There is always an either/or about sovereignty, and indeed, about government itself. Someone always has the final say. Nullification changes who has that say -- it doesn't resolve or do away with the basic problem.
Premodern monarchies of the sort that Hoppe celebrates -- and it has to be recognized that many despotisms didn't fit this pattern -- were distinguished by the fact that government didn't have control over large areas of public life. Unfortunately, it's not likely that state's rights movements would really do anything to restore this condition.
State's rights activists did not renounce far-reaching powers for state governments. State's rights was largely about protecting large-scale state exercises in social control and engineering. State sovereignty, nullification and secession wouldn't get government out of our lives, they'd simply shift the locus of power to different units.
Properly understood and applied, federalism doesn't include reckless ideas of unilateral nullification and secession, but it does apportion powers between the larger and smaller political units and balance power against power. Federalism draws disputants into the political sphere and brings them towards resolution there. It makes compromise more possible because the different units may follow different policies on important questions. Woods condemns political life entirely and promotes radical expedients that do more harm than good, leading not towards compromise but towards revolt, separation and, eventually, war.
Much of the current interest in secession and nullification can be traced back to Murray Rothbard,. Some samples:
"…there is another important reason for hailing the principle of secession per se: if one part of a country is allowed to secede, and this principle is established, then a sub-part of that must be allowed to secede, and a sub-part of that, breaking the government into ever smaller and less powerful fragments…until at last the principle is established that the individual may secede—and then we will have true freedom at last." -- "The Principle of Secession Defined" (1967)
"Secession is a crucial part of the libertarian philosophy: that every state be allowed to secede from the nation, every sub-state from the state, every neighborhood from the city, and, logically, every individual or group from the neighborhood." -- "Mailer for Mayor" (1969)
Rothbard reads like a logical lunatic. How exactly is the secession of the individual from the rest of society to happen? What will it lead to? How would society function?
Anarchism was the idea behind Rothbard's enthusiasm. It was not an ideal of the nullifiers and secessionists, though it is what unionists saw behind such concepts. And anarchism is a notoriously unworkable and destructive idea.
Moreover Rothbard's answer isn't likely to remove government and politics from our lives. Breakaway movements demanding their sovereignty and rights are more likely to bring politics, government, violence and war to the forefront than to promote free and peaceful development.
Identity politics and moral collectivism are more likely to be the result of secessionist ideas as liberty. Sandefur is aware of this. Rothbard and Woods are not.
Good point. A survey of our history would find that the vast majority of abuses of liberty have been on the state and local government level, not on the Federal level. Infact, through the 100 years between the civil war and the 1960s, virtually every "States Rights" argument was in reality an argument for the right of state governments to ignore individual rights and liberties guranteed by the Federal Constitution.
That history of abuse and over reaching by some states has deeply damaged the concept of states rights.