Form up and just do it, don’t wait. Let these g—damned socialists/progressives/communists go their own way. Refine the Constitution, get rid of the “general welfare” clause; but, the Constitution works and should be kept as the standard. Eliminate these “living document” advocates. There’s got to be a set of standards and the Constitution is that set.
We don’t need to break up the union. We need to revitalize a robust operation of the Tenth Amendment, with the federal government actually being limited to its enumerated powers and with the entire house of cards of wealth transfer payments at the federal level mostly ground to a halt.
Then if a state wanted to be socialist, it could knock itself out doing so — with this CRITICAL difference from today: each state would have to finance its social programs with money that state raises, however it can do that. No other state would be required to pay its citizens’ money into a big federal pot so it could be sent to pay for the socialist states’ programs.
If the Tenth Amendment worked the way it was supposed to (if it hadn’t been gutted by Progs over the years), the federal government never would have been able to establish the large number of oppressive wealth transfer programs that exist now. We would remain the United States of America, with the proper federal functions of the military for national defense and so on, but states certainly could choose to tend toward Statist or Free — they’d just have to do so with their own money, based on what income they could earn and on their citizens were willing and able to pay for.
At #37, I posted a link to a fascinating FR thread on these ideas.
Oh, and to do a virtual secessiont there would have to be a drastic revision to the federal income tax.