Would the breakup of the Union be a bad thing?

You know what I think, but here is a concurring opinion from Dave Mundy at Op-Ed News. Mr. Mundy states quite clearly why war would not necessarily be the result of states seceding. While he supports the idea that the red state/blue state split in American politics is a good reason to allow secession, he also notes that secessionism is not necessarily a red state/blue state thing, noting that liberals are included in the membership of his Texas Nationalist Movement.

Mr. Mundy writes:

The Civil War never settled the question of secession. It simply settled the fact that the industrialized North had more men, more weapons and more money than the agrarian South -- a situation which would be nearly reversed today. In order to prevent secession, Abraham Lincoln shredded the Constitution whenever it was convenient, ordered federal troops to fire on immigrant protesters in New York City, and laid waste to the South in a fashion not seen in war since Roman times.

Imagine what kind of devastation would be wrought using modern weapons. I even saw one comment from a self-proclaimed California liberal which maintained that if Texas seceded, "...we can nuke them right back into the Stone Age." Do statists really desire power so bad that they would kill millions of people and devastate huge swaths of this country just to achieve their goal of a single omnipotent imperial-style government?

And the thing is, this nation is increasingly polarized because of the way the statists have divided us, rather than united us... Statists, from Barack Obama to George W. Bush, think the government can fix everything. Secessionists are pretty well convinced the government can't fix anything, and we've got a lot more examples showing we're right.The fact exists that this country is extremely polarized. Every major election brings on more and more angry, virulent rhetoric. Democrats and Republicans alike spend more of their time playing dirty tricks or digging up dirt on each other than they do trying to solve the problems of government.

People on the Left Coast do not share the concerns of the people in the Rust Belt. Texas has far different concerns than does the Deep South. Rather than a single homogenous nation which shares a single culture, we have hundreds of different sub-cultures all competing for primacy.

So why in the name of reason would anyone want to hold so many diverse, conflicting groups together? Can anyone argue that, despite the struggles in Kosovo and Bosnia, that Yugoslavia isn't better off separated into seven republics? What good would using force accomplish?

The real problem is that, for Americans educated to believe in "one nation indivisible", the idea of separate nations is a paradigm shift, one that carries with it some emotional baggage. But that an idea seems emotionally wrong does not make it unworthy of consideration. It simply means that we may have to go outside the comfort zone of our thinking to find a better solution to the problems that confront us.