The New Confederacy

The New Confederacy is a movement to resurrect the Confederate States of America under a new and different constitution than the 1861 CSA Constitution. The chief proponent of this movement is Liz Michael, a political activist of Tuscarora and Meherrin heritage, who was twice an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, and hosted a politically oriented cable access television program in Los Angeles named Lady Liberty from 1996 to 2000.

Although a movement in flux, the aim of the movement is to return much of the United States and Western Canada to a decentralized form of federal, or "confederate", government, where the states and provinces are more dominant, and "states' rights" are paramount. The process by which this happens is described as a "peaceful secession" of states and smaller units.

The new constitution has several characteristics. Although using the 1861 constitution as a base, the new constitution, called the New Confederate Constitution, outlines a process for orderly secession, and features characteristics such as the forbidding of slavery, the protection of voting rights, the right of recall of federal judges, as well as requirement that all elections under the Confederacy are non-partisan, conducted with paper ballots, and require all elected officeholders win a majority of the vote. The authors, of which Michael is one, cite specifically the 2000 Republic Of Texas Constitution and the California Constitution as influences.

The New Confederacy movement specifically rejects the idea of a "Southern Nation", and believes the original Confederate States of America represented a rebellion against a strong central government based in Washington, DC., not just a rebellion of slave sympathizers, and points out that the original Confederacy had many Northern sympathizers. The New Confederacy movement specifically rejects race based notions of privilege and citizenship found in some parts of the Neo-Confederate movement. The inclusion of Canadian provinces in the proposal represent a belief that Canada is merely the unliberated part of English speaking North America, and that many founders of the United States envisioned eventually adopting Canadian provinces into the country.

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