Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that cultural friction between the North and South persists to this day. After all, we fought an incredibly brutal, ugly Civil War. The battlelines that were drawn then continued to divide us through the Reconstruction period and well into the middle of the 20th century, as federal troops were once again deployed to enforce the civil rights acts.

According to Chuck Thompson, a veteran travel writer who toured the American South, a degree of mutual enmity between Northerners and Southerners continues to be a source of cultural tension and political gridlock. We remain divided even as we have grown to become the world's superpower. In his new book, Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession, Thompson argues that it may be time for a divorce – to shake hands and go our separate ways.

Thompson appeared on last week's AlterNet Radio Hour to discuss his book. A lightly edited transcript of our discussion is below (you can listen to the whole show here).

Joshua Holland: Chuck, you seem to be channeling the frustration of a lot of Northern liberals. I may have even said myself that we should have let the Confederacy walk in 1860. But I haven’t heard a lot of people calling to break up the Union today. You’re known as a comedic travel writer. So my first question is to what degree are you being tongue-in-cheek here? To what degree are you being serious?

Chuck Thompson: I am being serious. I understand that the meta arguments here that call for secession can be received as somewhat absurd in some corners. I acknowledge that it is probably a remote possibility. Within the framework of that argument I think there is a lot of room to highlight a lot of these problems and a lot of these frustrations that you refer to. One of the goals of this book really was to more or less articulate — to put some facts, figures and research behind — a lot of this frustration of Northern and Southern liberals, of which there are many. I encountered many Southern liberals while conducting my research.

There’s this seething frustration people have. There’s this kneejerk reaction to blame the South. The sort of Northern media strafing of the South for a lot of the nation’s ills is a longstanding tradition. What I wanted to do was to get away from the traditional stereotypes of the dim-witted, mouth-breathing, Southern racist redneck and really look at what’s going on today. Find out why people are still having these issues with the South, and put some hard research and some facts and figures behind this general unease with the influence that the South has on the rest of the country.

JH: So we know we have an overtly religious political culture down South, and a culture today that is pretty hostile toward organized labor. What is it in your travels or in your research that prompted you to call for Southern secession?

CT: I get tired of everybody bitching about the problem. It’s like what Mark Twain said about the weather. Everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything about it. People have been having this problem with the South for my entire lifetime, and as my research pointed out to me, since even before there was a United States of America. Even in the Continental Congress, before the Declaration of Independence was signed, there were a lot of Southerners from South Carolina – particularly a family called the Rutledge family – sort of running the show back then and didn’t want any part of the United States. So a lot of the problems that have arisen between North and South have been around for a long time.

So, as I’ve said, I’ve spent a lot of my life hearing from everybody from Seattle to Savannah. Almost every American, at one time or another, has said that it’s too bad the country didn’t just split when we had the chance. We didn’t let the South go when we had the chance. We would have avoided a lot of problems. We – meaning this group in the north as we might identify ourselves – could take the country we want into a direction that we think is befitting of America without this push and pull that comes from the Southern states. At the same time the South could do the same thing.

What really led to this call for secession was understanding that a lot of people from the South are just as sick and tired of people like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid having an impact on their country as I am sick of people like Newt Gingrich and Jeff Sessions, Eric Cantor, and Haley Barbour having an impact on my country.

So why shouldn’t each of these societies that are really very different from each other in the way they approach the fundamental building blocks of society – education, religion, commerce, politics ... both sides of the country really approach their problems in the way they want to put their societies together in very diametrically opposed ways. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to live in a pseudo-theocracy if they want to? If the majority of the people in a very large part of the country wants to have the Ten Commandments emblazoned in front of their legislative houses, why shouldn’t they be allowed to do so?

My call here for secession isn’t really a punitive thing towards the South, though I admit to a lot of these Northern frustrations. It’s an effort to identify these differences; to acknowledge that they’re very striking and very strong, and to say each one of these sides might be better of without the other.

JH: So we could have a divorce without an excessive amount of acrimony.

CT: I would hope so. Why not?

JH: How are you defining the South? Are we losing the Research Triangle in North Carolina? Are we losing Texas in this deal? And is there any chance we could give them some of the duller states. We’re not using South Dakota, are we?

CT: There are some noncontiguous pockets of what would be left of the North that I think would be culturally more comfortable in the South. It’s the first question I started off with in doing the research. It’s a lot trickier than we might imagine. As for the Research Triangle in North Carolina? Yes, we’re going to lose it. Texas is really interesting to me. The best line I heard about Texas during the research was from a student at the University of Georgia who said the Texas state flag is a perfect representation of Texas, in that it looks just like the American flag without all the other states.

