The defenders of centralized governmental power despise the Jeffersonian idea of nullification, that is, the idea that citizens of a state or states should have a say on the issue of the constitutionality of federal laws, and should be able to nullify those laws within their state if they are deemed to be unconstitutional.

Most Americans seem unaware of the fact that one of their favorite holidays, the Fourth of July, is properly construed as a celebration of an act of violent secession. “Independence Day” is a celebration of the colonists’ secession from the British Empire, America’s first war of secession.

The popular election of U.S. Senators allows a small cabal of wealthy plutocrats to exert grossly disproportionate influence over government policy. This is because getting elected to the U.S. Senate requires the raising of millions of dollars for television advertising, campaign consultants, publicists, and the other elements of modern campaigning. Consequently, U.S. Senators have long been “in the pockets” of their major “campaign contributors,” some of whom may not even be American citizens.

In 1961 Life magazine invited the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren (author of All the King’s Men and nineteen other novels) to record his thoughts on the meaning of the American “Civil War” on the centennial of that event. Warren responded with a long essay on “the symbolic value of the war” which was eventually published as a small paperback book entitled The Legacy of the Civil War.

In his 2009 book, The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, historian Larry Tagg utilized thousands of primary literary sources to make his case that Abraham Lincoln was by far the most hated and reviled of all American presidents during his lifetime. After his death Lincoln was turned into the kindly, grandfatherly, saintly figure that he has been portrayed as ever since then.

All of the worst tyrants in world history have been enemies of states’ rights, federalism, and divided sovereignty. Tyrants lust after monopolistic political power, and monopolistic political power cannot exist if the people have an escape route from it. Dissent must be crushed and avenues of dissent abolished if one is to exercise dictatorial powers over a society. Adolf Hitler articulated this view as well as any twentieth-century tyrant did.

In recent years scholars have attempted to document the extent to which various governments during the twentieth century committed acts of mass murder against their own citizens. These are not estimates of war-related deaths, but of the murder of dissenters to the regime. The most prominent works are those by sociologist R.J. Rummel (Power Kills and Death by Government) and The Black Book of Communism by a collection of French authors.

In The Costs of War (edited by John Denson), historian Joseph Stromberg referred to the Spanish-American War of 1898 as a “trial run” for the American empire. The war had nothing to do with national defense and was purely an act of imperialism on the part of the U.S. government, which gained control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine Islands.

When James M. Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 the first thing he said at his George Mason University press conference was that the award “does not make me an instant expert in everything.” Buchanan was well aware—and amused—at how previous recipients of the award had made fools of themselves by viewing the award as a license to pontificate about anything and everything, whether they knew anything about the subject or not.

The very first public statement that Abraham Lincoln made after being inaugurated as the sixteenth president was an ironclad defense of slavery: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists.