Ron Paul, a United States Congressman, and alleged patriot, writes on his website:
If the Feds refuse to accept that and continue to run roughshod over the people, at what point do we acknowledge that that is not freedom anymore? At what point should the people dissolve the political bands which have connected them with an increasingly tyrannical and oppressive federal government? And if people or states are not free to leave the United States as a last resort, can they really think of themselves as free?
But what of the millions and millions of Democratic voters that might live in the (hypothetically) seceding states -- what happens to them? Modern civil wars (for I think that is what this would entail) bode ill for them.
Die Ruinen von Guernica // Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H25224 / CC-BY-SA
incendio de La Moneda 11 septiembre de 1973.
Sackville Street/O'Connell Street 8th July 1922
Mural relatando masacre en el cementerio comunitario de Rabinal. (link)
Desaparecidos, Argentina / Revista Forum Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Srebrenica mass grave exhumed 2007, Adam Jones, Ph.D / CC BY-SA 2.0
But it can't happen here, can it?
Athens, Alabama, Ku Klux Klan rally, September 2007
Gregory Skibinski / Flickr / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0