Even though Texas was part of the original Confederacy, it’s always been an all-around pain in the neck to categorize. They’ve never really been much of a team player, let’s face it. In my breakdown of the South I did not include Texas as a Southern state. I completely acknowledge there’s a lot of room for argument there, and that’s probably the easiest point in my book to argue against. I could argue both sides of it myself. In the end I decided that Texas would stay with the North in large part for economic reason. Texas is really one of the economic anchors of this country.

JH: So it wasn’t just for the barbecue?

CT: Barbecue, cheerleaders and Dr. Pepper.

JH: What about the people who live in those states? It’s easy to say they vote for the crappy government they deserve, but consider that in Utah – the reddest state in the country – 30 percent of the population votes Democratic. I’m not saying that voting Democratic is a perfect proxy for one’s ideology, but there’s a good chunk of people down there who we would be consigning to basically English-speaking Mexico. In Alabama, it’s 40 percent. Do you just say, "Here you go, you have to live in a third-world country with crappy education systems, no health care, and a government of snake handlers?"

CT: [Laughing] You’re tougher on the South than I am! Let me give you two answers to that. One is that in my imaginary secession legislative framework, I’m building in a period of 10-20 years where there’s free and open citizenship for anybody who feels caught on the wrong side of the divide. A tofu-scarfing liberal in Mississippi would be free to come on back over to the North, as well as maybe some survivalist NRA fanatic in the hills of Washington state would be legally entitled to take up residency in the new Confederate homeland. So I’ve built something into the imaginary structure for that.

The larger point goes back to what I said about even if you consider the argument for secession absurd, it really does give us a lot of room to address other issues. One of those that you allude to in your question is one of Southerners who are not the mouth-breathing, white-supremacist, gun-toting rednecks. That is the stereotype, but the fact of the matter is, that’s a minority in the South.

JH: Fifty-seven percent of African Americans live in the American South.

CT: That’s right. That’s exactly right. One of the big mistakes that people who make these sort of polemics and screeds against the South is that they assume “Southerner” equals conservative white male. Now if you want to be really mean you include “racist” with Southern white male, that’s the stereotype.

But let’s even say that it’s conservative, evangelical Southerners. The fact of the matter is that’s not what the whole South is. There are a lot of African Americans in the South. There are increasingly a lot of Hispanics in the South. There are a lot of liberals in the South. There are atheists in the South. One of the things I really try to do with this book was not solely traffic in those easy stereotypes that I think a lot of people trap themselves with. That’s not to say I didn’t find a lot of those Southern, evangelical, white conservatives. I did and they’re in the book, but I also made a huge effort not to define the South solely on the classic Northern stereotypes.

JH: Ultimately, while I share your befuddlement with Southern politics, I have to say that I’ve traveled extensively in the South. I lived in Arkansas briefly. I love the South, and I’ve met good, progressive people everywhere I’ve gone.

CT: What did you love about it?

JH: I love the culture of the South. I love the people of the South. I really had some great experiences dealing with Southerners. Even those Southerners I couldn’t necessarily discuss politics with.

I guess a related question is this: We have a really screwy political system with lots of deeply entrenched problems. Do you see anything that could be gained by the South’s secession that couldn’t be achieved by, say, getting money out of our political system? Or bringing back the fairness doctrine? Maybe reforming the filibuster in the Senate? Do you know what I’m saying? Those things aren’t likely to happen in today’s environment, but the South splitting away isn’t too likely either.

CT: That’s right, but a lot of these problems have been deeply entrenched in American society long before this dysfunction befell our political system. Politics is really only one way in which the South is quite a bit different it approaches its society. I think religion is the really big factor here, and I think that’s what’s really not going to change in the South. Yes, there are evangelicals and religious lunatics in all 50 states in the country. Only in the South, though, do they represent a voting quorum. Only in the South can you appeal to voters in very overtly religious terms and expect success on a consistent basis. Again, that’s not to deny that this exists in the rest of the country. It does, but in the South is where its power base is.

I think that is the piece of the puzzle here that informs the politics of the South, in the same way that evangelical Christianity is the least tolerant of any sort of diversity or diversity of opinion. It’s Bible literalism. Everything is true and you adhere to everything; it’s black and white. When that is the foundation of the majority of the people in your society, when that becomes your whole social framework, then that’s the politics that grows out of that society. So we get that same sort of blinkered view of humanity of politicians in the South who come up to the North – we get this absolute, no compromise stance between these hardcore conservatives and other politicians.

