Also By This Author

Bye Bye, Miss American Empire

Neighborhood Patriots, Backcountry Rebels, and Their Underdog Crusades to Redraw America’s Political Map

by Bill Kauffman

Excerpts

Bill Kauffman: FEATURE: Bye Bye Miss American Empire - Where Wisdom Lies: Home and Homefolks

Vermont Commons - April 26, 2011

The crimes and follies of the Bush-Cheney Administration boosted their fortunes on the left, secessionists admit, just as the statist lunges of Barack Obama energized independence sentiment on the right. But no matter which party lays claim to leviathan, the case for radical devolution loses none of its cogency.

The problem with the United States is one of scale, and it cannot be solved simply by electing new or different or better people to public offices. As Donald Livingston says, “The public corporation known as the United States has simply grown too large for the purposes of self-government, in the same way that a committee of 300 people would be too large for the purposes of a committee. There needs to be a public debate on the out-of-scale character of the regime and what can be done about it.”

Bill Kauffman, resident of New York state, is the author of Bye Bye Miss American Empire (Chelsea Green, 2010), a book that explores the unaffiliated secession movement in the U.S. With the author’s permission, Vermont Commons: Voices of Independence has been publishing excerpts from the book focusing on Vermont’s participation and leadership in secession from the U.S. Here, we present our fourth installment from Kauffman’s book.

Read the excerpt.

Chapter One - More Thomas Jefferson than Jefferson Davis: A Brief and Digressive History of Seccession that is not Tinctured in Shades of Gray

Alternet - December 7, 2010

Read the excerpt at Alternet.