Whenever the word "secession" is uttered, it is assumed that angry, racist honkies from the South are trying to stand athwart history, keeping America from reaching the great beige future imagined by the Founders. After all, the story of America is Yankee New England imposing civilization on the rest of the nation and, from time to time, those barbaric slack-jawed yokels from the South threatening to leave. Everyone knows this because it is in our history books and movies.

In reality, the birthplace of secession in America is not Fort Sumter, but Salem Massachusetts. In the late 18th and early 19th century, Federalists based in Massachusetts agitated for the New England states to leave the Union. It really got going when Jefferson and the Republicans swept the 1800 elections, giving his party control of the Congress and the Presidency. The Federalists thought it was the sign of the apocalypse and ratcheted up their efforts to secede, culminating in the Hartford Convention.

It is a useful bit of history to keep in mind when thinking about the current grumbling from the Cult over the most recent election. Progressives are not a tolerant bunch. Even though they lack the self-awareness to see it, most of what drives them is a bone-deep hatred of their fellow Americans. You saw this with Bush the Minor, who embraced all the crackpot policies of the Left while in office. He was basically a post-modern LBJ, but the Left hated him because he was from Texas, a Christian, and a Yankee apostat

As the fever breaks and America begins the long march back to normalcy, the Left is looking around and imagining themselves surrounded by the people they hate. It is why they like making up stories about Trump supporters assaulting good thinkers on the streets. They really believe that the next step is to round up the people of [the blank space where God used to be] and sending them off to internment camps. Therefore, any nutty tale that confirms that fear is accepted and waved around in the news.

The point being is that the spiritual sons and daughters of John Winthrop have never really wanted to be Americans if that meant embracing the rest of us as equals. Rather, they are fine with America as long as it runs something like Iran, where the Progressive leaders run the country and the secular institutions of government are mostly window dressing. If Iran ever gets popular government, the Mullahs will head into exile. Now that America is on the road to free government, the Progressives are talking about secession again.

The big one is CalExit, a movement to have California break off from the rest of the country. This has been spurred by the election, where normal Americans broke mostly for Trump, but Californians voted in heavy numbers for the anti-American candidate. If you look at the bill of particulars on the CalExit site, the inability to dictate election results to the rest of the country is one reason they want to leave. Their history may be a little off, but the reasoning is well within the tradition of Yankee scolds going back to the founding.

That is not a terrible development. The lesson of the Hartford Convention is the rest of the country should have encouraged New England to leave. Fifty years after the convention, Puritan lunatics were invading the rest of the country, ushering in a century and a half of cultural lunacy that has just about obliterated America as a self-governing republic based on individual liberty. Letting the heirs of those original lunatics break off and create their own countries is an idea who time came 200 years ago.