Do more than 22,000 signatures on a petition advocating that Colorado "peacefully ... withdraw from the United States of America and create its own NEW government" qualify as a genuine movement or an abject embarrassment?

Let me answer this way: Just two years ago, nearly 200,000 Coloradans cast their vote in the governor's race for an unqualified, uninformed salesman prone to odd remarks whose campaign finance reports were a suspect shambles.

Dan Maes finished a dismal third, the most unpopular major-party candidate in memory. But still: 200,000 votes. If you can't entice at least 100,000 Coloradans to sign an online petition — and the secession petition at the White House's "We the People" site doesn't even verify identify or residence — you don't have a movement. You have a congregation of eccentrics who either aren't Coloradans at all or who have forgotten they live in a blue state that voted for President Obama.

Even the 126,000 signatures on the secession petition for Texas appear pathetic given that state's size and the fact that it remains solidly red.

Clearly the vast majority of voters who despise Obama understand that secession is preposterous and that Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and hemorrhaging red ink, as bad as they might be, do not constitute Jeffersonian grounds for a people "to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them."

It's not even clear that a state has a formal right to secede. As University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson says in a McClatchy wire story, "The Constitution doesn't specify an answer one way or another. My view is that it's a close call."


Rob Natelson, a retired University of Montana constitutional law professor who has pored over relevant 18th century writings with unusual care, tells me that "the dominant ratification-era theory was that the Constitution would be a power-grant from the people to federal officials, not an interstate compact, as Southerners later claimed. Many historical myths got started only after the Founding. ... The theory of secession is, I think, essentially a creation of the early 19th century."

Not that the idea of peaceful breakup is necessarily horrifying in and of itself. If a substantial majority of Texans — as opposed to the laughable fringe represented in the online petition — truly were pining to restore the Republic of Texas, would we really want to deploy federal troops to stop them? I'm not so sure.

We honor Lincoln for crushing secession but the war it required also crushed the great evil of slavery, even if that wasn't Lincoln's original intent. By the time William Tecumseh Sherman and his troops marched through Georgia in late 1864, they had become liberators who despised the Southern system and felt themselves on an ideological crusade. "More than any other person, [Sherman] destroyed the institution of American slavery and the Southern aristocracy that was interwoven with it," writes historian Victor Davis Hanson.

What great evil might be subdued by forcing any state to remain in the union today?

In Europe, they seem to take secession talk with surprising equanimity — although from a very different historical context. As CNN reported last month, "In Spain (Catalonia) and Belgium (Flanders), as well as the United Kingdom (Scotland), secessionist movements appear to be on the rise. All three have existed for decades, yet they seem particularly lively in the second decade of the 21st century."

And the response of the British prime minister? In late October, he "traveled to Edinburgh to sign an agreement on the terms for a Scottish independence referendum due in October 2014."

Meanwhile, a majority of voters in Catalonia this week supported pro-independence parties for the regional parliament, although the result was muddled by the relatively poor showing of the dominant pro-independence group. Yet Madrid seemed to take matters in stride.

The secessionist impulse in America aside, many conservatives apparently fear that the 2012 elections marked a tipping point in which those who favor granting government ever more resources and power now enjoy an enduring advantage. Yet even if they're right, which is doubtful, fatalism is a refuge for losers — and like secession, needs to be shown the door.

E-mail Vincent Carroll at Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP