Calls for Secession are crazy, and kinda sad...

    I have a couple of Facebook friends who are conservative, which is fine, but I really don't understand them.  I'm a member of a group that posts random liberal stuff, all of which is pretty funny, the conservative version, which I see through my friends shares, is kinda sad.  I'm conservative in many ways, so I try and find the humor and logic behind their memes but just can't.  One of the things going around nowadays is the whole states rights, 10th amendment, nullification and secession from the union.  Most of this comes from the fear that Obama's re-election is somehow ushering in the end times.  Additionally, people seem to believe that he is destroying America.  As an American historian I can officially declare these world views to be hilariously sad.
    First off, unless there is action taken in Washington DC, and were talking about mind-blowing crazy shifts in political thinking or vast shifts in American's political thinking and beliefs, the whole states rights, 10th amendment, nullification and secession issues were solved definitively YEARS ago.  Heart sick republicans sadly point to the secession petitions that have formed online.  What they fail to realize is that the thousands of people who signed those petitions are less than 1 percent of the states population and even less of the countries population.  Look at the election returns for the Libertarian party, for it to become the mainstream belief would take...something impossible...well at least something so unlikely as to be nearly impossible in our lifetimes.  For better or worse, our country is locked into the two party system, politics in this system is coordinated on a national level, states are not leaving.
    Second, you cannot destroy America with a single election. The America that these people point to has not existed in a very long time.  The America that these people want is not right for the world we live in today.  We tried the America they want and we decided against it.  That is the fundamental thing that people fail to understand.  The American experiment is ongoing, we change and adapt to the world around us, we cannot go back we can only go forward.  So yes the America that these people want, the White laissez faire America is being destroyed, slowly dieing, but that is not Obama's fault.  We have tried the unfettered capitalism model and we have communally selected against it.  Social programs did not cause the great depression or the dot.com bust or the housing bubble, nope.
    All that being said, I believe that the strength of the American system is that the dynamic between liberal and conservative elements have in the past balanced each other out, making consensus necessary.  This made change slow, measured and balanced.  I don't want to see a total liberal domination, I want to see a strong and vital conservative party.  Hopefully, they find their way back to reality.