recruit party members and raise operating funds. Reunion 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 flag. 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 a substantial increase in 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 had ever had as a result of its seemingly endless internal squabbles. Cause of the factions The widespread factionalism that derailed the Southern Party's seemingly promising prospects has sometimes been characterized by former supporters as the result of a wide-ranging ideological struggle between "centralizers" versus "decentralizers." This was reflected in the public statements of many of the key Southern Party players after the dissolution of the SNC. Kalas, the principal founder of the SP, was a committed paleoconservative whose interest in Southern heritage and regionalism tended to constitute more a reflection than a foundation of his core beliefs. On the other hand, Lancaster, the author of the Asheville Declaration, was a moderate-conservative Republican in many respects who nonetheless harbored strong regionalist sympathies, a fact subsequently reflected in later writings. Mike Crane, who succeeded Kalas for a brief time, was far more the stereotypical Southern nationalist, a longstanding Southern heritage activist and nationalist with strong libertarian convictions. Many others within the SP rank-and-file mirrored these differences. Still, despite significant differences in political convictions, the major players in the various SP factions nevertheless 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