1) So did South Africa. That didn't 1) impair it from becoming a totalitarian dictatorship or 2) having that dictatorship implode. South Africa was also dominated by an English-speaking elite committed to a racist view of politics, with no scruples as to how to maintain it.
I would disagree with your characterisation of South Africa as a totatlitarian dictatorship in the strongest terms, even during the 1980's at the height of the
Rooi gevaar free and fair elections were held and rule of law upheld (even if the law was immoral it was upheld). See for example the
Muldergate Scandal. Government ministers broke the law, government ministers got caught and punished, even the head of the state.
On the topic of a CSA even if the electorate is severely limited and thus pursues policies that serves the interests of the planters rather than the wider nation it does means that it is less likely to suffer the sort of incompetent, kleptocratic leadership that so bedevilled Latin America. That doesn't mean it's going to equal the USA but it does means it's going to do better than Honduras.
2) And if the rich neighbor has territory the poor neighbor thinks is rightfully its own and it thinks the fluke of the 1860s must repeat itself every single time, why is it going to accept that rich neighbor controlling territory it sees as rightfully its own to control? The CSA will see the USA as a threat regardless of whether or not the USA is or intends to be, and they have no choice but to sustain a large army to meet that threat and the real and (mostly) imagined prospects of slave revolts (imagined primarily due to how brutal the CS surveillance system would be).
No argument but sustaining such a force might in some respects be helpful in the long term by building up the capacity of the CS government and maybe helping get around the ban on internal improvements (similar to Eisenhower and the Interstate Network).
3) On the contrary, the CSA has limited democracy, self-imposed ideological shackles that will mean common-sense economics will be identified with treason to the state as well as being politically impossible to actually accomplish and most crucially its political system is built on a full third of its population being ground underfoot as an illiterate slave class by the other 2/3 in a political system where criticism of slavery had already become illegal and the least hint of dissension was already seeing repression when the CSA had the ability to freeload on the North and the North being strongarmed into enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law. The CSA will inherit *that* tradition and *that* tradition is the real menace to its democratic survival, and *that* tradition is the one that just so happens to predate the establishment of an existing CSA with a siege mentality to rival that of the apartheid regime and Israel, without a means to ghettoize blacks who are too essential in terms of labor for the very regime's survival.
You are making two separate arguments here imho, one is that slavery is a dumb economic system and breeds poverty and two that maintaining it corrupts and weakens the rest of the CSA, including it's democracy.
It doesn't take a genius to work out that even if slavery is an economic boon in a cash crop centred economy that era is passing and the CSA risks being left behind, however once again I am not making a comparison with the vastly superior US system, but rather the serfdom (hacienda system and equivalents) which prevailed in much of Latin America during this period. Here I personally think that considering some of the CSA's other advantages I've mentioned and the fact that serfdom is imho a less efficient system than chattel slavery I think the CSA will out perform the Latin American average, though it will be far behind the USA. No matter how immoral we regard the internal slave trade by moving labour from where it was no longer required (the Upper South) to where it was in demand (the Cotton Belt) slavery mimicked some of the advantages of a truly free labour market, unlike serfdom which keeps people where they are, even if they could be better used elsewhere.
As for the effect of slavery on CS democracy I have to disagree with you, the sense of siege mentality and the undemocratic undertaken by the CSA during it's brief existence suggests it's democracy would be flawed, however I continued to believe that it had sufficient history of democracy and that it was sufficiently embedded into custom and practice the it would be unlike to descend into Caudilloism but rather maintain at least some form of democracy, even if it is an oligarchic authoritarian democracy. That put's it above the general run of Latin American countries.
Once again I am not suggesting the CSA will be comparable to the USA, or that it will be prosperous and (properly) democratic; just that it won't be an economic basket case with a tinpot dictatorship.