When there were Republicans and Democrats fighting it out in the '80s during the Reagan years, there was the famed Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan give-and-take. This is how politics works; it’s the art of compromise. The ruling power says to the opposition, "We won the election, so we’re going to get these big things. Don’t give us too much trouble and we’ll work with you. We realize you have a constituency. Let us get our big things through without a lot of hassle, and we’ll make sure you’re taken care of on some level." That’s sort of how it has worked for the most part. In the South, it’s different, because there is no such thing as compromise. If it’s God’s law that is driving you — if God says gay marriage is an abomination, if God says abortion is an abomination — then you simply can’t compromise. That’s not in your DNA if you really believe that. That’s where I think a lot of the dysfunction of our political process comes into play.

And I don’t think that’s going to change, regardless of whether you pull the money out of it or not. This ties into how the South deals with education. Southern states don’t typically fund their public schools the way other states do – they're typically at a much lower level. There’s less commitment to the ideal of public education in the Southern states than there is in the rest of the country. That’s why we see over and over when the statistics come out, the South has the lowest SAT scores, lowest graduation rates, the most illiteracy. Whatever measures you want to put on academic performance, it’s those core Southern states that are always leading the bottom of the back. In the bottom 10, eight or nine of them are always going to be Southern states.

I wanted to look into this. Why is that? Is it just that Southerners are stupider than the rest of us? Clearly that’s not the case. It’s the same gene pool. The more you look at it the more you realize there’s just a lower commitment to public education in the South than there is in the rest of the country. That’s been going on for hundreds of years. It’s not changing.

I was in Arkansas. I spent a week in Little Rock while they were searching for a new superintendent of schools last year. The dysfunction that I saw just in attending these public meetings where they were talking about what they needed was astonishing.

JH: We see a lot of liberal animosity towards the South. Were you at all concerned in writing this book about whether you would reinforce the stereotype of the coastal, elite liberals looking down their noses at the middle and the South? Was this a concern?

CT: Sure, people are going to jump to that conclusion. As you know -- and as I found out in writing web articles and books -- most of the really heated criticism you get from people are always from people who don’t even bother to read your article or your book in the first place. That’s going to happen. There’s nothing I can do about it. I really did make an effort not to be strident – though I’m certainly judgmental – and to find good things in the South, which there are. You deal with Southerners on an individual basis and they’re great. They’re friendly, hospitable, gregarious, and they like to party. They like to drink, to give you their food, they like to play music. It’s a lot of fun.

I didn’t try to be this super-strident jerk who was just sitting there bashing. I really am trying to put some numbers and some facts to this argument. These are two very different societies that have been economic and social frenemies from the day they were founded. The dysfunction has got to stop at some point.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He's the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Mitt Romney knows how to do a cost-benefit analysis, and he's determined that it's better to be dogged by reporters for failing to release his tax returns for the duration of the 2012 campaign than it is to make the documents public. Never mind that a majority of Americans – and a third of Republicans – think he should come clean.

It's beyond obvious that whatever's in those returns must be enough to do serious damage to Romney, or even sink his candidacy completely.

What might it be, exactly? In the vacuum Romney has created by not disclosing, any number of theories have been floated as to what his returns could reveal. For your convenience, we've collected 10 theories that are making the rounds in the political press.

1. Mormon Tithes

Mormons are expected to fork over 10 percent of their income to the Church of Latter Day Saints. And that fact leads us to two theories.

First, Rachel Zoll of the Associated Press speculated that Romney doesn't want to remind evangelical Christians that he belongs to what many consider a non-Christian “cult.” “The Republican candidate's commitment to the church is a double-edged sword in the contest for the presidential nomination,” she wrote. “Many GOP voters are Christians who do not consider Mormons to be part of historic Christianity. Romney supporters worry that details of his church donations contained in the tax returns could fuel opposition to him based on his religion.”

But it may be the other way around – perhaps he doesn't want to piss off Mormons. After all, the right-wing Daily Caller reported that in 2010 and 2011, the two years for which Romney released partial returns, it looks like the former Mormon bishop under-tithed the church, paying 7 percent of his income one year and 9.7 percent over the two-year period. As the  Caller noted, “Romney recently told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, 'I made a commitment to my church a long, long time ago that I would give 10 percent of my income to the church, and I’ve followed through on that commitment. So, if I had given less than 10 percent, then I think people would have to look at me and say, ‘Hey, what’s wrong with you fella — don’t you follow through on your promises?’”

Of course, if he were sheltering additional income in offshore accounts, then the degree to which the  Caller says he shortchanged the Mormons might be even greater.

