were actually working to achieve devolution of political power from the federal government back down to the State governments with the idea of restoring the division of powers between the federal and state governments to its pre-1865 status.
Although party organizers did believe that secession remained a constitutional right of the states, the party's advocacy of secession was mainly a publicity stunt designed to gain media attention and it was also a tactical move intended to differentiate the SP from other minor parties in the South. The SP's founders felt confident that their controversial advocacy of peaceful secession via the ballot box would give the party a louder voice by drawing in far more media attention than they otherwise would have received.
Party organizers were also inspired to adopt the secessionist stance by the example of Quebec's secessionist Parti Quebecois (PQ), which had won vast regional autonomy for Quebec from Canada's central government as a result of two secession referendums it pushed forward during the 1980's and 90's. Southern Party leaders hope to emulate the PQ's success by creating a regional political party that was openly secessionist. In this way, party leaders hoped to build a political movement in the South strong enough to force the federal government to devolve power back to the states. To achieve this goal, the SP would need to become genuinely competitive for public offices. While the SP did not expect to elect large numbers of its candidates to public offices, it was felt that if the party began to garner substantial support it would force the Republicans and the Democrats to advance the SP's agenda by co-opting the most popular issues espoused by the SP's platform, thus securing the party's ideological goals.
Despite its initial success at Flat Rock, NC, the SP soon sqaundered the momemtum created by the media blitz when unexpected infighting broke out between the SNC leadership in October of 1999. The dispute was sparked by disagreement over a proposed increase in SNC dues for state party organizations. This dispute over a mundane administrative matter soon escalated out of control and culminated in an acrimonious split of the SNC with one faction led by party chairman George Kalas and the other by party Vice-Chairman Jerry Baxley. A vicious power struggle ensued for control of the party's website, treasury and state-party organizational affiliations. In December of 1999 SNC chairman George Kalas sought to facilitate an end to the bickering by voluntarily resigning his post. The SNC reluctantly accepted the resignation but voted to recognize Kalas as "Chairman Emeritus" of the Southern Party in recognition of his past services. The SNC then elected Mike Crane of Georgia as interim SNC chairman whose immediate goal would be to heal the SP split and reunite the two warring party factions. However, the conflict continued on into the early months of 2000 causing considerable discouragement amongst party supporters and a rapid outflow of dues-paying members from the state party organizations.
Realizing that the feud between SP factions had negatively impacted the party's viability, the Baxley faction finally agreed to the truce proposed by Mr. Crane and the two factions began negotiations to reunite the SP. These negotiations were successfully concluded by March of 2000 and were publicly announced with new elections scheduled to select a fresh slate of officers to lead the Southern National Committee. However, the subsequent election resulted in the surprise selection of Jerry Baxley by a narrow margin as the new national SNC chairman. Substantial voting irregularities instigated by the Baxley faction during the elections produced massive disaffection in party ranks. This dissatisfaction was further exacerbated by Baxley's abrasive, erratic and unpopular leadership style. The party reunion was short-lived and Baxley soon found himself presiding over a rapidly shrinking party organization as other SNC members resigned and state party organizations began disaffiliating from the SNC as their recognized national party organ. The steady departure of established state party organizations ultimately led to the final dissolution of the SNC in 2002.
In the aftermath of the SNC's collapse one faction formed the Federation of States and various state-based Southern Independence Parties (SIP's). Other state SP's simply disaffiliated from the SNC and became wholly independent - refusing to recognize any national/regional authority. Two such parties were the SP of Georgia and the SP of North Carolina. Most of the other remaining state SP's were, in reality, only "paper parties" led by a few officers and lacking substantial numbers of dues-paying members. These parties soon proved unviable and ultimately folded due to their inability to recruit party members and raise operating funds.
In the Spring of 2003 the League of the South attempted to re-establish its influence in the Southern Party by volunteering to serve as an honest broker to coordinate the reunion of all SP supporters (excluding the now-discredited Baxley faction) under one aegis. The League invited all anti-Baxley factions of the SP to a meeting in North Carolina for the purpose of realigning all of the invited state parties into a loose confederation with no centralized governing body. This approach was publicly endorsed by all of the original founders of the Southern Party with the exception of the Baxley faction, which was not invited to the meeting. Although the North Carolina meeting marked the end of the SP's internal wars, it did not result in much of a revival of public interest in the SP. By 2003 the Southern Party had lost credibility with many of its erstwhile supporters and had squandered what little political capital it ever had as a result of its seemingly endless internal squabbles.
The ubiquitous factionalism that derailed the Southern Party's promising beginning has sometimes been characterized by former supporters as the result of a wide-ranging idealogical struggle between advocates of "centralism" vs. advocates of "decentralism." In reality, however, all of the major players in the various SP factions professed a strong allegiance to the Southern tradition of decentralized government and localized control. The party infighting was actually driven more by personal conflicts between competing party leaders than by genuinely substantive disagreements over party ideology. As one prominent supporter once humorously described the problem: "Organizing Southerners is harder than herding cats!" This factionalist trait was not lost on outside observers, more than one of which noted the irony of the fact that a party advocating secession found itself undone by multiple secessions within its own ranks.
As of November 2006 there is little evidence of any regionally coordinated political effort by the Southern Party, which can largely be attributed to the lack of party member support for the empowerment of any "national" coordinating body, but some activity continues at the state level. The most active remnant of the original Southern Party is the Southern Party of Georgia which has consistently been the strongest and most active state party organization. The SP of Georgia has fielded multiple candidates for local and state offices in the 2002, 2004 and 2006 elections and was a high profile participant in the statewide political fights over the redesign of the Georgia state flag. North Carolina also has an active Southern Party which has been continuously active since 1999. Both the SP of Georgia and the SP of North Carolina are actively recruiting candidates for the 2008 elections and continue to assist Southern nationalists in others states who have expressed interest in expanding the Southern Party's reach in the region.
