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A former member here sent me this link this morning. Its from a Freeper who posted in 2010, but I think his conclusions are spot on:

"Killers Without Conscience"
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2509007/posts

The time is coming when we must either begin the "long march" back through the institutions to reclaim them and to restore the principles of freedom and human dignity to their rightful place, or we must separate from the killers without conscience and those who condone them. My own world-view is contradictory to, and irreconcilable with, that of the criminal totalitarians - the heirs and disciples of Machiavelli, Marx, Gramsci and Alinsky - who promote the politics of envy and victimization, and whose goal is the destruction of our culture and institutions.

"The great misfortune of the twentieth Century is to have been the one in which the ideal of liberty was harnessed to the service of tyranny, the ideal of equality to the service of privilege, and all the aspirations and social forces included under the label of the "Left" enrolled in the service of impoverishment and enslavement. This immense imposture has falsified most of this century, partly through the faults of some of its greatest intellectuals. It has corrupted the language and action of politics down to tiny details of vocabulary, it has inverted the sense of morality and enthroned falsehood in the very center of human thought."
Jean Francois-Revel, The Flight From Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information - 1991, Random House

There seems to be a sort of 'virtual secession' is underway even as we speak. It usually begins when, one by one, we arrive at the same ideas that I have summarized so far. It's the understanding and acceptance of the fact that we can't 'just all get along' as a certain Mr. R King once suggested. We're well past that. We're well past the point of reasoned debate, appeasement or compromise. Those who feel they have the right to dictate the terms of existence to everyone else are on a deadly collision course with those of us who understand that no such 'right' exists. The history of the 20th century stands in mute witness to the brutal tragedy of appeasement and the folly of compromise with totalitarian monsters. We are in fact at war, realize it or not, like it or not. At the most fundamental level, that war is being waged not so much for control of our economic lives - although that is certainly part of it - but for the hearts and minds of our children. The battlefields are: popular culture, our public schools, our institutions of higher learning, our churches and even our homes. The casualties are your kids' intellectual and spiritual sovereignty - their inner life and their freedom.

{---SNIP--}

There are many of us, and I include myself among them, who constitute an entirely different class of humanity than these killers without conscience and their enablers. We are neither interested in power nor its abuse. We are satisfied to live our lives in peace with ourselves and with others, and we derive great satisfaction in seeing others enjoy life as we do. We believe that our lives and our minds are sovereign, and that the fruits of our labors are not forfeit to the first thug who demands them at the point of a gun. We are never the initiators of violence. We judge others solely by their competence and by their character.

The final first-principles question is this: To whom does the world belong? Does it belong to those of us who wish to live free of coercion or to the killers without conscience? Does it belong to those who uphold man's life as the standard of their values, or those who uphold the standard of death?

That's just a small snippet of his post. I'm nearly done with it, but I've been reading for about 30 minutes. So don't start this until you have the time to sit down and read through it, but I assure all of you that he makes some very persuasive arguments.

I don't believe we'll have to secede. I've already aired my dystopian view of the nation's future on a number of occasions. I could fill a book on this subject because I've spent a lot of time thinking and writing about it, but in as condensed a version as I can make it, it is this:

As the distant federal gov't in DC becomes more and more grasping, it angers more and more people in liberty-loving states. As they become angrier against the federal gov't, it becomes less and less relevant to them, and they begin to act less and less in line with its dictates. Eventually, the nation begins to subdivide into semiautonomous regions of "like-minded" states which have contiguous borders. For instance, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, and possibly Missouri and Mississippi might form one such region. The states comprising these semiautonomous regions will still be part of the United States, and the federal gov't still exists in theory, but the federal gov't becomes increasingly less relevant to their governance as the states of each region begin to negotiate directly among themselves in terms of cooperative commerce, resource management, and other measures, cutting the feds out of the process. These semiautonomous regions will begin to negotiate and treat with other regions for the commerce and resources that do not exist within their own. For example, what can tiny Vermont do to coerce Texas to sell Texan oil to Vermont? Nothing. BUT.... we can offer to trade them some oil in exchange for maple syrup. In case you can't see what's happening, it's that the federal gov't stops being able to use the Commerce Clause to regulate every little action we take. Each state keeps electing representatives to DC, but the state governments become more relevant to The People, and the power of federal office over our affairs diminishes tremendously. They can pass all the crappy laws they want, but it won't mean anything because people no longer care what happens in DC.

At some point, the federal bureaucracies, Congress, SCOTUS, and POTUS wake up and realize that they have to do something to either reestablish their relevance, or concede that their day in the sun is over, and fade away. To reestablish their relevance, they have to get the attention of those regions. They can't do it by force, not when the national military is made up of personnel from those regions, whose personal loyalties are beginning to transfer to their regions of origin rather than the federal gov't. What group of yankees wants to take a train ride to the south to be slaughtered by Texans and Okies? Exactly none.......and in no small part because the yankees are trying to make their own thing work. If they have to deal with us, they'd rather it be over trade agreements rather than rifle sights.........as we should too...... So, the only way that the federal gov't can continue to exist and an entity with any influence at all, is to conceded that they have been going about it all wrong. If they can't force compliance, then they have to do it with reason. Not the "reason" of policy wonks and party apparatchiks, but the kind of reason that concedes that the other side has a legitimate complaint against them, and that the feds will have to win back their trust. Personally, I wouldn't give them that trust back until I see a term limiting Constitutional amendment for Congress, and the reduction of federal judicial appointments - including to SCOTUS - from lifetime appointments to limited terms. Judicial terms should be long enough to decouple them from the political process to the extent possible, but short enough so that no presidential appointment to SCOTUS can set the course of the nation for decades to come.

If they can't make those kinds of changes, then I think it is best that the federal gov't perish, and that these semiautonomous regions become new independent nations.

There are details to be filled in, but that's a general overview of what I think is down the road if the federal gov't doesn't pull its head out of its nether regions.