Michael Lind says the South has created its own counter-Detroit and Southern politicians are doing the bidding of Japanese, Korean, and German car companies as they argue against federal aid to the US auto industry. He looks to the European Union and sees states collaborating with each other in order to compete against foreign economic rivals including the US, Japan, and China.

In contrast, here in the US our Southern states are collaborating with foreign rivals “to destroy America’s most important industry.” If this keeps up, says Lind, the entire US will be turned into “a low-wage export platform for the outsourced industries of advanced industrial societies in Asia and Europe.”

Lind’s got a proposal to stop it:

The alternative to the Southernization of the U.S. is the Americanization of the South — a process that was not completed by Reconstruction and the New Deal and the Civil Rights era, which can be thought of as the Second Reconstruction. The non-Southern states, through their representatives in Congress and the executive branch, and with the help of enlightened Southerners, need to use the power of the federal government to put a stop to the Southern conservative race-to-the-bottom strategy once and for all. Call it the Third Reconstruction.

His is a three point plan:

1. End the “race to the bottom” in hourly pay by raising the minimum wage gradually but dramatically and in regulation through stricter national worker safety and environmental regulations.
2. End the “race to the bottom” in taxes and public services through federal revenue-sharing. The federal government should pick up the tab for more state and local public service funding, “a popular and effective program abolished by Reagan.”
3. Finally, Lind says, “federal-state collaboration in national economic development must replace individual state economic development systems designed to promote one state at the expense of another.” By scaling up state development entities “each of the state economic development systems can play a constructive rather than destructive role.”

To those who object:

I can hear the objections already: “We agree that the South’s beggar-thy-neighbor and race-to-the-bottom strategies should be thwarted — but the methods that you suggest, a high national minimum wage, greater equalization of state and local public spending by increased federal revenue-sharing, and a national economic development framework built to align the existing state economic development systems are politically too difficult to achieve.” That may be true. But if it is true, then the neo-Confederates and their strategy of turning first the South and then the entire U.S. into a low-wage export platform for the outsourced industries of advanced industrial societies in Asia and Europe will prevail. If a non-Southern majority, controlling the White House and Congress, with the support of at least some moderate Republicans in other regions, along with the support of Southern populists and progressives, is too timid to take on a Southern oligarchy that is willing to wreck the national economy to promote their local economic empires, then the neo-Confederates have already prevailed. The choice is simple — the reconstruction of the South, or the deconstruction of the U.S. economy.

I like the notion of a “Third Reconstruction” and agree completely that Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights era moved the South forward but there’s still a long way to go. For the North it seems easier to point fingers at the South than to actually do something about it.