Good magazine’s Christopher Ketcham looks at the secessionist movement in Vermont. One of its leaders is 70-year-old author Kirkpatrick Sale, who wants the US out of the Green Mountains:

One day two years ago, I heard Sale speak before 1,500 attendees at a meeting of the SVR. Sale, who has the build and mien of a terrier on methamphetamine, reasoned out the desire for separation from the behemoth. “It is intolerable,” he said, “for a citizen to succumb to a government that is in favor of unjust and unjustified warfare, brutal torture in defiance of all conventions, illegal detentions, the fostering of terrorism, war profiteering, sky-high trade deficits. … It is intolerable, I say, for a citizen to live under such a government, in such a country.”

“But,” Sale went on, “I have no intention of going to Canada, or France. I love my home, and I want to leave this country without leaving home. And the only way to do that, ladies and gentlemen, is … secession.” The crowd exploded, but gently.

Sale was also an organizer of the Second North American Secession Convention, held last year in Chattanooga, Tennessee. That event was co-sponsored by the League of the South, which has a Confererate flag on its website. The League wants to separate from the US and form a Southern nation “based on its Christianist faith,” with a ban on income, property, and inheritance taxes.

So if lefty Vermont and the right-wing South act in concert to become independent nations, will they immediately declare war on each other?