2. Things That Might Infuriate the Base

Mitt Romney, who just four years ago was dubbed the “conservative alternative” to John McCain is probably, as he claims, “severely conservative.” But when he wanted to become governor of Massachusetts, he played to that state's politics, swearing to protect a woman's right to choose, saying that climate change isn't a socialist plot and generally being reasonable. He passed the precursor to Obamacare, which he now condemns as a sign of looming tyranny.

Rick Newman at US News and World Report wonders whether Romney really stopped supporting those causes when he claims to have converted himself into a far-right Republican. Could he have a bunch of itemized deductions to, say, Planned Parenthood listed on those returns? We'd be wrong not to speculate.

3. Harry Reid, Lazy Blogger

That's how Wonkette characterized Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's unsourced, secondhand rumor that Mitt Romney paid no taxes at all over a 10-year period. (This is very unlikely, due to the Alternative Minimum Tax.)

But many, many people have speculated that the reason Mitt doesn't want to reveal his tax returns is that they will show that he paid a significantly lower rate than his campaign has claimed in the years prior to 2010.

4. It's the IRAs

Mitt Romney has an Individual Retirement Account, just like you probably do! But unlike you, Mitt has somewhere between $20 million and $101 million in his account.

We know that the maximum amount one can contribute to an IRA account is $17,000 per year (employers can match that with up to $30,000). So that would be a pretty impressive performance – what an investor!

Or what a cheat. Michael Graetz, a professor of tax law at Columbia University and a former official in the senior Bush's Treasury Department, suggested that to get such a fat IRA, “we have to presume that Mr. Romney valued the assets he put in his retirement account at far less than he would have sold them for.”

He continues:

The I.R.A. also allows Mr. Romney to diversify his large holdings tax-free, avoiding the 15 percent tax on capital gains that would otherwise apply. His financial disclosure further reveals that his I.R.A. freed him from paying currently the 35 percent income tax on hundreds of thousands of dollars of interest income each year.

5. The Mini-Mitts

Graetz has a second theory about what Mitt might be hiding, and it also has to do with dramatically under-valuing his assets in order to screw over Uncle Sam.

It has to do with a trust he set up for his five sons in 1995. Graetz explains that until this year, there was a $1 million life-time exemption on such gifts, and after that they should have been taxed at between 29-44 percent. So Mitt would have been on the hook for between $29 and $44 million in gift taxes.

“Based on his aggressive tax planning,” writes Graetz, “my bet is that — if Mr. Romney filed a gift tax return for these transfers at all — he put a low or even zero value on the gifts, certainly a small fraction of the price at which he would have sold the transferred assets to an unrelated party.”

Wouldn't he get busted with such a brazen strategy to avoid paying taxes? After all, that's some pretty serious tax fraud. Well, catching Mitt in this kind of scheme might be harder than one would think. Graetz explains that “every good tax professional knows that gift tax returns are rarely audited, except after the transferer’s death. And normally the I.R.S. cannot challenge such a return after three years from its filing.”

6. Is It All About 2009?

BusinessWeek's Joshua Green thinks Romney may not want to reveal his taxes for one year in particular – 2009. That's because Romney probably took some significant losses when the economy crashed in 2008. Green explains:

It’s possible he suffered a large enough capital loss that, carried forward and coupled with his various offshore tax havens, he wound up paying no U.S. federal taxes at all in 2009. If true, this would be politically deadly for him...

The “zero tax in 2009” theory—again, this is sheer speculation—gains further sustenance when you consider it’s the only year for which nobody knows anything about Romney’s taxes. He’s revealed what’s in his 2010 and 2011 returns, and he reportedly submitted 20-some years’ worth of returns to the McCain campaign when he was being vetted for vice president in 2008. Steve Schmidt, McCain’s chief strategist in that campaign, said on MSNBC,,, that while he didn’t examine Romney’s returns himself, nothing that McCain’s vetters found in them disqualified Romney from consideration.

7. CEO, President and Chairman of Bain

You probably know that Mitt claims he retired – or perhaps retired “retroactively” – from Bain Capital in 1999. You probably also know that almost three years later, as the Huffington Post reported, “Romney was listed as the CEO, chairman and president of the company... in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission; took a six-figure salary; signed corporate documents related to major and minor deals and attended board meetings for at least two Bain-affiliated companies.”

