I posted a lot of what follows as a comment in a current front page diary. I think it's important enough to stand on its own.
I know folks here get angry with right wing cultural stuff and it's easy to express it by saying, "Let Texas secede already," or some such.
Stop it. I want you to stop it right now and rethink your image of the United States and United States history. Your support for secession, even if you don't fully mean it, is similar to the support for secession inside the Union during 1861-1865. There were many believers in the "let them go" groups. Some even said the remaining United States would be better for it.
The United States is a whole entity, warts and boils and all. The history that the right wing wants to teach is a history of failure; the United States was once great, has developed cancers over the many years and needs to be restored. They may blather about the greatness of the United States but they really worship the image, not the message (yes, that does correlate to a worship of the icon Jesus, not his message).
The United States is an improving nation. Its improvement goes in fits and stops and the occasional backslide, but the steady trend in United States history is one of improvement. Pick an issue, a law, a group; consider what it was, how it has changed and what it is like now. Other nations may beat us to the punch historically (for example, the right to vote) but we act as a people towards a steady improvement of ourselves. There is no final answer and there is no perfection. This general idea, that we were not perfect in the first place, we have always changed, we will continue to change and there is no "perfect" to ultimately achieve ("towards a more perfect union" is an interesting, and galvanizing, phrase; how can something become "more perfect?") is hateful to conservative thinking as it is practiced today.
This is why education is the critical issue of our future. The environment? The law? Personal freedom? Health care? Diplomacy? All issues that can be named have a base in attitude: can it get better? Can it be fixed? This is the message of liberalism and the history of the United States.
The right wing wants to teach the youth that we have already failed to live up to our promise. The want to preach that we need to give up our reforming instinct and give power to the elite (as defined by their acceptance and promotion of their role as an elite). Things are supposedly "great" in America but they are actually bad and the people are incapable of ruling themselves. Our Founding Fathers were right but what they wrote down on paper isn't working. It is interesting, and disturbing, that conservative-thought wants to teach that the Founding Fathers actually had something else in mind, no matter what they wrote down and voted on. The promotion of "the United States was founded as a Christian nation" is the basis for a reversal of the idea that the Founding Fathers chose, in a rational manner, to do what they did.
Secession is a deep, deep mistake to support in any way. It implies the correctness of the Confederacy in 1861. It implies the loss of our ideals. It implies that things can't be battled and fixed. It implies surrender to the message of failure.
So stop it.
Instead, reconsider what you think of the United States and its history. Rededicate yourself to idealism. Rededicate yourself to hope. And fight, fight, fight the message of failure.