all this to say, as one of the so-called coastal elites, the textbook answer as to what is the South can be very myopic.
is it south of DC? is it the slaveocracy states? or the Confederacy?
The South is very much a geographic, historical, political and sociological metaphor.
but what i have learned during the current opoid AND COVID19 epidemics, The South is very much at odds and is even the enemy of Appalachia.
and those 1860s Marx essays confirm that.