If we return to the principles of the Constitution, secession is not necessary.
With a country as large as ours, a single all-powerful federal government doesn’t scale. There is no way that a single government entity can be nimble enough to account for the needs of both the people in large metropolitan areas like San Francisco and rural areas in Kansas. They have different needs, different standards, and different expectations, and trying to apply one set of rules to both leads to the divisions that we see now.
The problem is that neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have any interest in shrinking the scope of the federal government; once the power has been allocated, they’re obviously not going to give it back. We can’t assign the blame to one party more than the other, either; the Democrats hypocritically talk about civil liberties while clamping down on video games and speech that they see as “dangerous”, while the Republicans (Nixon, Reagan, Bush) have all expanded federal legislation to enforce subjective moral codes and limit personal freedom and responsibility (War on Drugs, prohibitions on gambling and prostitution). Read some of the conservative opposition to the Lawrence vs. Texas decision (http://www.glapn.org/sodomylaws/lawrence/lawrence.htm); it goes well beyond the correct analysis that it infringes on states rights, and moves into the frightening territory that the state should be in the business of regulating peoples’ sexuality.
The problem we have in America isn’t that we have groups of people with different opinions living in close proximity, but that we try to enforce our personal beliefs on others through federal legislation. Instead, we need to stop — at the federal level — raiding California medical marijuana clinics, censoring speech that is critical of Muslims or any other religious group, and criticizing people who engage in private sexual behavior that we find “icky”. Instead, if we were to apply those standards at the local level and leave the federal government to only worry about the borders and intrastate commerce, I think we would all see fewer calls for the next civil war from both sides.
Of course, I meant to say “interstate commerce”. It looks like KeyesPlease beat me to the punch with a similar thought in post 64, anyway.
The problem is that the federal government has a taste for the “blood” of the citizens now. Simply ignoring it will change nothing, it must either be “put down” or separated from its cattle.
But the nanny-staters (left mostly, but as you point out some right too) do not want to relax their grip on us via the FedGov beast.