It's possible that releasing his returns could clarify exactly what involvement he had with Bain after 1999. And that might reveal that Romney was, contrary to his claims, involved in Bain's decision to invest in Stericycle, a medical waste company that disposed of aborted fetuses. Ben LaBolt, an Obama campaign spokesman, told Fox News: "If he released more documents, like further tax returns, we would know the extent of his involvement at Bain during this period.”

8. Is Mitt a Felon?

Relatedly, in 2011, Mitt Romney signed a financial disclosure form and sent it to the Federal Election Commission. In it, he stated emphatically that he had no active role in the company after February 1999. That claim appears to be contradicted by a number of other documents.

It's a felony to lie on an FEC financial disclosure form. Some forms of tax evasion are also felonies. Mitt's tax returns might offer proof that he committed a crime.

9. Are There Other Non-Disclosures?

There's lying on a disclosure form, and then there's not filing required forms. The LA Times reports that “at least 23 funds and partnerships listed in [Mitt's] 2010 tax returns did not show up or were not listed in the same fashion on Romney’s most recent financial disclosure, including 11 based in low-tax foreign countries such as Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg.”

More tax returns might reveal other investments that Romney has failed to disclose, as he is required to do by law.

10. There's Nothing – It's Just His Sense of Entitlement

Esquire's James Wolcott doesn't think there's any there there. Sure, Romney's tax returns would provide an object lesson in how the ultra-rich avoid paying their fair share of taxes, but everyone already knows that those at the top of the pile game the system. For Wolcott, the issue comes down to Romney refusing to bow to the little people on principle.

It is helpful always to remind yourself that, in the mind of Willard Romney, there are only two kinds of people — himself and his family, and the Help. Throughout his career, and especially throughout his brief political career, Romney has treated the Help with a kind of lordly disdain...

The Help has no right to go pawing through the family books, giggling at the obvious loopholes and tax dodges, running amok through all the tax shelters, and probably getting their chocolate-y fingerprints all over the pages of the Romney family ledger. And, certainly, those members of the Help in the employ of the president of the United States, who is also part of the Help, have no right to use the nearly comically ostentatious wealth of the Romney as some sort of scrimey political weapon. He does not have to answer to the Help. I mean, jeepers, he's running for office.

This isn't stubbornness. That's often an acquired trait. What this is, fundamentally, is contempt. Contempt for the process, and contempt for the people who make their living in that process, and contempt for the people whose lives depend on that process. There are rules for the Help with which Willard Romney never has had to abide, and he has no intention of starting now. My dear young fellow, this simply is not done.

The Most Likely Explanation

Given Romney's refusal to release his returns, this kind of speculation is entirely predictable. But the most likely reason Romney doesn't want to release his returns is that they'll cast a bright light on the aggressive tax avoidance strategies the super-rich use every day – strategies David Cay Johnston outlined so well in his excellent book, Perfectly Legal. The Romney campaign keeps assuring us that he paid all taxes required by law, and that very well might be the problem.

A Vanity Fair investigation into the trickle of tax documents that Romney has disclosed – under intense pressure – found that they “provided a lavish smorgasbord for Romney’s critics. Particularly jarring were the Romneys’ many offshore accounts.”

To give but one example, there is a Bermuda-based entity called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd., which has been described in securities filings as “a Bermuda corporation wholly owned by W. Mitt Romney.” It could be that Sankaty is an old vehicle with little importance, but Romney appears to have treated it rather carefully. He set it up in 1997, then transferred it to his wife’s newly created blind trust on January 1, 2003, the day before he was inaugurated as Massachusetts’s governor. The director and president of this entity is R. Bradford Malt, the trustee of the blind trust and Romney’s personal lawyer. Romney failed to list this entity on several financial disclosures, even though such a closely held entity would not qualify as an “excepted investment fund” that would not need to be on his disclosure forms. He finally included it on his 2010 tax return. Even after examining that return, we have no idea what is in this company, but it could be valuable, meaning that it is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates. While the Romneys’ spokespeople insist that the couple has paid all the taxes required by law, investments in tax havens such as Bermuda raise many questions, because they are in “jurisdictions where there is virtually no tax and virtually no compliance,” as one Miami-based offshore lawyer put it.

While James Wolcott thinks that it's “hardly a secret anymore” that “our tax code — and, indeed, our entire economic system — has been gamed to benefit the folks in Romney's economic stratum,” most people probably don't have a firm grasp on precisely how the vaunted “job creators” avoid paying their fair share, and the release of Romney's returns would offer a teachable moment.

As real estate billionaire Leona Helmsley once said, “Only the little people pay taxes.” That's not the message Mitt Romney wants to convey during a campaign that has a lot to do with tax cuts for the wealthiest.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He's the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.