[Tau Food]

Of course, these (mostly online) petitions have no formal legal bearing because our constitution does not identify a process for secession, and the very act was deemed illegal as an outcome of our US Civil War.

The first step in the process of a legal secession would be to amend the Constitution to provide for secession procedures. That would be hard.

More fundamentally, the biggest obstacle to secession is the patriotism of the American people. There doesn't exist a state or even a county in which a significant percentage of the population would ever consider turning against the USA.

The only realistic alternative for folks who feel that they are stuck in a country that they hate is to emigrate to somewhere they like better, like the South of Brazil, the home of the Confederados, the only unreconstructed Southerners left in the world.

[Windflier]

The first step in the process of a legal secession would be to amend the Constitution to provide for secession procedures. That would be hard

I've heard people claim that the US Constitution forbids secession by any state, but I've never seen anyone cite the Article, Section, or Amendment which states this.

I'm not even going to ask that you do so. I'm just going to state the self evident truth that any people have the inalienable right to leave a political union they no longer wish to be part of. This is especially true of our (supposedly) sovereign states.

[ought-six]

“There doesn’t exist a state or even a county in which a significant percentage of the population would ever consider turning against the USA.”

What do you mean? Democrats have been doing it for decades.

[RatRipper]

There doesn't exist a state or even a county in which a significant percentage of the population would ever consider turning against the USA.

. . . yet.